>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: Welcome.
My name is Catherine Hiebert Kerst and I'm going to be talking
to you today about Sidney Robertson Cowell
and the WPA California Folk Music Project.
I'd like to thank the music division for asking me to speak today
in their curator lecture series.
The collection actually resides,
both in the American Folk Life Center where I worked
for many years, I retired last fall, and also in the music division here.
There is also a companion collection that resides at Berkeley,
UC Berkeley in their music library.
The Folk Life Center has the audio recordings for this collection
and many forms of field notes and correspondence.
And the music division has a lot of information about the background
of Sidney Robertson, primarily because she was married
to Henry Cowell for many years.
And since Henry's collection is there,
many of Sidney's materials are there.
But they are in some sense overlapping.
I'm indebted to the staff
of the music division who's helped me out a lot.
Nancy Seiger [assumed spelling] did a beautiful finding aid
for the Sidney Robertson Cowell collection in the music division.
And also to my colleagues in the American Folk Life Center
who have always supported my absolute fascination
with this collection.
They've heard me talk about it at nausea I know.
And I want to thank the many language and cultural specialists
in the library's European division and the Hispanic division
who have provided language and cultural background
for the many cultural groups that are focused on in this collection.
I'm writing a book and so, I'm getting a chance
to see what these songs actually mean in their languages.
And I've gotten a lot of help.
So, I'm very appreciative.
From 1938 to 1940, while in her young thirties, Sidney Robertson,
collector of traditional music, single-handedly organized
and directed a Work Projects Administration,
or WPA project designed to serve a musical tradition
in Northern California.
The result of this new deal collection project generated an
ambitious, multiformat, ethnographic field collection called the WPA
California Folk Music Project that I will speak about today.
Not only did the project generate a wealth of musical
and cultural documentation from a wide variety of cultural groups
at a certain point in California history, it also provided
through the ebullient and dynamic presence and writings
of Sydney Robertson, a vicarious experience for all of us
of what it meant to do ethnographic field work at the time.
In my experience, recorded collections of traditional music
from the 1930s do not always include much in the way
of documentary background and may only list a song title,
the collection and performer's names,
the town where the recording was made, plus the date.
This collection has much more contextual detail,
with numerous photographs, drawings and sketches,
official field reports sent into the WPA, a variety of other field notes,
and a wealth of Robertson's lively reminiscences about her own work
and her often gossipy correspondence.
It is a vast collection, included 35 hours of audio recordings.
I'll only be able to give you a glimpse of what it contains,
plus a small amount of background.
But I hope it will wet your appetite to browse
through the entire collection at your leisure.
It is entirely online here at the library.
Robertson was a dynamic and vigorous presence, and eloquent spoke person
for traditional music and its practitioners.
She was also a colorful personality with very strong views,
perceptive of the graphic skills
in her own uniquely patterned narrative style.
In a publicity file she kept,
Robertson described her new deal folk music collecting efforts
dramatically in a bio that read
"Sydney Robertson Cowell is a Californian whose adventures as a
"government song woman" in pursuit
of folk songs would fill several books.
Before she married the composer, Henry Cowell in 1941,
she had worn out three automobiles,
traveling over 300,000 miles in her car in 17 states.
Alone with her recording machine, her sleeping bag
and a companion once described in her hearing
as "the lady about the songs' dog."
That is typical Sydney Robertson verbiage.
Sydney William Hawkins was born in 1903 in San Francisco.
As a child she was precocious, articulate and inquisitive.
Her upbringing reflected an independent and rather unstructured,
but open minded educational philosophy,
progressive in character, but definitely high cultural in texture.
She was given piano, violin, dancing,
and elocution lessons from an early age.
She had French tutors, riding and polo lessons,
children's cooking classes and much more.
When asked about her interest in folk music collecting later
in her life she wrote, the first ingredient was an itching heel,
which she attributed to having accompanied her father as a child
on long business trips throughout the west.
He would leave her for long periods of time where she was free
to go exploring, as she explained, he naturally felt a certain danger
in the extreme gregariousness that I had inherited from him.
And so, the stock warning for girls of that era, became a daily ritual.
