Sidney Robertson Cowell ca. 1929

Sidney Robertson Cowell and the WPA Northern California Folk Music Project

Internet Research Paper by Corry Dodson Fall 2005

In a letter dated February 13^th, 1938, Sidney Robertson wrote to her former boss, the noted ethnomusicologist and folklorist, Charles Seeger, from San Francisco, California, “…so little has been done out here, and there is so much to do…”[1] Despite the federally funded folklore collecting of the 1920s and 1930s almost no attempt had been made to collect the folk music of California and Californians. Sidney Robertson believed that the music in California being sung and played in the 1930s deserved to be collected as much as the songs of the Dust Bowl south, that the songs of the Portuguese fishermen in Martinez deserved as much to be preserved as the songs of African American prisoners in Alabama. In 1938 Sidney Robertson spearheaded the first major folk song collecting project in California and left behind an invaluable archive of her writings in addition to the folk songs she recorded. Currently available at the Library of Congress’ American Memory on-line archive, the “California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties” collection is the culmination of Robertson’s effort to collect the folk music current to the residents of the state of California from November 1938 through March 1940, the duration of her project.

Robertson’s collection sets her apart from other leading ethnomusicologists of her day for several reasons. Robertson collected the songs of nearly every ethnic group she came in contact with, rather than limiting herself to any one specific group. Her fairness and protectiveness towards her subjects was unique in its day. Her complete ethnographic recordings of her travels, through in-depth field notes, correspondence, drawings and photographs also set her apart from others. Perhaps most importantly though Robertson provides an in-depth look into the people of California and their music, work that no one else was doing at the time. Her collection reveals her adventures, her philosophies of collecting, and her own indomitable spirit and love of folk music.  In this paper, mostly through utilizing Robertson’s writings, I intend to explore the important historical record she left behind and highlight her contributions to the field of ethnographic folksong collecting during the 1930s.

Before delving into Robertson’s life and collection however, it is important to explore the context of the time she was working in. Additionally though, I must note the degree to which Robertson has been largely forgotten by history. Very little work has been done on the life of Sidney Robertson, which makes her a fascinating historical character but also a frustrating historical subject. Robertson left behind an incredible collection of songs, field notes and correspondence, but she wrote no books about her work, nor has anyone else. Her name is not usually mentioned among the ranks of other well-known folklorists of the 1930s such as Charles Seeger and John Lomax, although she worked with both of them. Indeed with the exception of the online collection and a handful of articles, and material on other websites, very little secondary source material exists about the life of Sidney Robertson. I mention this not only as point of interest, but as a detail in my research about her. Most of the material we have to examine Robertson’s life and research is written by her own hand, which complicates the verification of its accuracy and guarantees its personal biases. These facts do not diminish the work of Robertson, but they must be made clear when discussing the nature of the researchable material about her.

There are at least two probable reasons (although others could be imagined) Robertson’s name is not listed among the names of the other vaulted folklorists of the 1930s: one, by her own doing and the other external. In 1941 Sidney Robertson married the American composer, Henry Cowell, and from then on preferred to be known as Mrs. Henry Cowell. Of her own volition, she also gave up much of her own work to help Henry with his writings and other obligations. For example, though Henry Cowell had been asked to write a biography of their mutual friend, the American composer, Charles Ives, Cowell quickly tired of Ives’ antics during interviews and turned the project over to Sidney, who ended up writing the majority of the book. Her name was only included as a co-author after the editor of the book suggested it.[2] It is unclear after her marriage how much of the work she published and did was her own, as it was so frequently credited to Henry Cowell himself. 

The possible external cause for her relative obscurity is the fact that she worked, and remained, outside of the academic world throughout her career, while collectors such as Lomax and Seeger worked in academia in addition to their work in government institutions. In an article about Robertson’s online archive, Catherine Hiebert Kerst, of the Library of Congress, posits that the reason we know so little about Robertson, is because she was a woman working outside of the academy. Kerst writes in the article, what those few who have studied Robertson over the years have come to believe, that Robertson made many worthwhile contributions despite her lack of notoriety. Kerst writes that the historical oversight of Robertson’s work is unfortunate:

… since the concerns Robertson had in the thirties have become increasingly valuable to many in the intervening years. I am referring here to the questions she posed about the music—where, when, and why it was performed; her annotation of contextual details accompanying field recordings; her insistence on taking an ethical stance on behalf of the 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. It is a voice from the field during an era from which there were few such voices—and especially from women.[3]

