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                             Folklife Center News
                           American Folklife Center
                           The Library of Congress
                            20th Anniversary Issue
                                  Winter 1998
                              Volume XX, Number 1
                  ISSN 0149-6840  Catalog Card No. 77-649628
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The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S.
Congress to "preserve and present American folklife" through
programs of research, documentation, archival preservation,
reference service, live performance, exhibition, publication, and
training. The Center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture,
which was established in the Music Division of the Library of
Congress in 1928 and is now one of the largest collections of
ethnographic material from the United States and around the
world.
Administration
Alan Jabbour, Director
Doris Craig, Administrative Assistant
Camila Bryce-Laporte, Program Coordinator
Acquisitions
Joseph C. Hickerson, Head
Processing
Stephanie A. Hall, Archivist Coordinator
Catherine Hiebert Kerst, Archivist
Nora Yeh, Archivist
Programs
Peter T. Bartis, Folklife Specialist
Mary Hufford, Folklife Specialist
David A. Taylor, Folklife Specialist
Publications
James Hardin, Editor
Public Events
Theadocia Austen, Coordinator
Reference
Judith A. Gray, Folklife Specialist
Jennifer A. Cutting, Folklife Specialist
Administrative Office
Fax: 202 707-2076
Reference Service
Tel: 202 707-5510
E-mail: folklife@loc.gov
Board of Trustees
Congressional Appointees
Judith McCulloh, Chair, Illinois
Carolyn Hecker, Vice-chair, Maine
Nina Archabal, Minnesota
James F. Hoy, Kansas
William L. Kinney Jr., South Carolina
Charles E. Trimble, Nebraska
Juris Ubans, Maine
Presidential Appointees
Ada E. Deer, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Department
of Interior
Joseph D. Duffey, Director of the United States Information
Agency
Ex Officio Members
James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress
I. Michael Heyman, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
William Ferris, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
Alan Jabbour, Director, American Folklife Center
FOLKLIFE CENTER NEWS
James Hardin, Editor
David A. Taylor, Editorial Advisor
John Biggs, Library of Congress Graphics Unit, Designer
Folklife Center News publishes articles on the programs and
activities of the American Folklife Center, as well as other
articles on traditional expressive culture. It is available free
of charge from the Library of Congress, American Folklife Center,
Washington, D.C. 20540-4610. Folklife Center News does not
publish announcements from other institutions or reviews of books
from publishers other than the Library of Congress. Readers who
would like to comment on Center activities or newsletter articles
may address their remarks to the editor.
TELEPHONE AND ONLINE INFORMATION RESOURCES
American Folklife Center publications (including FOLKLIFE CENTER
NEWS), a calendar of events, collection guides, general
information, and connections to a selection of other Internet
services related to folklife are available on the Internet via
the LC MARVEL Gopher Server and the LC Web World Wide Web Server.
LC MARVEL is available through your local Gopher server. Or use
your Gopher Client Software to connect to marvel.loc.gov. From
the main menu, choose "Research and Reference," then "Reading
Rooms," then "American Folklife Center."
LC Web is available through your local World Wide Web service.
The Center's home page can be accessed from the Library's main
menu. The direct URL for the Center's home page is:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/folklife
Folkline, an information service providing timely information on
the field of folklore and folklife, including training and
professional opportunities and news items of national interest,
is available through the above Internet servers. For telephone
service, call the Folklife Reading Room: 202 707-5510.
EDITOR'S NOTES
20th Anniversary Issue
The first issue of Folklife Center News, volume 1, number 1,
appeared January 1978, twenty years ago. No editor is listed on
the masthead, but Alan Jabbour and Paula Johnson worked together
to assemble it and several other subsequent ones. Brett Topping
became managing editor with volume III, number 2, April 1980; and
I became editor with volume 10, number 1 (winter 1988), when
Brett left to become director of publications for the new
National Museum of Women in the Arts. The mailing list has grown
from about four thousand in 1980 to more than twelve thousand
today, both in this country and abroad.