Try not to lose your purse Sidney, and never talk to strangers.
The trouble was I never met a stranger.
From the ages of 10 to 14,
she accompanied her piano teacher each summer
on Cook's Tours of Europe.
Robertson seems to have been present
at many memorable early 20th century high cultural events.
And to have run into or met royalty, famous artists, authors
and musicians in serendipitous ways.
In her reminiscences, she writes of attending the premier
of Stravinsky's [foreign word] in Paris.
She was in Rome at the outbreak of World War I and in Paris
when German troops moved into Belgium.
And on, and on, and on.
Robertson studied romance languages at Stamford in the early 1920s,
married a philosophy student, Kenneth Robertson,
travelled with him to Europe where in Paris she studied piano
with Alfred Créole [assumed spelling].
Kenneth studied with Young, though Young appears
to have been more enamored of her mind
and perceptiveness than with her husbands.
When they returned to California in 1926,
Robertson took a job teaching music at the progressive Peninsula School
for Creative Education in Menlo Park, and sat in on classes
about world music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
She divorced her husband in 1934,
and increasingly felt she was leading too self-indulgent a life
in California.
Franklin Roosevelt had become president in 1933,
soon thereafter initiating a wrath of social and arts programs intended
to help the US recover from the Great Depression.
It was in the spirit of the times that Robertson moved east in 1935,
where she found a job directing the social music program
at the Henry Street Settlement on the lower east side in New York
and began to work with recent Jewish refugees.
Here is Sidney in 1929, when she was 26 years old.
I will refer to her as Sidney Robertson throughout this talk,
because that was the name she used during this period of her life.
She called herself Sidney Robertson Cowell later,
after she married Henry Cowell.
It was in 1936, while visiting friends here in Washington
that Robertson visited the archives of American Folk Song
as the American Folk Life Center Archive was called at the time,
where it was then part of the music division here at the library.
Because of her many questions about folk music collecting,
she was encouraged to visit the Office
of Ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, the father of Pete Seeger
who was then in charge of the folk music office
at the resettlement administration.
They hit it off and as she explained, "Of course,
I got hooked on the work and the wonderful, hopeful
and dedicated new deal so that I didn't resist too much
when Charlie urged me to stay on."
It wasn't long before Robertson had learned how
to work an instantaneous recording machine and began to travel
on her own, collecting a huge body of traditional music
and song throughout the south and into the Midwest
for the resettlement administration.
In her car, with her recording machine and her dog.
These recordings are also here at the library.
This she pursued until Seeger's Office
of Resettlement was dissolved early in 1937, followed briefly
by a few months of folk music collecting support of the Midwest
through the Farm Security Administration.
When all of these sources of funds dried up, Robertson began to lobby
for funding sources that would allow her
to continue collecting on her own.
She traveled to her native California, where she stayed
at her father's pig farm near Fresno to seek support
for a state based project which she hoped would become a prototype
for the collection of folk music across the country.
After doggedly pursuing a variety
of funding possibilities unsuccessfully,
like the Rockefeller Foundation, she succeeded in 1938
in convincing the northern California WPA Office
in San Francisco that her project was one
that might be appropriate for their consideration.
By this time she had secured sponsorship for the project both
from the music department at the University of California in Berkeley
and from the Library of Congress' Music Division here.
UC Berkley arranged for space and equipment on campus
and the library suppled Robertson
with 237 blank 12-inch acetate discs for recording.
The trick within the WPA was to device a project
that could keep 20 people occupied,
both to provide socially usefully work for those on the relief roles,
and to justify the hiring of a supervisor.
After working for Seeger, Robertson was eager to be a supervisor herself
and not be beholden to anyone else in her work.
She was also determined to collect both English
and foreign language recordings.
Something that American folk music collectors were just beginning
to do.
Robertson was not an academic, and of course she was a woman,
but with her forthright and energetic personality,
she found a niche for herself in the fluid social chaos
of the Roosevelt Era, where in other decades she might have had
more difficulty.
It was an era reminiscent of our own in a number of ways.