     Despite Robertson’s lack of notoriety her contributions nevertheless deserve attention, as they provide us with valuable resources to explore California in the 1930s and particularly the phenomenon of folklore collecting. While it is true that Robertson (as she will be referred to in this paper, since it was her name at the time of the WPA California Folk Music Project) worked in relative isolation in California, she was also part of a national trend during the 1930s, in which America began to look inward at its national spirit and culture in an effort to gain strength in a time of crisis. Understanding the context in which Robertson worked and collected, America in the 1930s, is a vital element to understanding Robertson’s work, and illustrates both her adherence to national trends but also her ability to transcend them. It is worth exploring then what was happening in America during the1930s, in an effort to provide a context for Robertson’s work.

            The Great Depression brought a palpable desperation into the lives of millions of Americans and hence into the national psyche. The reality of millions of unemployed Americans plagued the minds of the people and the President as the economy faltered year after year. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his staff tried desperately throughout the 1930s to re-invigorate the country’s economy through the “New Deal” hoping that a series of programs led by the federal government could restore American’s trust in the nation’s security, businesses trust in the economy and workers trust that their labor was valuable and worthy. One of Roosevelt’s largest concerns was how to provide money for American’s even when there was no work for them to do, and in turn how to make them feel worthy and not as if they were accepting a handout.

Despite conservative criticism of Roosevelt that he was in the business of relief, Roosevelt was very strongly opposed to relief alone. As quoted by David M. Kennedy in his book, The American People and the Great Depression, FDR believed relief alone, “’induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.’ Work, on the other hand, nurtured ‘self-respect…self-reliance and courage and determination.’”[4] 

One of Roosevelt’s answers to this dilemma was the creation of the Works Progress Administration. Through the creation of the Works Progress Administration, the federal government would hire millions of unemployed Americans to complete various national improvement projects, everything from bridge-building to public highways. The WPA was headed by one of Roosevelt’s confidantes, Harry Hopkins, who expanded the notion of nationwide improvements to incorporate the works of artists, musicians and writers as well. The WPA dispatched photographers to document the lives of the hard-hit farmers in the South, hired visual artists to paint murals on public buildings, musicians to give free concerts, and writers to capture the essence of America by creating an American Guide Series, a series of guidebooks about the various states.[5]

Out of the need to employ desperate Americans, and the desire to capture the people and arts of America, the WPA created an incredible panorama of the United States in the 1930s, of the United States in a time of limbo, a time of reflection and introspection, that today provides a wealth of material for historians and others to examine, analyze and explore. The sheer mass of photographs, music, written works, oral histories, and other materials produced during the WPA years today provides an invaluable resource to those of us seeking to understand the American past. Projects such as Sidney Robertson’s and countless others would not have been possible without the funding of the WPA.

     It is one American history’s interesting crossroads that all of this national cultural collecting happened in a time of crisis. The insecurity of the era drove WPA workers in search of the national identity by returning to the past, by uncovering America’s stories, people, and songs. Writers from the Federal Writers Project interviewed ex-slaves, and poor Southern sharecroppers white and black to capture their stories. The Library of Congress funded song collectors to gather folk songs, the music of the people. Photographers were sent to document workers in migrant camps, capturing their poverty stricken yet somehow noble faces on film.  In his book, Kennedy quotes the critic Alfred Kazin’s 1942 study of the era, On Native Grounds, in which Kazin writes that the artistic and literary work generated throughout the Great Depression was,

’one of the most remarkable phenomena of the era of crisis…Whatever form this literature took—the WPA guides to the states and roads…the half-sentimental, half-commercial new folklore…; the endless documentation of the dispossessed in American life—it testified to an extraordinary national self-scrutiny….never before did a nation seem so hungry for news of itself.’[6]

One of the emphases in capturing the national spirit was the attempt to gather the songs of the American people. John Lomax began the collecting of American folksongs in earnest during the early 1900s with his collection of cowboy songs. Lomax’s early work inspired a national interest to gather the music of everyday Americans, which in the 1930s coincided with the federal government’s culture collecting projects.

