The Map That Taught America Its Own Folk Songs.
Folklore Music Map of the United States.
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Description
America’s Folk Songs Mapped State by State.
This large and exuberant pictorial map of the United States was compiled by the folklorist Dorothea Dix Lawrence, illustrated by Harry Cimino, and published by the Hagstrom Map Company of New York around 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and at the beginning of the American folk music revival that would transform popular culture over the following two decades. Distributed to schools and used in public lectures and recitals on American folk music — which explains its presentation here, mounted on its original wooden rollers — it is simultaneously a work of popular education, a celebration of American regional identity, and a serious piece of folkloristic scholarship, its sources including Carl Sandburg’s landmark American Songbag of 1927 and the accumulated field research of a generation of collectors.
The Map in Detail
Every state is populated with illustrated figures dancing, playing instruments, and enacting the characteristic activities of their region: cowboys shooting guns and riding horses across the West, prospectors panning for gold in California, fishermen and sailors in New England and the Pacific Northwest, cotton pickers in the South. Bars of music and lyrics to folk songs appear alongside these figures throughout the map, including Home on the Range, She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain, The Old Chisholm Trail, and Pop Goes the Weasel, alongside dozens of more obscure regional songs now largely forgotten.
The border is itself a composition of considerable interest: illustrated with instruments from across the American musical tradition — fiddle, banjo, harp, guitar, accordion, drum — it also incorporates Zuni symbols representing notes on the musical scale, a detail that reflects Dix Lawrence’s particular scholarly interest in Zuni culture and her conviction that Native American musical tradition was an integral part of the American folk inheritance.
All illustrations on the map and in the border are numbered and correspond to a classification system explained in the keys and indexes printed at the top of the sheet. A bibliography toward the upper right identifies the sources consulted, including Sandburg’s American Songbag, making this as much a research document as a decorative object.
Historical Context
The Folklore Music Map appeared at a precise cultural hinge point. The 1930s and early 1940s had seen an extraordinary flowering of interest in American folk music, driven by the New Deal’s cultural programs — the WPA, the Federal Music Project, the Library of Congress field recordings made by John and Alan Lomax — and by the popular success of Sandburg’s American Songbag, which had brought folk songs to a middle-class audience for the first time. The war had deepened this tendency: folk music became a vehicle for patriotic solidarity, and figures like Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers had made it politically charged.
In 1946, with the war won and the country in a mood of self-celebration, Dix Lawrence’s map offered a vision of America as a nation unified by its musical traditions, diverse in regional character but coherent as a whole. The folk revival proper — Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, ultimately Bob Dylan — was still a decade away, but the map anticipates its central argument: that American folk song was a living national inheritance worth preserving, teaching, and celebrating. That it was distributed to schools and used in public recitals suggests it succeeded in that educational mission.
Publication History and Census
Compiled by Dorothea Dix Lawrence, illustrated by Harry Cimino, and published by the Hagstrom Map Company, New York, circa 1946. Presented here in its school-room format, mounted on original wooden rollers. OCLC (9239789) records twenty-one institutional holdings.
Cartographer(s):
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.
Hagstrom Map CompanyThe Hagstrom Map Company was one of the most prominent commercial cartographic publishers in twentieth-century New York, founded by Andrew Hagstrom in 1916 and best known for the detailed street atlases and road maps of New York City and its surrounding region that became standard references for taxi drivers, delivery services, and urban navigators for much of the century. Operating from New York, Hagstrom combined precision street mapping with a commercial sensitivity to popular demand, and the firm expanded its output over the decades to include thematic, educational, and pictorial maps alongside its core street atlas business. The Folklore Music Map represents this latter tendency — Hagstrom as publisher of culturally ambitious popular cartography rather than purely utilitarian street guides. The firm continued in operation through the late twentieth century, its New York street atlases remaining in print long after most commercial map publishers had been displaced by digital navigation.
Harry CiminoHarry Cimino was the illustrator responsible for the figures, musical vignettes, and decorative elements that give the Folklore Music Map its visual character. Commercial illustrators of this kind, working for map publishers and print houses in mid-century New York, rarely achieved the name recognition of their counterparts in editorial illustration, and Cimino is no exception — he is credited on the map itself but otherwise remains an obscure figure whose broader career and output have not been established here.
Condition Description
Mounted on rollers. Some creasing and wear in margins and at bottom-left professionally repaired on verso.
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