A Treasury of Field Recordings
Appropriate for the anniversary, whether that of the newsletter
or of the Center (in 1996), is a new compact disc produced by
Rounder Records, selected by Stephen Wade from the legendary
series of published Library of Congress field recordings. For
those unfamiliar with the work of John A. and Alan Lomax and
other pioneering folklorists, this CD provides a splendid
introduction; for those who know their work, it offers convenient
access to the company of old friends; for teachers of folk music
and folklore, the TREASURY should become an essential tool.
caption:
Cover: Members of the Musgrove family, Westmoreland County,
Pennsylvania, October 1935. Library of Congress field recordings
from the 1930s are featured in a new compact disc from Rounder
Records. Photograph by Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration
Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
.................................................................
"The Beautiful Music All Around":
A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings
By James Hardin
.................................................................
      In the 1930s, an African American musicologist from Fisk
University named John W. Work III began documenting the street
musicians of Nashville, Tennessee. Work came naturally to the
study of music, since both his father and grandfather had
directed choirs, but the Fisk professor sought to document what
he called "the beautiful music all around you."
      Musician Stephen Wade kept this quotation in mind as he
selected and annotated thirty of the best performances from the
Library of Congress LP series FOLK MUSIC OF THE UNITED STATES for
a new compact disc from Rounder Records, A TREASURY OF LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS FIELD RECORDINGS (Rounder 1500). Wade's selection is
based on a lifetime's devotion to the thousands of performances
documented on the series, and a collaborative friendship.
      Stephen Wade moved to Washington, D.C., in 1981 to appear in
his one-man show "Banjo Dancing." Scheduled for a three-week
engagement, that show and the subsequent "On the Way Home" ran
more than ten years at Arena Stage and became one of the longest-
running stage performances in the United States.
      Washington residency gave Wade ready access to the Library
of Congress. Already familiar with the Library's series of
published recordings from his days growing up in Chicago (and
having visited the institution a number of times), Wade was now
able to use the American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk
Culture on a regular basis. The Archive was established at the
Library in 1928 to document and preserve the rich heritage of
American folksong, and since that time has itself documented or
received from others thousands of ethnographic field recordings
of music and the spoken word.
      Sometime in 1994, during one of his nearly daily
conversations with Folk Archive Reference Librarian Gerald E.
Parsons, Wade discussed with Parsons the idea of producing a
single album of folk music that represented a few of the
wonderful songs and tunes from the legendary series of published
recordings.
      The operative word was artful, for the two agreed that there
were great folk performances, notable in their own right and
worthy of critical attention and acclaim. Stephen Wade says that
the final choices were based on a personal judgement that these
were simply wonderful performances that people would like to
hear. Gerry Parsons thought the album might be the one recording
of folk music anyone might want to own if he owned only one.
      Parsons offered intellectual context and insight and edited
the liner notes; Wade became a tireless investigator into the
background of the recordings, searching archival file folders,
making phone calls, tracking down informants. Parsons died in
July 1995, and I took on his editorial role to help Wade complete
the work on the liner notes.
      On a series of journeys, Wade retraced the routes taken by
John and Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, and other folklorists who
made the original disc field recordings from 1933 to 1946,
identifying locations, talking to the descendants of performers,
and in several cases interviewing the performers themselves. A
TREASURY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS FIELD RECORDINGS appeared in
October, the collaborative effort of a musician and a librarian
with a common vision.
      Here on a single compact disk are W. H. Stepp's rendition of
the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the tune Aaron Copeland
used for the hoedown section of Agnes DeMille's 1942 ballet RODEO
(which was used in turn on national television for a commercial
advertising "Beef, it's what's for dinner"); a stirring
arrangement of "Rock Island Line" by prisoners at Cummins State
Farm in Arkansas; the plaintive lament "Another Man Done Gone";
and a virtuoso performance of the triumphant gospel tune "Ain't
No Grave Can Hold My Body Down."
      Here are children's game songs and the songs of miners and
cowboys; a Sacred Harp singing convention; a tune from the Civil
War performed by the distinguished jurist Learned Hand; a Kiowa
flute player; and the Nashville Washboard Band, recorded by the
Fisk professor John Work III.