After having studied music during her youth in California and working as an organizer for community music at the Henry Settlement House in New York City, Sidney Robertson went to work for the Resettlement Administration as the then head, Charles Seeger’s, assistant in 1935. A “New Deal” organization, the directive of the Resettlement Administration was to relocate impoverished families hard-hit by the Depression into new communities. Nicole Saylor explains, on the website for the Center for the Study of Midwestern Cultures, the rationale for government sponsored folk song collecting,

To soothe tensions within these artificially created communities, the government set upon folksong as a means of unifying the people. A lead proponent for making folksong central in resettlement was ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, who headed up efforts for the Special Skills division. This initiative sent a fleet of fieldworkers, including Robertson (Seeger’s assistant), into rural American [sic] to capture the nation’s unique musical tradition.[7]

After the Resettlement Administration folded much of its work continued

under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. It was while working for the FSA in Minnesota, as a relief worker helping Resettlement families acclimate to their new lives, that Robertson began taking weekend trips into Wisconsin to collect the music of lumberjacks who had moved from Kentucky to Wisconsin in search of work.[8]

            Robertson enjoyed her time traveling and collecting songs, and by her early thirties had already worked with the leading ethnomusicologists of her time, Charles Seeger, and John Lomax, with whom Robertson had studied for several weeks at the request of Seeger so that she might learn to use recording equipment, a necessary skill for her Resettlement work. In a letter dated March 29, 1938, to Isabel Morse Jones of the Los Angeles Times, Robertson recalls her love of song collecting,

In November, 1936, I started out alone with around 400 lbs. of recording machinery in four large cases, and went from Washington to Pennsylvania, then into West Virginia, Old Virginia, and west through Kentucky and Tennessee to  Missouri and Arkansas. Everywhere my interest in 'the old-time things' opened doors usually closed to 'furriners' and I was treated with the most amazing kindness and helped along in ways I  could never have expected.[9]

In 1937, Robertson decided to head west to her home state in the hopes of organizing the first large-scale collection of the folk music of the people in the state of California.

         Robertson’s work in California is her most well-preserved work, and it is the substance that makes up the archive “California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties” put on-line by the Library of Congress. The majority of work done by Robertson is available on this website, and is work that seldom appears in any other context or sources, electronic or print. Due to the correspondence in the archive collection we are allowed a glimpse into Robertson’s views about collecting, working for the Federal Government, her reasons for folk song collecting, her philosophy of collecting, her methods, her subjects and many other points of interest, to say nothing of the music itself. For the purposes of this short study, I limited myself mainly to Robertson's writings about her work and findings, in an attempt to learn about her contributions and attitudes in relation to her era and contemporaries.

            As a native Californian, Robertson felt the state was rich in possibilities for collecting folk music, and should not be ignored in national cultural preservation efforts.

In her correspondence, mainly in the context of seeking funding for her project, Robertson writes extensively of the potential she sees for collecting California folk music. In a letter seeking funding to a Mrs. van Sicklen at the California Society of Pioneers, dated Februray 28^th, 1938, Robertson writes,

As it happens…there are no records at all from California. No real efforts has been made, so far as I have been able to determine, to collect the songs sung by the lumbermen in the north, the seamen along the coast, the miners, and so on…

and, in a revelation of her talent for appealing to her various funding sources, she adds, “I am perfectly sure that songs brought in by the pioneers in the Seventies and Eighties can be unearthed, with a little persistence.”[10]

            In much of Robertson’s correspondence she also notes the frustrations of working with the bureaucracies of the federal government in trying to secure funding for her project. In a letter dated March 5^th, 1938 to the Acting Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, Dr. Harold Spivacke, Robertson writes of the bureaucratic woes of her project,

The writing up of this sort of project involves playing ring-around-a-rosy with entirely too many people! The original negotiations with the University of California were too funny for words: The Music Dept. was very interested but wanted a letter expressing interest from WPA on which to base its endorsement; and  WPA wanted the University's endorsement before it committed itself in writing to any active  interest... and so on.[11]

            A unique feature of Robertson’s proposed collection, is that she wanted to collect the music of many disparate ethnic groups inhabiting California in the 1930s. Much of the folk song collecting in the United States up to that point was done among ethnic groups with long-established communities in the United States, such as African Americans, Spanish, Native American and French communities, but Robertson wanted her scope to include Russians, Asians, Portuguese, Armenians, Finnish, whomever she could find.

