California Gold is almost like two stories in one. The main story is of folklorist Sidney Robertson, who conducted interviews and collected over 40 hours of folk songs in 12 languages among more than 185 individuals in Northern California between 1938 and 1940 under the auspices of the WPA’s California Folk Music Project. Her 15-month journey reflected her desire to capture the real experiences of the population that made up this part of the state, helping the contemporary reader understand the “diverse, multilingual American musical culture in 1930s California” (297). Her story is also filled with descriptions of the musicians and their culture, placing them into context within Depression America. Robertson believed, as she wrote in 1939, that “[f]olksong is song alive” (40) and people use it to build and maintain community and identity. The role of the collector is not to try to get musicians to perform known traditional songs, but those that resonate within the group. In her notes about the songs and performers, which include 168 photographs and 62 drawings of the unique instruments used, she portrayed them as they were, within their space and identity.
Robertson was born into a prosperous San Francisco family in the early part of the last century and was afforded many of the privileges of her class. She traveled to Europe as a teen; after graduating from Stanford, she and her husband, Kenneth Robertson, moved to Paris, where she studied piano. They returned to California in 1925 and she became interested in folk music, largely because of her studies with the composer Ernest Bloch. The Depression hit her family hard and by the mid-1930s she had moved to the East Coast in search of greater opportunities. In New York City, she collected Yiddish songs for a brief stint before being hired by Charles Seeger in 1936 to work as a folk song collector with the Resettlement Administration. After a several-week apprenticeship with John A. Lomax in North Carolina, Robertson was on her own to collect in the Upper Midwest. She collected the most recordings of the RA staff until it was disbanded in late summer, 1937. She returned to California and was hired by the WPA’s Folk Music Project to travel around the northern part of the state in her car searching out the diverse groups that made up modern California. She collected without censor the songs the people wanted to sing, occasionally pointing out their offensive or racist connotations.
California Gold contains descriptions and transcripts of the songs performed by the state’s Spanish, Azorean, Basque, Mexican, Russian, Hungarian, Balkan, Italian, Norwegian, Armenian, and Anglo-American populations. The collection is amazing. As an added bonus, readers can listen to the songs by visiting https://soundcloud.com/uc-press/sets/california-gold.
The other story is that of the author, Catherine Hiebert Kerst, who was hired by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 1989 to organize the plethora of documents that made up Robertson’s work with the WPA. Robertson’s collection was scattered in numerous files because once the WPA officially ended in 1943, most documents were boxed up and archived away. Eventually, the Library of Congress and the National Archives began the slow process of rediscovering and organizing these files. Kerst waded through “onionskin carbons” with notations in the margins, in different languages, with photographs and drawings, to compile the “puzzle pieces into the semblance of a fascinating ethnographic whole that documented” (both xiv) the collective voices of Northern Californians during the Depression era. Kerst admired Robertson’s commitment to collecting authentic voices and songs and was surprised she was not well known, unlike Lomax or Seeger. Kerst’s efforts resulted in the addition of Robertson’s WPA California Folk Music Project to the Library of Congress’s first American Memory project of its American Folklife Center. In 1995, the archive was digitized and made available through the library’s website under California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell. And while Robertson did an amazing job of collecting and annotating these folk songs, Kerst is to be commended for expertly steering the reader through the variety of voices in the book. Her guidance places into context what Robertson was trying to accomplish in her efforts as the “lady on wheels” (41). In each of the sections, which vary both geographically and culturally, she helps the reader understand the complex situations Robertson faced with each group. Some wanted to sing traditional songs, while others wanted to display their vocal talents with opera or popular tunes. Kerst locates each of these groups as part of the California mosaic.
Under Roosevelt’s Federal Project One, artists, writers, actors, directors, conductors, musicians, composers, and many others found temporary employment creating art, literature, plays, and music for the American people. The Art, Theatre, and Writers’ projects came under fire by Roosevelt’s opponents for their left-leaning tendencies, but the Music Project escaped this scrutiny largely by focusing on American music. Robertson also had to navigate this line and was advised to make certain her collection reinforced the Americanness of Northern California. Perhaps this is the reason for leaving out three significant groups of Americans in her collection—Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Kerst recognizes this omission and suggests that Robertson hoped to add them later, complaining in 1939 that “[w]e have done nothing with the Oriental groups…and I am looking forward to that” (295). As for the other groups, Kerst’s explanations are a bit weak. Robertson felt she lacked the expertise to record the Indigenous peoples who also asked for money in exchange (as they had been exploited in the past), yet this did not stop her from working with Eastern or Mediterranean European groups. Kerst’s rationale for Robertson’s omission of African Americans was that they were recent migrants to the state, and racial tensions made it difficult to work with them. The volume contains numerous examples of songs recalling the days of ’49 and the accompanying Gold Rush. The songs of Anglo-Americans are rife with mentions of these days, but missing are the Chinese, and later other Asian peoples. And while Robertson did hope to eventually record these groups, Kerst suggests that perhaps the reason for this gap lay with the growing anti-Asian sentiment developing in California during that time. California Gold is an excellent chorus of voices that made up California during the 1930s, and while the above omissions are significant, they should not take away from the story of Sidney Robertson or the excellent work by Kerst to bring this subject to life.
University of California Press