      The name "folk music" is attached to many different forms
and productions these days. Even folklorists may not agree as to
what is and is not folk music. But in making a definition, most
would invoke the idea of context and a connection with the daily
life and particular traditions of the performer. With Wade's
beautifully lucid and informative liner notes, we can imagine the
context for each of these personal renditions of ongoing
tradition.
      Stephen Wade's treasury project has outgrown the original
idea for a compact disc. National Public Radio launched a series
of Wade's commentaries about the Library of Congress field
recordings. A number of programs have already been broadcast on
"All Things Considered," including ones on "Bonaparte's Retreat,"
"Rock Island Line," "Pretty Polly," and the "Nashville Washboard
Band." Several have been rebroadcast on "Weekly Edition," an
editors' selection of the best programs from the week before.
Ever restless, still roving in devotion to his life's work, Wade
is writing a book for the University of Illinois Press series
Music in American Life--thirty case studies of the performances
included on his TREASURY CD, with many illustrations.
      Nat Hentoff, writing in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, November
20, 1997, calls the TREASURY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS FIELD
RECORDINGS "the most diversely dramatic and illuminating
collection of the American folk music heritage." Amidst the
jarring cacophony of a noisy world, it is good to be reminded
that beautiful music with an intimate connection to everyday life
is all around us.
      The TREASURY is available at record stores nationwide, or
call Rounder Records: 800 443-4727.
captions:
The Shipp Family, Byhalia, Mississippi, 1939. Christine and
Katherine Shipp (right) perform "Sea Lion Woman" on the Stephen
Wade's TREASURY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS FIELD RECORDINGS. The song
was recorded by Herbert Halpert in 1939. Photo by Abbott Ferriss
Stephen Wade in the American Folklife Center's Folklife Reading
Room, 1994. Photo by James Hardin
Ella Hoffpauir Boudreaux, New Iberia, Louisiana, February 1997.
Stephen Wade interviewed Mrs. Boudreaux about her recording
session with John and Alan Lomax in June 1934, during which she
sang "Sept ans sur mer." Photo by Stephen Wade
Thaddeus C. Willingham Jr. sang and played the banjo for Herbert
Halpert in Gulfport, Mississippi, June 11, 1939. Photo by Abbott
Ferriss
.................................................................
Outsinging the Gas Tank: Sidney Robertson and the California Folk
Music Project
By Catherine Hiebert Kerst
.................................................................
From 1938 to 1940, while in her thirties, Sidney Robertson,1
ethnographer and collector of traditional American music, single-
handedly organized and directed a Northern California Work
Projects Administration project designed to survey musical
traditions in the northern part of the state. Sponsored by the
University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the
Archive of American Folk-Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture),
American Folklife Center) at the Library of Congress, this
undertaking was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects
to document English- and foreign-language traditional music in
one region of the United States.
Sidney William Hawkins was born in San Francisco in 1903. Her
family was quite well off and lived comfortably. As a child,
Sidney was precocious, articulate, and inquisitive. She was given
piano, violin, dancing, and elocution lessons from an early age
and spent her summers in Europe. Sidney graduated from Stanford
University in 1924 with a degree in Romance languages and
philology. Later that year, she married Kenneth Robertson and
traveled with him to Paris where he took classes with Jung while
she studied the piano with Alfred Cortot.
      When they returned to California in 1926, Robertson found a
job teaching music at the Peninsula School for Creative Education
in Menlo Park. The progressive, experimental nature of the school
allowed her to introduce Spanish and cowboy tunes and the modal
Irish and English songs she loved to the children she taught.
Sidney and her husband gradually grew apart and were divorced in
1934.
      In 1935 Sidney Robertson decided that she was leading too
"self-indulgent" a life in California and wrote to the Henry
Street Settlement in New York City to ask if there were anything
she could do for them. They responded that there was an immediate
opening for someone to organize social music in the community.
Robertson moved to New York and began working with elderly Jewish
immigrants from Central Europe.
