Frances Densmore (May 21, 1867 - June 5, 1957) was an American ethnographer and ethnomusicologist, both being divisions of study within anthropology. She worked as a music teacher with Native Americans nationwide, while also learning, recording, and transcribing their music, and documenting its use in their culture. She helped preserve their culture in a time when government policy was to encourage Native Americans to adopt Western customs. She began recording music officially for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1907. In her fifty-plus years of studying and preserving American Indian music, she collected thousands of recordings. Many of the recordings she made are held in the Library of Congress. While her original recordings often were on wax cylinders, many of them have been reproduced using other media and are included in other archives. She frequently was published in the journal American Anthropologist, contributing consistently throughout her career.She died in 1957 at the age of 90.