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Dr. Harry Oster was an American folklorist and musicologist.
Oster was the firstborn of Jacob and Sarah, Russian-Polish Jews, who emigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After one year in college, he was enlisted in January 1943 to serve as a weather observer, graduated from Columbia Business School with an MBA and became a firm manager. He went on to Harvard University to receive a BA, and to Cornell University for an MA and PhD in English. He worked as an assistant in the Cornell department and helped to organize folk-themed public events.
From 1955 he taught at Louisiana State University, English department. In 1956 he was among the three founders of the Louisiana Folklore Society, through which he issued his recordings of folk music from Louisiana, although the society did not fund them. The early material included Cajun music from Mamou. Louisiana Folksong Jambalaya is a collection of folk songs sung by himself.
In 1959 Oster went with New Orleans jazz historian Richard B. Allen to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola prison, to record African American Blues, Spirituals sung by choirs and soloists, Sermons and personal interviews. The musicians he recorded there for the first time include Robert Pete Williams, Roosevelt Charles, Hogman Maxey, Otis Webster and Robert Guitar Welch, the first of whom was pardoned and was to have a remarkable career. The same year he made, by Allen's advice, a record of Snooks Eaglin in New Orleans and sold it to Folkways Records.
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