Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/arts/14yurchenco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 14, 2007

Henrietta Yurchenco, whose quest to save living music from the past took her from the mountains of Guatemala and southern Mexico to a New York City radio station to the Jewish community of Morocco, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.

The cause was lung failure, her son, Peter, said.

Like a linguist nailing down a dying language, Ms. Yurchenco, an ethnomusicologist, recorded music from long ago that faced an unclear tomorrow. In an interview, Pete Seeger said she “went to places people didn’t believe she would be able to find.”

Among her thousands of recordings are ritual songs from North, South and Central American Indians, including peyote chants, and music celebrating everything from love to agriculture, found from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean to Appalachia to Spain.

Oscar Brand, the folk singer and radio personality, citing her work with Native Americans, said, “She went out of her way to discover the soft spots, the shining things you couldn’t see in the mists back in the mountains.”

Ms. Yurchenco was also a radio producer, announcer and interviewer. Beginning in the 30s, she broadcast only folk music, both traditional and modern, at a time when few knew it.

Woody Guthrie called her in 1939 or 1940 and asked if he could be on her live show. Bob Dylan, a little tongue-tied, did one of his early radio interviews with her in 1962. In an interview with NPR in 1999, she said she scoured union halls and immigrant groups to find genuine music.
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Ethnomusicologists study music in varying ethnic contexts. Ms. Yurchenco began by tracking down 14 all-but-unknown Mexican and Guatemalan tribes, reaching them with little but a mule and 300 pounds of recording equipment. She eventually recorded 2,000 of their songs for the Library of Congress.

Later, she studied the music of the Sephardim, Jews who had been thrown out of Spain in the 15th century. She arrived in Morocco just as many Sephardim were preparing to move to the new state of Israel, and she seized a last chance to capture their ancient songs in the original context.
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Woodie Guthrie
Bob Dylan
Alan Lomax
Pete Seeger
the Weavers