Dorothea Dix Lawrence

Dorothea Dix Lawrence was an American folklorist and educator active in the mid-twentieth century whose particular scholarly interest lay in Native American musical traditions, especially those of the Zuni people of the American Southwest — an interest reflected in the incorporation of Zuni musical symbols into the border of the Folklore Music Map. Her work placed her within the broad current of American folk revival scholarship that ran from the field recordings of John and Alan Lomax through the popular syntheses of Carl Sandburg, all of which shared the conviction that the musical traditions of ordinary Americans — Indigenous, immigrant, regional, occupational — constituted a coherent national cultural inheritance worth documenting and preserving. The Folklore Music Map was her most widely distributed work, reaching schools and lecture halls across the country in the years immediately following the Second World War. Beyond this, the details of her career and biography have not been established here and would reward further research.