Laura Boulton (1899–1980) was an American ethnomusicologist and documentary filmmaker. She is known for the many field recordings, films, and photographs of traditional music and its performances and practitioners she collected. Boulton also collected traditional musical instruments from around the world. In her work with the National Film Board of Canada during World War II, she was recognized as a pioneer in the film industry.
She studied voice at Western Reserve University and obtained a B.A. degree from Denison University. In 1925, she married Wolfrid Rudyard Boulton, Jr., who was an ornithologist and lecturer at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. In 1941, John Grierson, the head of the National Film Board of Canada contracted Boulton as a freelancer to make a series of films on Canadian cultural communities. Her work at the NFB turned into a series called Peoples of Canada, consisting of 15 films. Although Boulton had little film experience, she collaborated with a number of experienced cinematographers, including Judith Crawley. Robert Flaherty, the American filmmaker, and director of Nanook of the North (1922), served as a consultant on Boulton’s three Baffin Island films. Postwar, Boulton’s films would meet with great acclaim in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, contributing significantly to the growth of the NFB’s international reputation.
Today Boulton’s large collections of traditional music materials are found at several institutions. The Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress contains wax cylinders, aluminum discs, and reel-to-reel tapes of Boulton’s field recordings of traditional vocal and instrumental music worldwide, with accompanying catalogs, and commentaries. The Smithsonian Institution Film Archives contains the originals of her film footage from 1934–1979. From 1972–77, Boulton took her personal collection with her to teach at Arizona State University. This collection, later named “The Laura Boulton Collection of World Music and Musical Instruments” came to Indiana University, Bloomington in 1986 from Arizona State and the Laura Boulton Foundation. The musical instruments are housed at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, while the remaining materials are at the Archives of Traditional Music. In 1977, Boulton started the Laura Boulton Foundation in New York City, a non-profit institution dedicated to supporting ethnomusicological research. Through the Foundation, Indiana University awards junior and senior Laura Boulton fellowships, designed for researchers to work with these materials.
