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JULY 21, 1940SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLEIN THE REALM OF [M?]Our Musical Resources Are Tapped by the WPABy Alfred Frankenstein

THEY told Sidney Robertson that she (yes, she) wouldn't find much in the way of folk song in California, mainly because no one had ever made a systematic survey of the State's natural resources in this respect. But in a period of 18 months or so Mrs. Robertson and her associates in the California Folk Music Project of the WPA, sponsored by the music department of the University of California, have turned up thousands of folk songs, folk dances and fiddle tunes; they have discovered a Californian "musical [paleography?]" of great rarity and interest, and their files on the folk music of linguistic minorities make up what is probably the most alive and human document on "foreign" cultures in California that has ever been put together. The entire body of material collected by the project is being deposited with the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, and a duplicate archive is being kept in Berkeley.

"Folk song, like the poor, ye have always with you," says Robert Winslow Gordon, who founded the Library of Congress archive and was one of the early workers in this field in California. And yet folk song, as any student of the subject will tell you, is always on the verge of dying out. For folk song is a function and process of life, in constant flux and movement, and to record its movement and its characteristics as it changes on the local scene is the task Mrs. Robertson has set herself.

Her equipment for such a job is singularly apt. The fact that one of her ancestors was Sir John Hawkins, the friend of Dr. Johnson and author of one of the classic histories of music, may have something to do with it. Thorough training at Stanford, the University of California, the Ecole Normale in Paris and elsewhere has even more to do with it, as well as several years of experience as head of the music unit in the Special Skills Divisio of the Agricultural Resettlement Administration. But what counts most is the zest for the human values of folk song that prevents Mrs. Robertson's work from becoming another dusty file of [scholarly?] dessications.

Mrs. Robertson has so far collected mainly in Tuolumne, El Dorado, Shasta, Santa Clara, Alameda, San [Mateo?] and Monterey counties, confining the scope of the project largely to living folk song as sung by whites, although she has done a little work with Indians and picked up a few interesting items from Negroes fresh from Porto Rico. About half of the total body of material is "American" (i. e., in the English language or associated with American folk dance traditions) and about half foreign. The mountain counties provide fragmentary, highly corrupted versions of the stage and minstrel songs of the gold rush period. (In connection with this phase of the research, the project has published a check list of the contents of 49 songsters and over 500 broadsides published or circulated in California between 1851 and 1892.) The indications seem to be that there was little genuine 49er folk song, since the 49er tradition, so far as it survives, largely duplicates the songster and minstrel show of that time. One rare historic find was the hitherto unknown music library of a singing teacher and dance fiddler named Broderson, who flourished in Calaveras county in the 60's and whose collection was left at Sutter's Fort.

OTHER English-language folk song, however, goes as far back as the earliest British ballads and as far forward as yesterday. One singer in San Jose recorded a genuine folk version of a song mentioned by Shakespeare, and a young man who came from Wisconsin to work on the Shasta dam has made discs for the project of English ballads that were antiques in Shakespeare's time; on the other hand the files contain songs improvised by steel workers on the bay bridge and a cynical [bar-room?] ballad about the Fair. Professor Francis James Child would have heard his hoary manuscripts coe to life in the mouths of Mrs. Robertson's singers. Cecil Sharp, who prowled the Appalachians for ancient English songs, might have heard some of them in California, too. And the common happenings of every day, as done up in song by those who have an impulse to vent their feelings in that form, are profusely recorded. This later material is particularly valuable as showing how folk song originates. It can be traced to occurrences and composers, in many instances, and out from that to its circulating versions.

The fantastic variety of the foreign-language cultures kept alive in California is fascinatingly revealed in these archives. Here are ancient Serbian heroic ballads recorded in a garage in San Mateo to the accompaniment of a Dalmatian fiddle. Here are reflections of Italian opera as filtered through Mexican sources to become "Spanish - Californian" folk song; here are boat songs of the Hebrides, shepherd songs from the Mountains of Van in Armenia, fragments of Finnish and Icelandic sagas, songs from Sicily and Syria and Spain. The Portuguese material is particularly rich, and its analysis is not made any easier by the fact that much of it went originally from Portugal to Brazil and then back to the Azores, whence it came to California. The ancient hymnody of a Russian puritan sect, the Molokani, is here, as recorded in their church on Potrero Hill.

With the "foreign" music go odd old instruments, some brought from faraway places, some made in California according to the old models [md] bagpipes, flutes, plectrum instruments, and so on, whose technique aid tradition continue to live, and sometimes to adapt themselves to changed surroundings. Mrs. Robertson found an Armenian orchestra in Fresno, using Armenian folk instruments, that boasted of its ability to play in Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Greek and American swing style.

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New RecordsDUST BOWL BALLADS. Recorded by Woody Guthrie. Sx 10-inch records in two albums; $2.75 each. Victor Albums Nos. P-27 and P-28.

WOODY GUTHRIE is said to be an Okie who made the trek to California, the trek back again to the Dust Bowl, and eventually the trek to New York and the microphones. He is also said to be the author of all the songs included in these albums, which he sings in a style a little reminiscent of Vernon Dalhart, accompanying himself on a guitar and playing interludes on an exceptionally water-logged harmonica. His tunes seem largely to be derived from the "hill-billy" records of 10 years ago; at any rate, the old Eva Davis "John Hardy" tune is here note for note, and there are suspicious resemblances to Dalhart's "Billy the Kid," "Jesse James," and others. Some of these songs are genuine folk songs of the Dust Bowl migration, which have turned up in the collecteana of the archive of California Folk Song; others may or may not get into folk circulation. The titles indicate their quality and direction [md] "Blowing Down. This Road," "Dust Can't Kill Me," "Tom Joad," "Dust Pneumonia Blues," "The Great Dust Storm[".?] "Vigilante Man," "Ain't Got a Home in This World Any More," etc., etc. Many of the songs reflect the heroic humor with which the American pioneer had traditionally accepted disaster; some are dramatic in ballad style; a few introduce a left wing revolutionary note not frequently found in American folk song. Those albums provide a tremendously interesting document.

YSAYE: SONATA NO. 1. Recorded by Efrem Zimbalist. Two 12-inch records in album: $4.50. Victor set No. M-669.

AN UNACCOMPANIED violin sonata by Ysaye is certainly a novelty. Its appeal is likely to be limited, however, to violinists and those who remember the personality of the great [Eeigian?] musician. This work, admirably played by Zimbalist, is much in the vein of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas, although it uses some devices Bach did not employ.

THESE ARE ONLY A FEW of the main headings into which Mrs. Robertson's material is divded One of the most important not mentioned above is the old mission music. Work on this centers mostly around a rare and precious manuscript given to Mrs. Leland Stanford in 1885 by Father Casanova of Mission San Antonio. It has been in the Stanford Museum ever since there has been a Stanford Museum, but no [?] knew much of anything about it until Carleton Sprague Smith of the New York Public Library stumbled across it recently. It is probably the most valuable musical manuscript of the mission period in existence, and it is only now being thoroughly studied.

At present the project is under temporary suspension, but Mrs. Robertson, to quote one of her Joad Family songs, "ain't gonna be treated this-a-way." If you find yourself [tempted?] to burst into song in a bar-room some night, watch out for microphones. If there is one, Sidney Roberston is probably behind it, and your lyric [cocktail?] effort will be embalmed forever in the stately archives of [??] and the Library of Congress[.?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?][illegible paragraph?]