      In reminiscing about the development of her interest in folk
music at this time in her life, she recalled:
I had for some time been worrying the question of folk song, like
a dog with a bone, and particularly I was curious about American
folk song: What was American about it? I knew only the Lomax
COWBOY SONGS and a few tunes from my parents, but I had been so
struck by the wild enthusiasm and persistence engendered among
the youngsters at the Peninsula School by "Home on the Range"
that I was convinced there was some special affinity between the
character of this song and the youngsters who went after it so
hard.2
While in Washington visiting friends in 1936, Robertson went to
the Archive of American Folk-Song (now the Archive of Folk
Culture) at the Library of Congress to ask this very question.
She also visited the office of Charles Seeger, who was then in
charge of the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the
Resettlement Administration. One thing led to another, and
shortly thereafter Robertson became Seeger's assistant. At first
she accompanied John A. Lomax and Frank C. Brown to Alabama and
North Carolina to get a taste of how they conducted folk music
fieldwork. It wasn't long before she began to travel on her own
on extensive recording trips throughout the South, into the
Ozarks, and later the Midwest (mostly Wisconsin and Minnesota)--
all for the Resettlement Administration.3 Women generally didn't
travel alone during the thirties, and especially not in the
South.
      Once the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement
Administration was liquidated late in 1937, Robertson began to
search for WPA connections that would allow her to continue
collecting on her own. In 1938, she traveled to her native
California to organize a state-based project that she hoped would
become a prototype for the collection of folk music across the
country.
      In a paper describing her plans for the collection of folk
music in America, distributed to possible sponsors at the time,
Robertson wrote:
      Until recently Americans have been humble before
      Russian and British folk music and quite sincerely
      unconscious of their own. To a people brought up on
      songs like the Volga Boat Song, it has been a great
      surprise to discover that America has her own boat
      songs and bandit songs, her Civil War songs and her
      love songs, stemming like the American race from many
      nationalities but after generations here stamped, in
      varying degrees, with the American mark.4
Robertson was especially eager to record the kinds of folk music
being performed in California that had not previously received
much attention. For example, she wanted to explore ethnic as well
as English-language musical traditions. In this, as well as in
her determination to produce a thorough ethnographic
documentation of the folk music she wished to record, she was far
ahead of her time.
      The WPA Northern California Folk Music Project (1938-40) was
the result of her efforts. It was sponsored by the Music
Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and
cosponsored by the Library of Congress, the New Music Society,
and the Society of California Pioneers. The project became one of
the earliest attempts at conducting a large-scale ethnographic
survey of American folk music in a defined region. Its scope was
broad and went well beyond the thirty-five hours of instantaneous
sound recordings she made on 12-inch acetate discs. One third of
the recordings represented English-language material, and the
other two thirds the music of numerous ethnic groups, primarily
European, including Armenians, Basques, Croatians, English,
Finns, Hungarians, Icelanders, Italians, Norwegians, Russian
Molokans, and Scots (from both Cape Breton Island, Canada, and
the Hebrides Islands, Scotland). There was also Portuguese music
from the Azores, Spanish music from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the
Asturias region of Spain, not to mention recordings of Spanish-
speaking settlers whose forefathers had come to California
beginning in the 1600s. In addition, 168 photographs of the
musicians and their instruments were made, and field
documentation of numerous kinds and textures was gathered.
      The Library of Congress Folk Archive supplied Robertson with
blank acetate discs, with the provision that the original copies
of the sound recordings, once made, be returned to the Library.
Through the sponsorship of the University of California-Berkeley
Music Department, Robertson's project received support for space
and equipment on campus. And, because she conceived her
collecting project as belonging to the fields of anthropology,
sociology, literature, and music, Robertson made contacts with
interested faculty members in a variety of university departments
who agreed to serve on its advisory panel.
      Once the official sponsors were lined up, Robertson was able
to apply for WPA funds to hire personnel. The trick within the
WPA was to devise a project that could keep twenty staff persons
busy--both to provide socially useful work to those on the relief
rolls and to justify the hiring of a supervisor. With Robertson's
ingenuity, a whole range of activities associated with the
collection of folk music was proposed that convinced the Northern
California WPA office that her project might succeed.
