Natalie Curtis

Curtis, along with Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore, was one of a small group of women doing important ethnological studies in North America at the beginning of the 20th century.

She came to be fascinated by Native American music, and began to devote herself to its study, which she furthered during a trip to Arizona with her older brother George.

[2][better source needed] Theodore Roosevelt was a family friend of Curtis, and one of her biggest influences.

At one point, Curtis even entered Roosevelt's house to ask for tribal land rights with Mojave-Apache chief.

[3] Starting in 1903 she worked from the Hopi reservation in Arizona and produced transcriptions using both an Edison cylinder recorder and pencil and paper.

In 1911, she and David Mannes founded the Music School Settlement for Colored People in New York, and in 1912 she helped sponsor the first concert featuring black musicians at Carnegie Hall, a concert that featured the Clef Club orchestra, directed by James Reese Europe.

She published the songs in four-part harmony, a task that brought praise from composer Percy Grainger in 1918.