Dena Epstein
Dena Julia Polacheck Epstein (November 30, 1916 – November 14, 2013) was a music librarian and historian who documented the African origins of the banjo and the history of Black folk music in the United States. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to William Polacheck and Hilda Satt Polacheck. She studied music at the University of Chicago and earned a library science degree from the University of Illinois in 1943. She became senior music librarian at the Newark Public Library that year, and in 1946 joined the music section of the Library of Congress as a cataloguer. While raising her family in New Jersey, she carried out research at the New York Public Library and by mail with librarians around the country, and this work became her 1969 book Music Publishing in Chicago Before 1871. Her 1975 article "The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History," published in Ethnomusicology, traced the banjo to instruments brought to North America by enslaved Africans. Her 1977 book Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War, the result of nearly three decades of research, won the Chicago Folklore Prize and the Southern Historical Association's Simkins Prize. She spent 22 years as assistant music librarian at the University of Chicago, starting in 1964, and served as president of the Music Library Association from 1977 to 1979. The association gave her its highest citation in 1986 and later named the Dena Epstein Award for Archival and Library Research in American Music after her. She also edited her mother's autobiography, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (1989). The 2013 documentary The Librarian and the Banjo, by Jim Carrier, covers her work and features the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Eric Weissberg. She died in November 2013 at age 96.
In the newsletter
- No. 19 Spring 1999