      Robertson had an uncanny knack for unearthing WPA staff who
could actually assist her in her project. One of her most
valuable fieldworkers was a Mr. Devere, who had had a dairy route
in Contra Costa County and who led her to numerous fine contacts
in that area. On the WPA staff were also Alice Lemos Avila, a
performer from the Azores who had hosted radio music shows for
the Portuguese community in Oakland; several Spanish speakers
familiar with music being recorded on the project; and an
Armenian ethnomusicologist.
      The California Folk Music Project opened officially on
October 28, 1938, at 2108 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Robertson
sought out all the performers and researched and recorded all of
the music herself. She also supervised the WPA personnel hired to
catalog and index the collection and to make photographs and
scale drawings of some of the instruments. WPA workers produced
catalogs of the sound recordings and a printed checklist of
English-language California songs. They compiled bibliographies
of many kinds and made photostats of California mission music and
old California songsters from several library collections. The
WPA staff also transcribed the texts of many English-, Spanish-,
and Portuguese-language songs and noted variants in the
literature.
      After seventeen months, 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. Robertson had hoped that the continuation of the
project would allow for recording and documenting the performance
of non-Western music in Northern California, including
performances by Asians, South and Central Americans, and Middle
Easterners.
An ethnographic collection is never solely a grouping of sound
recordings or cultural items--it also reflects the personality,
expectations, sense of humor, and point of departure of its
collector. In this, the California collection is no different--
and because of Robertson's fine documentary methods and lively
prose, we have an excellent record not only of what she was
looking for but also what she gathered as a result. Robertson was
a perceptive ethnographer, eager to reflect upon what she
recorded and to muse about what meaning the music she collected
had for her performers.
      Robertson has written about the field situation and how she
conceived her role as collector on this project. As she put it:
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, 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."5
Robertson honored any restrictions her performers placed on
duplicating their recordings. In fact, she became protective of
all the recordings, even long after they had been made.
Robertson's ethical standards served her well. The respect she
gave her performers earned their trust and appreciation and
resulted in their cooperation with her efforts.
      Robertson was also interested in documenting folk musical
performance in its normal context--not merely in recording
individual songs as separate items, as had been done by many
early collectors. Some of her folk music collecting ideas and
methods for documenting the cultural background of the music
being performed were no doubt forged through discussions with
Charles Seeger--though it seems that Robertson actually applied
many of the ideas that Seeger merely wrote or spoke about.
Robertson's fieldwork and correspondence consistently reflect her
keen interest in capturing a wide range of details about the
environment in which the music was performed and the functions it
served in community life.
      Robertson had excellent rapport with many of the persons she
recorded in California. In less than two years, she gained entry
into the lives and performance styles of many musicians. There
were thirty-one English-language and seventy-five foreign-
language performers recorded by Robertson during the project. In
an unpublished paper entitled "Folk Music in California,"
prepared prior to the WPA project, Robertson wrote:
How does one find songs? 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 delivery man was signed with a Basque name;
this led to a whole nest of songs . . .  And one man in Shasta
County offered to "outsing the gas tank" if he might ride along
to Fresno.6
The recordings Robertson made are wide-ranging in character and
offer a truly ethnographic perspective of northern California
folk music. Robertson was eager to record ethnic music and her
California collection is remarkable in this respect. In fact,
before the field recordings she made in the Midwest and then in
California, there are few examples of ethnographically documented
ethnic music made in the United States that include much beyond
African American and Native American music.
      Robertson's California recordings are also varied in style
and origin, not adhering to strict folk music-collecting
conventions of the time regarding whether a song was considered
authentically "traditional" or not. As she put it in an article
she wrote in 1940 about the WPA project,
"California" folk music was defined in the widest possible sense
as any music--song or dance tune--which is orally transmitted and
current in California in 1938.7
She did not restrict what her performers wanted to record, and
because of that policy we are able to hear both popular and
traditional melodies performed at the time, a cross-section of
home-grown music-making traditions.
      Among the English-language songs, one finds, for example,
tunes from the California Gold Rush era, Barbary Coast songs,
ragtime melodies, Cornish sailors' shanties, and popular songs
from the turn of the century. There is also music of recent
migrants from the Midwest, such as the Ford brothers from
northern Wisconsin, who came to work in the CCC camps at the
Shasta Dam.
