The Robert Winslow Gordon songster collection contains approximately 700 American songsters dating from 1844-1886, collected by Gordon. The word “songster” has been used for a wide variety of songbooks, but these are primarily pocket-sized pamphlets (approximately 3" x 5") collecting the texts of vaudeville, minstrel-stage, patriotic, humorous, religious, and traditional songs presented without music. Such songsters were popular in the United States in the nineteenth century and were cheaply printed and distributed in large numbers. They were sometimes used for promotional purposes by the manufacturers of medicines, tonics, and elixirs; as well as by distributors of other consumable goods. Popular stage entertainers also published promotional songsters collecting their repertories.

Songsters are important to the study of traditional folksongs. They often contain traditional songs that their editors learned from oral tradition. They therefore provide evidence about the history of individual songs and can help to explain the continuing popularity of certain traditional songs over others. Also, recently composed popular songs published in songsters were often learned by traditional singers and became part of the oral tradition, to be collected by later folksong collectors. For both these reasons, songsters shed light on traditional songs, and collectors like Gordon maintain an interest in them.

Gordon was the first head of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress from 1928 until 1933. He was a devoted collector of American folk music: as a Harvard student between 1906 and 1917, he conceived of a "national project" to collect the entire body of American folk music. Leaving graduate school to pursue his dream, he traveled extensively throughout the United States recording folksongs with an Edison wax cylinder machine. He convinced Carl Engel, the chief of the Library of Congress's Music Division, that grassroots traditions should be represented at the national library. Through his efforts, the Archive of American Folk-Song was established with private funding, and Gordon was appointed its director. He stayed at the Library of Congress for only a few years, but many of his collections remain with us in the form of recordings, manuscripts, and cheap print publications like these songsters. The Archive he founded is now the Archive of Folk Culture, part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

This collection contains historical materials that are products of their particular times, including offensive language and negative stereotypes. These do not reflect the views of the Library of Congress.