Robertson devised and carried out the California Folk Music Project
at fascist tendencies were gaining momentum abroad
and populous sentiment and the distrust
of immigrants was growing at home.
In addition, by 1938, the New Deal Arts programs,
the federally funded arts programs were facing increasing suspicious
across the country as being frivolous and a waste of money.
She was well-aware of the xenophobic tendencies of the age,
and prepared for pushback.
In Robertson's instructions to workers that she wrote
for the workers on her project, she instructed them to "remember
that the Anglo-Saxon music which we are inclined to think
of as the only American kind is a relative recent importation
on this continent.
Exactly as the Hungarian, Finnish and Armenian folk music are.
The Portuguese and Spanish have been in California three times
as long as the "Americans."
She also asked that her staff not refer to the musicians and singers
as foreign, but rather called them minority performers
to avoid widespread negative reactions to the foreign born.
In a letter at the time to her former boss, Charlie Seeger,
Robertson implored him when talking to people in Washington
to please not use the term "American traditional music" in reference
to her work in California, because as she wrote,
I am trying to keep the product description broad enough
to include Icelanders, Hungarians, Basques, etcetera.
Everywhere people are not crazy about "foreigners" though,
so I am also leaving out the word American everywhere
and hope not to get caught at it.
She called her recordings English language recordings
and minority recordings as a result.
Robertson had an uncanny knack for unearthing WPA staff
from the California relief rolls and she combed the files for people
who could help her with her needs on the projects.
She found a Mr. Deviere [assumed spelling] who had a dairy route
in Contra Costa County and who led her
to numerous valuable contacts along the route.
She also chose Portuguese and Spanish speakers familiar
with their own musical traditions.
An Armenian ethnomusicologist,
a young man whose parents had been performers
on San Francisco's barbary coast.
Plus photographers and draftsmen, she thought would be useful
and would lead her to singers she could record.
In her WPA project proposal, Robertson listed a wide range
of activities to keep her staff busy.
Everything from cataloging the recordings she made to transcribing
and translating some of the songs,
researching old California mission music,
San Francisco songsters and much more.
The year before the project began, Robertson was involved
in a car accident and the insurance payment she received
as a result allowed her to buy a new "baby presto machine"
as she called her portable recording device.
She was delighted to own it rather than borrowing one
as she had done for years.
At the time the Presto Recording Corporation was an up
and coming company in the broadcast and recording industry,
so that she could use her 12-ince acetate discs from the Library
of Congress to record up to 5 minutes on each side.
She liked the portability and how small it was
and loved having her own.
For the California project, Robertson defined folk song
in the broadest possible sense, as "songs circulated
in the oral tradition and discoverable in 1938 to 40."
She was remarkably uninterested in finding the very oldest songs,
but rather wanted to document what people were actually singing
in their homes, their communities, their churches,
and at festivals and celebrations.
Often in context.
She wrote an article for "The San Francisco Chronicle" a month before
the project officially opened.
And I'm going to read this.
It's a little long, but it gives you a sense of where she's coming
from when she's looking for music to record.
"Because our history in California is yet so young, we are more aware
of the road, the dams, the crops, and the bridges than we are
of the intangible accretions, which have built up our modes
of thought and of living.
Every school child knows
that California's immigrant civilization came from Spain first,
via Mexico and that the in rush of settlers drawn by the discovery
of gold contributed strains from the five continents and the seven seas.
And that California still draws farmers and agriculture workers
of all kinds from the middle west and the south.
How can we believe that these successive waves
of hard-working citizens contributed nothing
to California beyond the work of their hands?
What traditions came with them?
Which have survived here?
Changed or unchanged.
What were they thinking and feeling as they labored in mines
and forests, herding cattle and sheep along our slopes.
Plowing and harvesting in the valleys,
and fishing along the coasts.
Their songs will tell us, if we can find them."
I think it's fascinating that she uses the expression intangible
accretion because we currently are always talking
about intangible culture and the protection of it nowadays.
The California Folk Music Project opened officially
on October 28, 1938.
At 2108 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
This is a photo of the employees at work.
Here is Mr. Prater the photographer.
