>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:23 >> 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. ^M00:06:51 ^M00:06:56 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." ^M00:10:02 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. ^M00:16:51 ^M00:16:57 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. ^M00:20:00 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. ^M00:23:26 ^M00:23:30 >> 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. ^M00:25:53 ^M00:25:58 [ Music ] ^M00:26:22 ^M00:26:31 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. ^M00:27:27 [ Music ] ^M00:28:00 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. ^M00:29:47 [ Singing ] ^M00:30:40 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. ^M00:31:48 ^M00:31:59 [ Singing ] ^M00:32:46 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. ^M00:34:08 ^M00:34:22 [ Music ] ^M00:35:14 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. ^M00:37:11 ^M00:37:14 [ Singing ] ^M00:37:53 The lyrics are quite racy, I have learned [laughter]. ^M00:37:58 ^M00:38:02 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. ^M00:39:39 ^M00:39:43 >> 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. ^M00:39:53 [ Singing ] ^M00:40:33 >> 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. ^M00:42:23 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:42:45 >> Well, there's an old song that was used by Dr. Ridges to advertise his food for the babies. ^M00:42:56 [ Singing ] ^M00:44:00 >> 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. ^M00:45:37 ^M00:45:42 >> This song "Barney McShane" learned from my brother Bo who learned it from Walt Convert from Boulder City, Nevada. ^M00:45:50 [ Singing ] ^M00:46:52 >> 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. ^M00:48:58 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:08 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. ^M00:50:05 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. ^M00:52:30 ^M00:52:35 >> 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. ^M00:54:59 ^M00:55:03 >> 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. ^M00:55:25 ^M00:55:33 >> 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. ^M00:58:42 ^M00:58:47 >> 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? ^M01:00:03 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. ^M01:01:49 ^M01:01:54 Well thank you. Thank you so much. ^M01:01:57 [ Applause ] ^M01:02:01 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.