Harry Oster

American musicologist, folklorist, and musician.

Born: 17th April 1923, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Died: 19th January 2001

From 1955 he taught at Louisiana State University, English department. In 1956 he was among the three founders of the Louisiana Folklore Society, through which he issued his recordings of folk music from Louisiana. In 1959 Oster went with New Orleans jazz historian Richard B. Allen to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola prison, to record African American Blues, Spirituals sung by choirs and soloists, Sermons and personal interviews. The musicians he recorded there for the first time included Robert Pete Williams, who was pardoned and went on to have a remarkable career. The same year he made, by Allen's advice, a record of Snooks Eaglin in New Orleans and sold it to Folkways Records.

His next recordings were released on his own label Folk-Lyric. Oster packaged and sent the records to buyers and reviewers, and hand-lithographed the artwork. At the end of the 1960s the label and it's catalogue was sold to Folk-Lyric, and mostly transferred to CD.

In 1963 Oster went as a visiting professor to the University of Iowa, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The next year he received associate professorship and in 1968 full professorship. Unlike at LSU, Iowa dedicate some of the English curriculum to folklore, and Oster developed many new courses, from American Folk Literature to American Jewish Writers to Blues, Ragtime, and Jazz. He taught at Iowa until 1993.

His effort to record and endear folk arts ensued in Iowa with releasing Folk Voices of Iowa in 1965 and creating the Old Time Fiddlers Picnic with Art Rosenbaum. His first book, Living Country Blues, published in 1969, became a landmark in its field. The culmination of Oster's scholarly career came in 2000, with the publication of his Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore.

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