This collection includes nearly eight hundred performances representing more than thirty ethnic or geographical sources. Information about individual performers in this collection is uneven. If you have additional information about the performers, please send it to the Mills Music Library. Biographical information was gleaned from The Wisconsin Patchwork companion booklet by James P. Leary as well as from manuscript materials in the Helene Stratman-Thomas Collection. The following list is not a complete one. Also, if you find a performer or an ethnic group of interest, please be sure to search the Wisconsin Folksong Database to see and hear the music.
This page is still under construction. Be sure to check back for more entries!
Joe Accardi immigrated from Sicily to Beloit in the 1920s. He recorded seven Italian songs, including “Luna mezzo mare,” the Italian wedding song made famous in “The Godfather.” To find out more about this singer, check out his grandson's web page.
John Bear Skin, a Ho Chunk, played love calls on an Indian flute made from a gun barrel.
Pearl Jacobs Borusky lived beyond the power grid in rural Antigo. To mine Borusky’s endless repertoire of English ballads, Helene Stratman-Thomas had to arrange for the singer to be driven to a friend’s home so there would be electricity to power the recorder. The friend was Asher Treat, who had his mother pick up Borusky. Treat had notated several songs from the Jacobs family prior to Stratman-Thomas’s collecting trips in 1940 and 1941. The songs were published in the Antigo Daily Journal in March and April of 1936 and later compiled into a book, Kentucky Folksong Out of Wisconsin. Jacobs Borusky, who was in her early forties at the time, recorded 23 songs for Stratman-Thomas. Borusky was born Clarise Pearl Jacobs in Kentucky, the eighth of ten children born to James and Ollie Jacobs. She came to the Wisconsin in 1906 as part of the Kaintuck migration to northern lumber camps. For a time in the late 1920s, she lived in North Dakota, the home of her husband, Rodney Borusky.
Noble B. Brown was 14 when he first began work in a logging camp near Stanley, Wisconsin, peeling hemlock bark for tanning hides. He went on to labor at camps in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, California, Washington, and Oregon. “I seldom allowed my name to get dry on the pay-roll, before I dangled down the tote-road to another outfit. Looking for improvement. But there are few jobs in the woods that I have not tackled, and handled. The wonderlust was always in my bones until I dropt [sic] anchor here at Millville Grant Co. Wis. Got tired, at last. But they say there is no rest for the — restless. Hope I’m not so wicked.” This letter is one of many he would write to Helene Stratman-Thomas after she recorded twenty-three songs from him on Nov. 17, 1946. He was the last singer she recorded for the Wisconsin Folk Music Project. Some of his sea shanties have been issued on two LPs: American Sea Songs and Shanties I & II.
Winifred Bundy, secretary at the UW–Madison School of Music, was from a ballad-singing family and knew a great many of the old English tunes that Stratman-Thomas had been looking for all summer. Bundy ended up recording eighteen songs for Helene Stratman-Thomas several occasions until her retirement in 1948. Bundy, born around 1884, learned many English songs from her mother, Olive Morgan Bundy. Olive’s father, James D. Morgan, enlisted in the Union Army and moved the family from Canada to the United States when Olive was fourteen. Her mother brought the children first to Milwaukee and then to Marquette County , settling in Montello where there were many Canadians. “Mother had a beautiful exciting voice and was in great demand for entertainments although she never had any training. She knew all the Civil War songs and sang them at the old GAR [ Grand Army of the Republic ] encampments,” Winifred wrote in a note to Stratman-Thomas. Winifred attributed her mother’s musical knowledge to her grandfather, born in the barracks in Manchester, England, in the same year as Queen Victoria . “In the first months of his life received a little pension from King George because of the fact,” Winifred wrote. His father was a messenger-bearer to the Duke of Wellington and served in the English Army for most of his active life. He was “a good soldier judging from the colorful tales of his prowess with his horse, King George, but he was a very bad father, and my grandfather came up in a hard way, with no attention or help.” His mother was Welsh – and he was christened in Glamorganshire, Wales. She died of cholera during the family’s migration to Canada .
