This early curator and collector of songs for the Library of Congress not only wrote down folk songs, but also recorded them in the field (that is, wherever he discovered a folk singer making music).

In 1928, when the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, invited Robert W. Gordon to become "specialist and consultant in the field of Folk Song and Literature," Gordon had already conceived and launched his lifetime mission to collect the entire body of American folk music. He called it a "national project with many workers." Gordon attended Harvard University between 1906 and 1917, and then left in order to devote all his free time to this collecting enterprise. Supporting himself through teaching, writing, and the occasional grant, Gordon traveled from the waterfronts of Oakland and San Francisco, California, to Asheville, North Carolina, and Darien, Georgia, collecting and recording folksongs with his Edison wax-cylinder machine. He wrote a monthly column in Adventure magazine, "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," asking readers to send in copies of all the folksongs they could remember. And he contacted Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, to discuss his dream and seek institutional support.

Engel believed that American grassroots traditions should be represented in the national library, and wrote in The Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for 1928:

There is a pressing need for the formation of a great centralized collection of American folk-songs. The logical place for such a collection is the national library of the United States. This collection should comprise all the poems and melodies that have sprung from our soil or have been transplanted here, and have been handed down, often with manifold changes, from generation to generation as a precious possession of our folk.

Countless individuals, numerous walks of life, several races have contributed to this treasure of songs and ballads. It is richer than that of any other country. Too much of it has remained scattered or unrecorded. The preservation of this material in the remote haunts where it still flourishes is endangered by the spread of the radio and phonograph, which are diverting the attention of the people from their old heritage and are making them less dependent on it.