On the back of this snapshot, Robertson wrote,
Mr. Prater our wonderful Welch photographer did all our developing,
printing and enlarging for performers.
And the microfilming of California songs choice from various libraries.
There are 168 photographs of the musicians
and their instruments in the collection.
She also found draftsmen from the relief rolls.
And the collection has numerous sketches,
mostly of the foreign musical instruments.
Sketches on brown paper and blueprint drawings
of the musical instruments.
And here is Robertson herself making copies.
Robertson sought out the performers
and recorded all of the music herself.
She usually spent five days a week at the Shattuck Avenue office,
sometimes going out to record with a number of them, the staff,
but also made recordings after five and on the weekends.
There was no phone in the office.
Over the years she reminisced and she loved to reminisce
in quite flamboyant ways to set the record straight.
She was reminiscing about how she did her collecting work.
She wrote, "I never asked the singers to sing for me
or for the government, except as a preservation project.
And I was never demanding of them, if they didn't want to sing.
And we skipped it for the present.
And almost without exception,
they revived the subject later themselves.
I was careful, just as a matter of good manners not to say, I want."
In her early training at the Resettlement Administration,
Robertson had experienced folk music collectors who imposed more
of their demands on performers than she though civil,
often ordering them to sing.
In response, Robertson consciously forged a more approachable manner
with those she recorded.
She explained, "I wanted to convince people that I shared their tastes
and values and that I liked and understood them.
This is what has made a wide variety of people willing
and even anxiously determined that I should know
and record the best they had.
It had carried often past the language barrier to simple people
who knew only that I found their music beautiful and important
and that I wanted it perserved as it truly was
for future generations to hear."
She also has written about locating singers.
How does one found songs?
She asked, they are everywhere at hand.
A man changing a tire on Shattuck Avenue
in Berkeley last month sang an old ballad as he worked,
and was startled by an urgent request to repeat it
so it could be written down.
A receipt for a bill paid
to a railway express deliveryman was signed with a Basque name
and this led to a whole nest of songs.
I'd like to, throughout the collection she does this very small
WPA announcement I thought you might enjoy hearing her voice.
>> SIDNEY ROBERTSON COWELL: This is one of a series of recordings
of California Folk Media made by the Department of Music
at the University of California, in cooperation with the Archives
of the American Folk Song in the Library of Congress,
a diverse project administration,
official project number 665.8330, unit A 25.
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: The range of foreign language songs
that she recorded is quite impressive,
documenting 75 performers in 12 languages.
From European and Middle Eastern cultures primarily.
These recordings make up about 2/3 of the collection.
There are love songs from the Asturias in Spain.
And from the Basque country.
Hungarian Christmas carols, improvised [inaudible]
from Icelandic settlers about immigrating to North America.
Spanish serenades from old California,
and [inaudible] Russian Malukan hymns
from a San Francisco congregation.
Many of these groups had never been recorded before.
I have chosen a few to sample so that you can hear some
of this remarkable music.
I will focus on the foreign language materials in this presentation.
Alice Lemons Avila was a Portuguese Azorean
who had a Portuguese radio program in Oakland at the time.
And she was one of the people
that Robertson chose from the relief rolls.
She also did a lot of translating, transcriptions and translations
of Portuguese songs and arranged for groups of Portuguese Azoreans
to be recorded for Robertson often in their homes.
You see her in the front left with three other Portuguese singers.
She had a Portuguese guitar and this is one of the scale drawings,
drawn by one of the draftsmen, there are quite a few
of these wonderful drawings
of instruments throughout the collection.
And I'd like to play a song.
She's accompanying herself on the Portuguese guitar and let's see.
It's [foreign word].
This is a playful Portuguese song form the Azores bemoaning the plight
of those who have no lovers, whose faces look like raw parsley,
green lemons, or strained milk.
Those who are never visited after dark by suiters.
It's actually quite upbeat considering.
[ Music ]
Then I'd like to play you a recording
that was made a Mexican wedding in Carmel to which she was invited.
She met somebody on the street in Carmel, who she had seen
and they started talking, and then he invited her to this wedding.
