California Gold offers a compelling cultural snapshot of a diverse California during the 1930s at the height of the New Deal, drawing on the career of folk music collector Sidney Robertson and the musical culture of often-unheard voices. Robertson—an intrepid young woman armed only with a map, her notebooks, and the recording equipment of the time—proposed and directed a New Deal initiative, the WPA California Folk Music Project, designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. In
California Gold, Catherine Hiebert Kerst explores Robertson's distinctive and modern approach to fieldwork and examines the numerous ethnographic documentary materials she generated with WPA project staff to capture a cross-section of the music that people were actively performing in their communities. Kerst highlights some of the most notable songs, images, and ephemera of the collection, capturing and contextualizing the diverse musical traditions that California immigrant communities performed during the New Deal era. Kerst also foregrounds the ethnographic insights and accomplishments of a significant woman folk music collector who has received less attention than she deserves.
"Sidney Robertson was a pioneering folksong documentarian every bit as accomplished as the legendary Alan Lomax. Focusing on Robertson's late-1930s adventures in Northern California, Catherine Hiebert Kerst's vivid study reveals a brilliant woman and gritty field researcher able to overcome prejudice, win scarce funds from grudging bureaucrats, charm wary working-class immigrant performers, and illuminate the unforgettable singing voices of diverse cultural communities essential to the American experience."--James P. Leary, author of Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946
"Combining biography, detailed descriptions of the recording process, and access to the original audio recordings, Kerst's pioneering book on Sidney Robertson is a model for presenting archival material and the motivations of those who recorded the diversity of music in America in the twentieth century."--Anthony Seeger, Director Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Institution
"By mining a disorganized and neglected treasure trove of Sidney Robertson's recordings, photographs, and papers, Kerst--archivist and ethnomusicologist at the Library of Congress--has produced a critical intervention into the narratives of ethnomusicology and folklore that privilege the 'founding fathers.' Shining a long overdue spotlight on the 'Lady on Wheels, ' one of the founding mothers of music research and recording, this book brings us onto the stage of American politics and culture during the 1930s, highlighting issues of gender, technology, ethics, immigration, and artistic labor, demonstrating the formative impact of the New Deal and the WPA on the realization and creation of American culture."--Anne K. Rasmussen, coeditor of
The Music of Multicultural America