      Included in the collection of foreign-language recordings
are examples of Hungarian salon music "composed" in the early
part of the century. There are also recent Icelandic songs about
emigrating to Vancouver, collected side by side with Old Norse
rimur said to stem from the twelfth century in Iceland.  The
collection includes traditional Gaelic love songs, Hungarian
Christmas carols, Armenian dance melodies on a variety of
instruments, Spanish-Californian mission music, Dalmatian oral
epic, and melismatic Russian Molokan hymns from a San Francisco
congregation. Robertson sought to record what people were singing
at the time--not just the songs they remembered from the past.
      In the California project, she also took advantage of a
variety of contexts that allow us to hear where and how the music
she recorded was being performed. For example, Robertson recorded
popular tunes played by a band at a Mexican wedding, songs sung
at a Hungarian New Year's Eve Party, and Gold Rush songs
performed in noisy Tuolumne County bars. She frequently asked
performers to introduce themselves and to say a few words about
the songs. Fieldnotes written on the dust jackets while
instantaneous recordings were being made are evocative and
illuminating. When George Vinton Graham forgot his words while
singing, Robertson jotted down that "Mr. Graham's gravity was
disturbed by the antics of the photographer."
      Robertson also made detailed notes regarding the quality of
the recordings, such as "All the McCready recordings have a hum,
due to fan in Arizona Bar--the fan brought the temperature down
to 90 degrees at 6 p.m." While recording Sam Blackburn singing
"She's More to Be Pitied Than Censured," Robertson noted that the
record was made "in the milk house--occasional noises  are due to
milk running over cooling pipes."
The Northern California WPA Folk Music Collection provides a
valuable set of recordings representing a range of traditional
and popular music collected during a specific era. This
collection, taken as a whole, also tells much about ethnographic
fieldwork at its best during the late 1930s--and the style and
character of a particular collector: the questions Robertson
posed about the music--where, when, and why it was performed; her
annotation of contextual details accompanying the field
recordings; her insistence on taking an ethical stance on behalf
of her performers; and her documentation of the making of folk
music not only through recordings, photographs, and drawings, but
also and most importantly, through her own ethnographic and
personal impressions.
      The California Folk Music Project, available online as
"California Gold," gives us a glimpse of an energetic and capable
folk music collector who, through the Work Projects
Administration, had the opportunity to carry out an ambitious
folk music collecting project. Robertson's successes in the
California Folk Music Project fit well with the New Deal dynamism
and creativity that generated similar cooperative efforts meant
to document and validate the lives of exemplary, yet so often
unsung Americans.
_________________________________________________________________
"California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the '30s,"
a multi-format ethnographic field collection from the American
Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture, has just been made
available online through the National Digital Library Program of
the Library of Congress
(http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem//afccchtml/cowhome.html). This
elaborate online collection, drawn from the Sidney Robertson
Cowell California Folk Music Project, includes sound recordings,
still photographs, drawings, and manuscripts documenting the
musical traditions of a variety of European ethnic and English-
and Spanish-speaking communities in California. It comprises 35
hours of folk music recorded in 12 languages representing 185
musicians.
_________________________________________________________________
Notes
1. I will refer to Sidney Robertson Cowell as Sidney Robertson
because that was her name when she was most active as a folksong
collector--and before she became, in 1941, as she frequently
preferred to call herself, Mrs. Henry Cowell. Mrs. Cowell died in
1995, in Shady, New York.
2. Unpublished mss., Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife
Center, Library of Congress
3. These collections are also housed in the Archive of Folk
Culture.
4. Unpublished mss., Archive of Folk Culture
5. Unpublished mss., Archive of Folk Culture
6. Unpublished notes for mss. entitled "Folk Music in
California," prepared for potential sponsors of the California
Folk Music Project, p. 5.
7. Sidney Robertson Cowell, "The Recording of Folk Music in
California," CALIFORNIA FOLKLORE QUARTERLY 1, number 1 (19  ), p.
11.