It was a wedding of Ben and Rose Figueroa [assumed spelling].
And the orchestra that plays is Julio Gomez' orchestra.
It's performed in an ensemble form at that time called [foreign word]
which predate Mariucci ensembles of later years,
though this selection actually,
apparently is still a favorite among Mariucci,
in the Mariucci repertoire.
You can hear the wedding excitement in the background,
this is what I meant about mentioning the contextual aspect.
[ Music ]
Actually, Robertson was embarrassed at the wedding,
because the white boss of Ben Figueroa was present
and got horribly drunk, and acted horribly.
She was totally embarrassed and wrote about it at length
in her field notes, how you know she said I was one of the two outsiders
at this event and I was mortified that you know
that his boss was making such a ruckus.
Her field notes have that kind of detail which is really wonderful
to read many years later.
Elinor Rodriguez was of Puerto Rican heritage,
she was born on the mainland, and she sings a beautiful bolero.
Robertson called it Bolero Sentimental,
which actually it's a composed piece by Puerto Rican composer
and musician Rafael Hernandez, written in 1929
about the disastrous economic conditions of farmers
on the islands during the 920s.
This bolero continues to be one of the most symbolic songs
for Puerto Ricans I understand.
And it's also fascinating that as a folklorist
and as a folk music collector,
she made no disparaging comments whatsoever
about songs that were composed.
If it was song in a community, she was interested.
So, this is sort
of a heart-wrenching beautiful bolero that Rodriguez sings.
[ Singing ]
Another set of songs that have nostalgic imagery and a deep sense
of longing for the homeland, and there are many songs
in the collection that are represented in that way.
This next one is a Scottish song a scots Gaelic song.
There were a whole group
of beautiful scots Gaelic songs collected in Berkeley in Oakland.
Here Donald MacInnes from the Hebrides sings a moving traditional
song about sailing by the island from where he is from,
and not having a chance to actually go back home.
The lyrics in English go as follows.
"I see the land where I was a boy.
Land of heroes.
I will lift myself up and go suddenly to you.
I see the land where I was a boy.
I see her at a distance from me, veiled and cold.
And I am at sea on the back of the waves in the Army.
[ Singing ]
The Gaelic songs are really lovely, and very haunting I think.
Robertson also collected many wonderful recordings
from the Armenian community in Fresno.
Many of whom settled in California after the Armenian genocide of 1915.
She recorded music in Armenian cafes and at their picnics.
Bedros Haroutunian was a member for Azoreans Armenian Orchestra
that performed at many community events and that she recorded.
Jack Azlonian [assumed spelling] told Robertson
that the group could play in five languages, mainly Armenia, Turkish,
Greek, Arabic, and American Jazz.
Here is Bedros Haroutunian with his qanun.
It's an instrument similar to a zither with 30 strings.
The photographer on the project took a phot of the tuning mechanism.
It is plucked and played held flat on the knees.
So, here is "Song of Freedom" and it opened with a qanun solo.
So, the zither like instrument.
[ Music ]
So, as they played they speed up and this recording was made
on a Sunday afternoon at Mr. Haroutunian's home
where the group often played on weekends.
Robertson really wanted to use the microphone to bring
out the solos, but the group said no.
We all, we want to be one big sound, we don't want any solos.
We want that affect.
So that was very interesting that she writes about that.
An ode? And ode is like a loot.
Same family.
Yeah, there are pictures, I don't really have time
to show you but they're wonderful.
Giuseppe Russo, he was a Sicilian who also sang a number
of Neapolitan songs for Robertson.
He was a barber and as Robertson wrote in one of her WPA reports,
she wrote, Mr. Russo has been extremely helpful he has invited me
back over and over again, and says I can come any day but Saturday,
because that's a busy day for a barber.
He puts up the machine in his house and dashes back
and forth when the bell rings.
Leaving me to wait until he tends to a customer.
So, here is Mr. Russo sings an amusing
and upbeat Neapolitan tarantella about a man who wishes for more
than a kiss from his sweetheart, and she's playing hard to get.
It's almost like something from Opera buffa,
as far as my knowledge is.
