Choosing the Songs
Frances Densmore was methodical in her categorization of the 240 songs included in Teton Sioux Music.
Numerous categories include Ceremony and Sun Dance songs, Dream Songs, Healing Songs, Society Songs, Songs of War, Dance Songs and Honoring Songs. As Densmore writes in American Indians and Their Music, the words in these songs “are few in number and suggest rather than express the idea of the song.”
The collection of songs begins with the The White Buffalo Calf Pipe (Ptehíŋčala Čhaŋnúŋpa), and as Lakota author and artist Kevin Locke emphatically points out, “She didn’t choose to start there, they did.”
Densmore wrote:
It is fitting that a narrative of the gift of the White Buffalo Calf pipe to the Sioux should introduce the present account of the ceremonies and customs of the tribe. Throughout this memoir, reference will be made to ceremonial acts performed in accordance with the instructions of the White Buffalo Maiden, a supernatural being through whose agency the ceremonial pipe was given to the Sioux.
Thirty-three songs associated with the Sun Dance are included in Teton Sioux Music.
According to Lakota singer Courtney Yellowfat, “They go in order, they tell a story.”
We will never know if more of these Sun Dance songs were recorded and discarded why Densmore, or if the Lakota elders choose to share only some of these sacred songs. We do know there are more, because contemporary Lakota singers know them. They have been passed down generation to generation and are still in use.