Photo captions:
Sidney Robertson copying California Folk Music Project recordings
for the Library of Congress in the WPA project office, Berkeley,
California, early 1939. [photographer unknown]
"Some of the WPA personnel at work on the California Folk Music
Project, Berkeley, California, 1938. Sidney Robertson is sitting
just beyond the first window on the left, against the partition."
[This is Robertson's own caption for this photo, which she took.]
Mrs. Cruz Losada, Oakland, California, from San Juan Island,
Puerto Rico. A recent immigrant in 1939, she performed
unaccompanied Spanish songs for Sidney Robertson.
Myrtle B. Wilkinson playing tenor banjo, Turlock, California.
Mrs. Wilkinson was the accompanist for Mrs. Ben Scott, fiddle, on
Anglo-American tunes. [photographer unknown]
Son of a 49er and former singer of minstrel songs for medicine
show performances, Ben Pitts, from Pine Grove, Eldorado County,
also played guitar. Pitts recorded old American dance and
medicine show tunes with Leonard W. Jones on harmonica. Photo by
Sidney Robertson
John and Pen McCready, Groveland, Tuolumne County. John and Pen
are two of three brothers, born in Kansas, who came to California
to make a living mining. They made music and sang together for
much of their lives, performing Anglo-American music, including
many tunes from the Gold Rush era. Robertson adds: "They lived
also in northeast Arkansas and Colorado, which they left to come
to California to escape the snow! (It is 3'-6' deep in Tuolumne
County in the winter." [photographer unknown]
New Endangered Music Project Releases Feature Music from Brazil
The American Folklife Center, in cooperation with Rykodisc and
360 Productions, is pleased to announce the release of two new
albums in the Endangered Music Project series: THE DISCOTECA
COLLECTION: MISSAO DE PESQUISAS FOLCLORICAS (Rykodisc RCD 10403)
and L.H. Correa de Azevedo: Music of Ceara and Minas Gerais
(Rykodisc RCD 10404).
      These historical collections of field recordings were made
in the late 1930s and early 1940s and are now part of the
Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture. The albums were
coproduced by Alan Jabbour, director of the Center, and Mickey
Hart, the renowned percussionist whose series of albums is making
available to new audiences the musical cultures of many regions
of the world. All material has been expertly transferred from the
original source discs by Michael Donaldson of the Library's
Recording Laboratory and mastered for release by Mickey Hart.
      THE DISCOTECA COLLECTION is 1938-vintage field recordings
culled from the library of the Discoteca Pblica Municipal
(Municipal Public Recordings Collection), now known as the
Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga, in So Paulo, Brazil. The Discoteca
dispatched a team to six states in northern and northeastern
Brazil to document regional folklore, ritual music, and dance.
The research expedition gathered recordings, musical instruments,
costumes, and ritual objects. The music they collected, much of
which accompanied ritual, social, and dramatic dance, is
primarily vocal, accompanied by various types of drums, bells,
rattles, shakers, and other assorted Brazilian percussion and
strings. The Library obtained its set of the recordings in an
early exchange project with the Discoteca.
      The material on MUSIC OF CEARA AND MINAS GERAIS was recorded
in the early 1940s by Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo, a professor
of music and composer from Rio de Janeiro. Azevedo's involvement
in the study of folk culture began in 1937 and led to his being
appointed to a chair in National Folklore at Rio's National
Institute of Music. In 1941 he visited Washington, D.C., as a
guest of the Pan-American Union and returned to Brazil with
recording equipment lent to him by the Library of Congress. He
then began to undertake arduous expeditions through Brazil
documenting a great variety of his country's folk music. The
northern and central Brazilian songs in this collection are
performed on shaker, wooden box, claps, strings, bell, friction
drum, guitar, and other instruments. The music Azevedo recorded
documents the root traditions of Brazilian music that would later
attract worldwide attention.
      Many people helped make these compact-disc productions
possible. Kenneth Bilby and Max Derrickson began the process by
scouting among the Archive's collections for candidates for
release, then by undertaking much of the preliminary auditioning
and background research on the two collections finally chosen.
