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Biography
Donald Knight Wilgus (1 December 1918 – 25 December 1989) was an American folksong scholar and academic. He was Professor of Music and English at University of California, Los Angeles from 1963 until his death in 1989, where together with Wayland D. Hand he established the discipline of Folklore Studies
The Ethnomusicology Archive at UCLA includes the D.K. Wilgus Collection, his collection of 3,000 field recordings and 8,000 commercial recordings of folk music.
Wilgus was born on 1 December 1918 at West Mansfield, Logan County, Ohio and attended East High School (Columbus, Ohio) and obtained his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Ohio State University. He worked as an administrator at Purdue University (1941–1942) and served in the U.S. Army 1942–1945. From 1950 to 1963 he taught at Western Kentucky State College, as Associate Professor and, from 1961, full professor, moving to UCLA in 1963. In 1955 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Folklore and popular culture.
Wilgus died on 25 December 1989 in Los Angeles.