[ Singing ]
The lyrics are quite racy, I have learned [laughter].
Mr. Koljonen was a Finnish American man, who Robertson met
in Shasta County up in the mountains.
Boom Town was the name of the town that rose up in 1937 and '38
when the Shasta dam was being built and migrants from all
over the country rushed there to get a piece of work.
And he came from Minnesota.
He and his wife ran Koljonen's Café.
And there are recordings from inside the café.
He sings some Finnish songs, but I thought I would give you a taste
of a dialect song from Minnesota.
So, let's see.
It's called "The Disgusted Swede."
Now, dialect songs were commonly found in oral tradition
in the Midwest, and especially, there were quite a few
in Scandinavian communities that I know of.
They were comic songs about the misadventures of immigrants,
usually sung in broken English and usually about another ethnic group.
So, here you have a Finn singing about a Swede.
And at the beginning I think you hear, often at the beginning
of a recording you can hear Robertson saying,
and please tell them the name of the song, or where did you learn this,
or step up to the mic, or whatever.
And I always love that bit of context as well.
>> All right.
>> SIDNEY ROBERTSON COWELL: Okay.
>> Shall I say the name?
>> SIDNEY ROBERSON COWELL: Yeah, say the name.
>> This is "Song of a Disgusted Swede.
[ Singing ]
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: As I've mentioned 1/3 of the recordings are
in English, among the English language songs one finds
for example, tunes from the California Gold Rush Era.
Robertson sought out and actually found, Sons of the 49ers
who were able to sing old songs for her.
But she also recorded barbary coast, rag time, and popular songs
from San Francisco, Cornish sailors, chants and many other popular songs
from the turn of the century.
One character she recorded was John Stone.
He was a fiddler, harmonica player.
And he had performed in the medicine show routines earlier in the century
and in the previous century.
I want to play.
You see him, I mean she had a hard time finding him because he was
up in his cabin somewhere up in the mountain
and he would give cryptic reports on where he was going
to be the next day and she finally found him.
But she recorded this section called "Dr. Ridges Food" in addition
to all kinds of other things that John Stone performed.
This is an advertisement for baby food that John Stone performed
on the Medicine Show circuit in years past.
It punctuates sort of the common narrative with song
that you find sometimes typically in fable form and so,
I think you might enjoy this.
I always have enjoyed this one.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Well, there's an old song that was used by Dr. Ridges
to advertise his food for the babies.
[ Singing ]
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: And I've actually seen advertisements
in old newspapers for Dr. Ridge's food.
But it's a wonderful document to have.
Roberson was surprised that in the Gold Mining Territory
that she roamed in the mountain there were few purely traditional
songs and ballads, rather her understanding was
that the theatrical and musical stage, entertainment that sprang up
and was offered for the Gold Rush settlers from the middle
of the 18th century on really took over and people, when asked to sing
or play an old song, it often ended up being a tune
from the Medicine Show circuit or from old California songsters.
Warde Ford and his brothers were from Wisconsin.
They came to Shasta County to work
on the Shasta Dam from northern Wisconsin.
Robertson knew the Ford brothers and their extended family in Crandon,
Wisconsin where she had recorded them
for the Resettlement Administration in 1937.
Everyone in the multi-generational Ford family had wonderful voices
and a wide repertoire of songs about logging tragedies,
Civil War Ballads, love songs, body and humorous songs.
And I'd like to play you one humors song called "Barney McShame"
that Warde Ford sings here.
>> This song "Barney McShane" learned from my brother Bo
who learned it from Walt Convert from Boulder City, Nevada.
[ Singing ]
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: During the time
that Robertson was recording in Thalami County and Shasta County
up in the mountains she camped out in her sleeping bag,
or slept in her car with her dog on the side of the road.
And she writes about this sometimes even in writing formal WPA reports
to the San Francisco office.
After 17 months of recording, Robertson's plans for extending
and expanding the California Folk Music Project had to be given
up when the expected WPA funding was not renewed in time
for the project to go forward.
She had hoped that the continuation of the project would allow
for recording and documenting the performance of nonwestern
and primarily Asian music; Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
which would have been quite remarkable.
