CALIFORNIA GOLD

Kerst shares with readers a fascinating compilation of California’s folk music in the late 1930s and the passion and ingenuity of Sidney Robertson Cowell, its unsung collector.

To combat the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration set out to employ desperate job-seekers in public works projects. Founded in 1938, the WPA California Folk Music Project was one of these programs, an ethnographic survey of the varieties of folk music in the Golden State, created and led by Robertson Cowell. Prior to the Depression, Robertson Cowell had been raised in a prosperous family as a well-traveled, highly educated polyglot with considerable experience in music. Yet as a folk music collector, her documentation went far beyond just recordings; it also included observations in animated prose about her tools, methods, and travels to find artists, as well as the artists’ personalities, senses of humor, and family origins. Kerst, working from these notes from the Library of Congress, shares Robertson Cowell’s recordings from 1938 to the project’s closing in 1940, ranging from a paso doble at a Mexican wedding, psalms by the Russian Molokan sect, off-color English-language ditties, and many more. Commentary on how certain lyrics evolved, reflected the racial prejudices of the time, and used bawdy or downright erotic subtext adds a contemporary context to each entry as well. The resource is dense and includes translations of the songs from their original language and biographies of the performers, with helpful endnotes and indexes. The book is organized by the cultures of the performers, providing full cultural pictures of their subjects, be they Portuguese Azorean folk traditions, the mythological influences of Icelandic ballads, or the heartbreaking influence of the Armenian genocide. There is an infectious, boundless adoration for its subject and her pedigree throughout, one that rivals even Robertson Cowell’s own passion when capturing a variant sea shanty or locating a blind gusle player. Even those with little interest in 1930s folk music can learn valuable lessons from her approach to fieldwork.

An enthusiastic championing of folk music by an ethnographer ahead of her time.