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Ella Mittelstaedt Fischer (1871-1963) was a noted herbalist, curing humans and animals with remedies that, according to family tradition, her mother had acquired from Menominee Indians in the late 1860s and 70s. She recorded seven songs for Helene Stratman-Thomas during an Aug. 27, 1946 recording session in Mayville, Wisconsin. While most of her songs were German tunes, the most notable recording is perhaps her rendition of the historic song, “The Burning of Newhall House,” otherwise known as “The Milwaukee Fire.” The fire on January 10, 1883 claimed the lives of more than seventy-one people at the Newhall House hotel, a six-story wood building. Fischer had witnessed the fire when she was twelve. “She had come to town to buy her confirmation dress,” Stratman-Thomas wrote. “She remembered the occasion so vividly that she wept as she sang.” Fischer was born in Horicon, and her father came to the United States around 1840. During the 1946 session she told stories of the gemutlichkeit, the gatherings of the German families as expressed in her song, “Wir sitzen so frohlich beisamen” (We Sit so Merrily Together).
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Hamilton Lobdell, 87, blind and frail at the time of the recording session, put down twenty tunes. He was discovered after Mrs. Lee Lobdell of Mukwonago wrote to Stratman-Thomas about the singer, who was her husband's grandfather. “He sang for us all afternoon. When we suggested that he rest now and then, he would lie back on the couch but he kept on singing,” Stratman-Thomas wrote. He sang songs he learned as a boy at church and at school socials, which included a great many ballads, from “Daisy Dean” to “The Girl with the Waterfall.” “His prize offering,” Stratman-Thomas wrote, “was ‘Reuben Wright and Phoebe Brown.'”
Albert Mueller of New Glarus was a talented Swiss zither player whose parents immigrated from Switzerland to New Glarus in 1912, the year before he was born. In 1942, he moved to Milwaukee where he made a living as a zither player.
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Emery Olson, born around 1891, was an accordionist with Leizime Brusoe's Orchestra.
Frances Perry was a public librarian and local historian in Black River Falls who sang songs she learned from local cranberry pickers, a transplanted Georgia mountain family, and her Bohemian neighbors. She was a song collector in her own right.
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Dr. William Reese was a Welsh tenor from Dodgeville in his 80s at the time of the recordings.
Aunt Lily Richmond, 84, sang six African American spirituals and traditional Early American songs such as “Rock of Ages” during a recording session Aug. 23, 1946. She was the lone African American recorded as part of the Wisconsin Folk Music Project. Born a slave in Missouri in 1862, as a baby she was brought Beetown near Lancaster in about 1865.
Mary Richter sang for Stratman-Thomas on Washington Island. Her father was one of many Icelandic settlers in the area.
Iva Rindlisbacher, formerly Iva Kundert of Madison, played the "viking cello" and taught students on a wide range of instruments. She joined her husband, Otto, in accordion bands.
Lois Rindlisbacher managed the Buckhorn tavern after her father's retirement.
Otto Rindlisbacher played a variety of instruments and eventually began making them. He worked in the woods and in all five of Rice Lake's sawmills before opening the Buckhorn Tavern in 1920 with his two brothers, John and Louis. His collection of musical instruments is now housed at the Vesterheim Museum in Decorah, Iowa.
Jules Rower recorded one Belgian tune for Stratman-Thomas. He had been out threshing all day at neighbor's and he drove into the barnyard ahead of Stratman-Thomas. They asked he wanted to record. He said “Oh, as soon as I put the horses in the barn and get washed up a bit.' So we brought in the recording equipment and experienced a phenomenal piece of memory work. With no preparation whatsoever, Mr. Rower sang for us a song which covered one full side of the record and half of the other side without even hesitating for a word,” Stratman-Thomas wrote. (Adventures in Collecting, Page 5.)
Mrs. A.C.G.Gyshers Scholten was recorded in Oostburg, Wisconsin. She sang Dutch songs she learned when a child in Winterswyk, Holland.
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Robert Walker was part of an extended family of singers whose repertoire included about 140 songs and whose performances are documented in Sidney Robertson Cowell's LP, Wolf River Songs, issued by .
Chief Yellow Thunder, a Ho Chunk, sang the Morning Songs with the accompaniment of a gourd rattle. The songs were "spiritual instructions with which the Winnebago parents wakened their children. He translated, ‘Do not weep anymore, my child, for I love you; the daylight of life is on its way,'" Stratman-Thomas wrote.