In spite of the fact that the project was not renewed,
no other WPA field collection of folk music undertaken
by a single person in a specific region was
as impressive as this one.
The California WPA Folk Music Collection provides a set
of recordings, a snapshot as it were, representing a range
of traditional and popular music collected during a specific era.
This taken as a whole also tells much about the details
and the ethnographic field work at its best during the new deal era.
It also gives us a glimpse of the character of an energetic
and capable woman folk music collector who through the existence
of the WPA had the opportunity to take charge and carry
out an ambitious folk music collecting project.
Roberson's successes in California Folk Music Project fit well
with the new deal dynamism and creativity
that generated similar cooperative efforts to document
and validate the lives of exemplary, yet so often unsung Americans.
I hope you have a change to explore this collection.
[ Applause ]
If anyone has any questions, I'd be delighted
to see if I can answer them.
Yes, oh, wait they're bringing a mic, so if you just hold on a sec.
This, by the way, this image here is from the online collection.
Which soon will be migrated to a new format.
I'm not sure if this image will stay.
But if you wanted to find this collection,
you can just Google California Gold Folk Life, that's wat I do instead
of remembering the whole.
>> And it's available outside the building in the public website.
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: Yes, yes.
>> I'll just explain that one thing that's a little odd
about this collection in its online home right this minute is
that it hasn't been integrated into the Library
of Congress main search feature.
So, if you go on the front page of the Library of congress
and you search for an individual item
on this collection, you won't find it.
And so you have to go to this collection page
and so you should search for California Gold
and you'll find the collection page,
and on that page you can search and browse.
So, but I also had a question or a comment as well if that's okay.
So, I think one of the great things that you really bring
out about Sidney and her collecting is that she was much better
than a lot of the male collectors at the time
at allowing the community members
to be the authorities on their traditions.
But one place where I think she may not have done that is
with John Stone's recording there.
Because he very clearly said, this is an old song called
"The Beautiful Baby" which Dr. Ridges' food used
as an advertisement, and yet the name of it
in the collection seems to be Dr. Ridges' food.
And indeed it's an old [foreign word] which you can find
in northern Ireland and other places,
where it's called "The Darling Baby" or something like that
and so have you found other versions of that and found anything
out about the background of it.
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST:
I found other versions of it, yeah, as you say.
But I should mention that now, I mean I have worked
with this collection over the years, I'm discovering now that many
of the songs are, well the foreign language songs are misspelled,
drastically.
And basically what happened was during a recording session,
the 12-ince acetate disk was put on the baby Presto
and the record jacket was there for Robertson to jot notes
down including the spelling.
So, this is Dr. Ridges' food.
Then the WPA, you know staff typed that into their lists.
Sometimes even the English language songs are totally wrong.
There's the problem of reading her handwriting,
and then there's the problem, I mean of her not knowing Gaelic,
or Icelandic, or whatever.
So, as a result of this,
I think some of that will be rectified in the catalog records.
Oh, sorry.
>> Fascinating.
Fascinating lecture Cathy.
I noticed the life dates of Sidney, she lived into the nineties.
What was the rest of her life
like in a nutshell after these recordings?
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: She didn't record as much
as I would have loved her to record.
She married a famous composer.
She often was Mrs. Henry Cowell.
And she did some amazing recordings in the Aran Islands in the 1950s.
She did a smattering of collecting otherwise,
but she was a very complicated woman.
And Henry Cowell died in 1965, but she spent a lot of time sort
of being the composer's widow.
And his life was also very complicated.
During this project he was in San Quinton on a morals charge
and she would visit him, but that's a totally different story.
And then she married him in 1941.
So, it's very complicated.
But some of her who she was through her life had to do I think
with some of those events.
And yet, she wrote voluminously and also spoke for hours and hours
into a tape recorder reminiscing about Henry Cowell
and you know Langston Hughes, and you know just all kinds of things,
and about his music and so on.
All of that is transcribed and it's in the music division.
It's really quite remarkable.
So, it's not an easy answer.
And for me, personally, it's sort of hard to read
that she became Mrs. Henry Cowell after being so gutsy
and so self-sufficient in so many ways.