Ethnomusicologist Morton Marks wrote the general essays and
musicological analysis that appear in the booklets accompanying
each CD and assisted the project during various stages of its
development. Jose Eduardo Azevedo, who is affiliated with the
Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga in So Paulo, provided very helpful
annotations and corrections of the textual material in the
Discoteca Collection booklet, and Discoteca director Miriam Edith
Bolsoni and chief archivist Cristina M. Marinho provided useful
coordination. Staff at the Rio de Janeiro field office of the
Library of Congress--especially Pamela Howard-Reguindin and
Carmen Muricy--served as expert translators and facilitators of
communications between Washington and Brazil during the many
stages of the project's development, and Ieda Siqueira Wiarda of
the Library's Hispanic Division also assisted in matters of
translation.
      MISSO DE PESQUISAS FOLCLORICAS and MUSIC OF CEARA AND MINAS
GERAIS are available in the world music sections of fine retail
outlets nationwide or from Rykodisc mail order: 1-888-2-EARFUL
(1-888-232-7385).
Caption:
Babacue musicians, Belem do Para, 1938. From the Discoteca
Collection booklet.
..............................................................
In the Recording Laboratory
By Alan Jabbour
..............................................................
The American Folklife Center has recently acquired six test
pressings drawn from a recording session with legendary blues
singer Robert Johnson (ca. 1911-38). "Test pressing" is the term
for a special disc made by a record company to audition a
performance they have recorded, often as a prelude to selecting
the disc for release. These test pressings came to the Library
from the Alan Lomax Archives. One disc (American Record Co. test
pressing DAL 400-1, recorded in Dallas, Texas, June 20, 1937)
contains a take of Robert Johnson's "Traveling Riverside Blues"--
a performance heretofore not known to exist, despite long and
intense interest in Johnson by collectors and musicians as a
pivotally important Mississippi Delta bluesman of the 1930s.
      The disc containing the newly discovered take of "Traveling
Riverside Blues" has been included in the Library's exhibition
"American Treasures from the Library of Congress." Before
displaying it, the Library made a meticulous copy for
preservation purposes. When old disc recordings from the Archive
of Folk Culture are transferred onto tape for release on new
compact discs or by the public media, the Library relies on
expert sound engineers such as Michael Donaldson of the Library's
Recording Laboratory, pictured here transferring the Johnson test
pressing onto tape. The Recording Laboratory has a distinguished
history of special expertise in the preservation of unique sound
recordings--often in unusual or obsolete formats. In recent years
Mike Donaldson's skills have been a key ingredient in sharing
with the public the wealth of documentary sound recordings in the
Archive of Folk Culture.
photo caption
Michael Donaldson, Senior Audio Production Specialist, in the
Recording Laboratory of the Library's Motion Picture,
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Photo by James Hardin
In the Folklife Reading Room
Folklife Reference Specialist Judith Gray interviewing
anthropologist William Fenton in the Folklife Reading Room,
November 19, 1997. Fenton is known particularly as a student of
Iroquois culture and made recordings for the Library of Congress
in 1941 and 1945. Acknowledging that he never fully comprehended
the idiosyncracies of the recording apparatus the Library sent
out with him, Fenton credits the quality of the Seneca, Onondaga,
Oneida, and Cayuga recordings made at Allegany Reservation in New
York and Six Nations Reserve in Canada to the ingenuity of
Iroquois individuals who worked with him. Some of these
recordings were compiled for the Library's FOLK MUSIC OF THE
UNITED STATES series of LPs: SONGS OF THE IROQUOIS LONGHOUSE (AFS
L6), published in 1942; and SENECA SONGS FROM COLDSPRING
LONGHOUSE (AFS L17), published in 1948. Photo by James Hardin
Dr. Hilaire Valiquette, Keres linguist and consultant; Ms.
Rebecca Lucario, Acoma Language Retention Project director; and
Ms. Donna Boynton, Acoma Language Retention Project consultant,
(left to right) research language material from the Center's
Acoma collections, November 12, 1997. The project is based in
Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Photo by David Taylor
Back Cover:
Mrs. Cruz Losada, Oakland, California, 1939. Mrs. Losada
performed Spanish songs for Sidney Robertson Cowell, who
collected traditional American music for the Works Projects
Administration from 1938 to 1940. A portrait of Mrs. Cowell and
her career begins on page