So, it's a very complicated issue.
>> I'm sorry if I'm the only person in the room that doesn't know this,
but you're talking about tracking people down in their cabins,
what did the Presto run on?
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: It was plugged into the wall,
I mean an electrical source.
>> So, the cabins, wherever she recorded it.
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: She needed a source
of electricity for that, yeah.
I think there was a question up here.
>> Were there any areas where her collection did not overlap
with things that the Lomax's had recorded?
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: I don't know much about any Lomax recordings
in California, but in the previous era,
I mean during the Resettlement Administration
and the Farm Security Administration,
Robertson collected foreign language materials just as Alan Lomax did
and actually gave Alan ideas.
You should be sure to see this,
go to this Finnish community, or this, you know.
So, he was a lot younger than she, but they were in communication.
And I would just say the more each
of them collected just added to the bigger corpus.
Do you know what I mean?
>> I'm looking forward to the book
and this is a wonderful presentation.
I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about their move
when she married Cowell, east, because it does seem to me
that she gave up her life in a certain kind
of way to save him maybe.
And also, this was around the time of the beginning of the war
and how does this play within what was happening
in the country at the time of the war?
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: I guess, I don't have much
to say about all of that.
Henry Cowell knew a lot of the people she knew
from the progressive communities.
John Steinbach, I mean she was a name dropper.
And he also knew a lot of, but I mean she actually knew people too.
It wasn't just that she was dropping names.
So, Henry Cowell had been her piano teacher when she was young
and then I also know, I mean her family, her father was a businessman
for the White sewing machine company.
And I believe they lost a lot of money during the twenties,
even though they were quite wealthy earlier.
And she needed money.
She needed support.
She didn't have an academic affiliation.
And so in a way, marrying Henry, I've wondered about,
you know it gave her some kind of a support and she would,
for instance she would go on little field trips like in 1950
with Maude Carpoliese [assumed spelling]
who was retracing the steps of Cecil Sharpe
and Maude Carpoliese from the 19-teens.
And Sydney wrote Henry saying, oh it's so wonderful to be back
in the Appalachians, I'm going to come back here.
And then I don't think she ever did.
I don't know, I mean that's a whole other book.
Or several books.
Many layers of Sidney.
>> I have a couple questions I don't know what your time is here,
but this is a fellow playing a bag pipe and I would
like to know his nationality and if you know,
when did she record and music back from the.
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: He.
Mr. Biotical [assumed spelling], he's Croatian,
I don't remember exactly where he was from.
But I mean she recorded a wide variety of instruments
that were unfamiliar to a lot of people in California.
Then the three middle women are the three Puerto Rican woman
who were friends and who were all recorded
at Arura Caldron's [assumed spelling] home.
I've actually located Arura Caldron's daughter
who is still in Oakland.
So, I love having those connections because from that era,
we're moving away from people who might be able to be located.
Yes.
>> And one more question.
The Lomax recordings, did she?
It sounds like, I wouldn't say collaborated,
but she fed ideas to him?
Did she actually ever go to Appalachia and record with Lomax,
and that's kind of what I wanted, is there any cross stuff going
on between them as far
as collaborating, you know recording, or?
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: Not with Alan Lomax.
Sidney went on a recording, on a little field trip
with Frank C. Brown and John Lomax, Alan Lomax's father in 1936.
And that was where she was sort of testing
out how well she could work the recording machine
for Resettlement Administration.
But otherwise I don't believe that Robertson ever recorded
with Alan Lomax, though they were very aware of each other.
And I mean he would have a radio program in New York and say,
oh do you have any 49'ers songs that I could play on the?
You know so they were colleagues
and their relationship was a little thorny sometimes,
but I think they both respected each other in a certain way.
Yes?
>> Seems like mostly European extraction,
did she do any Asian recording?
>> CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: No.
There are a few scale drawings,
blueprints of some Chinese instruments because she had planned
that they would be done in the second phase,
though I think it might have been really hard for her
because of her lack of knowing any other those languages,
though it would have been fascinating.
Well thank you.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
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