            Folklore collecting in the 1930s did encourage a welcoming of the cultures of many ethnic groups, though Robertson seems to have put together one of the most diverse collections of ethnicities housed within one single collection. In Terry A. Cooney’s book, Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s, he explains that during the national introspection of the 1930s into the make-up of the American character, more ethnic groups were welcomed into the mainstream of society. He writes that with the focus on collecting folklore there came to be a sense that culture derived from the ‘people’ and America was made up of many rich and different varieties of people.

Cooney writes that much of the folklore collected,

…carried a nationalistic claim, an assertion of democratic identity sometimes combined…with the belief that folk materials offered a demonstration of cultural unity. Yet such versions of nationalism more often opened up than restricted the possibilities for being ‘American.’ An emphasis on culture as an inclusive idea, a concern for common people, an attraction to multiple forms of imagination and creativity, all encouraged attention to a wider range of social groups.[12]

Nevertheless, Robertson’s insistence on collecting the music of many minorities, not just specific ones, i.e. all the collecting of African American music simultaneously taking place in the South, was unique.

Once Robertson secured funding for the project, including her own salary, recording equipment and salaries to support twenty employees, the requisite number for obtaining WPA funding, she set about to outline the goals and instructions for her project. Writing in the “Instruction to Workers” form letter to her employees she outlines her vision, provides her definition of “California Folk Music” and warns her workers against white ethnocentricity. Robertson writes,

The purpose of this undertaking is to collect and preserve the old-time music now in circulation in California, particularly the songs which are fast disappearing and which, for the most part, have never been printed or even written down, but have been passed on from one perer to another by rote. ‘California’ folk music is understood to mean any traditional music, -- song or dance tune, -- now current in California; items from other states which deal with California life or history may be included. The investigation is not of course to be limited to perers whose native language is English. The minority groups in California have much to add that is of great interest.[13]

She re-iterates her desire for inclusion of all ethnicities later in her instructions to her employee's when she writes:

Remember that the Anglo-Saxon music which we are inclined to think of as the only ‘American’ kind is a relatively recent importation on this continent, exactly as the Hungarian, Finnish and Armenian folk musics are. The Portuguese and Spanish have been in California three times as long as the ‘Americans’.[14]

Today, Robertson’s attitudes towards the values of multi-cultural California seem normal, but it is important to remember, to her credit, that she is writing in an era when ethnic groups are still very segregated from white society, when there are still quota immigration laws on the books and when white versus ethnic tension runs high.

            In addition to her inclusiveness of multiple ethnic groups, Robertson’s protective attitude towards her performers, also set her apart from other leading folklorists of her day. Trained by such leaders in the field of song collecting as Charles Seeger and John Lomax, it is somewhat remarkable how much she differed from them when it came to respecting the rights performers. Both Seeger and Lomax collected songs for archives but also sought financial gain from the works. With a performer John Lomax found in an Alabama prison, Leadbelly, Lomax arranged for a singing tour in which Leadbelly would perform songs, with two-thirds of the profits going to Lomax and his son, and only one third of the profits designated for Leadbelly. In his book, Songcatchers, Mickey Hart illustrates some of the attitudes held by collectors of this era, “John [Lomax] recognized Leadbelly’s genius, but as a man of his times, he nonetheless expected gratitude and servitude from the man he ‘discovered.’”[15]

The relationship between collector and performer is always a fragile one and in the introductory biography of Robertson in the Library of Congress collection, Catherine Hiebert Kerst writes that Robertson was often appalled by how performers were treated by their collectors, sometimes being “ordered” to sing and having their songs published, or duplicated for commercial sales without their permission or remuneration.[16]  In Robertson’s correspondence she proves steadfast in honoring her promises to performers that the songs she is collecting are intended for posterity and are being collected for the government, not for commercial sale. In a letter to Adrian Dornbush, former head of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration, and one of her former co-workers, Robertson writes of her opposition to Charles Seeger seeking to publish some of her collected songs for commercial sale. In a letter dated February 13, 1938, Robertson writes to Dornbush:

…we collected this material with very definite purposes in mind which did not include commercial publication or dubbing from the records by commercial companies, but only by the government. As things have turned out, this is perhaps too bad; but it does not change the understanding under which I operated, as a government agent, and Charlie will really have to grasp the fact. I am not willing to tell these people one thing and do another.[17]

Robertson’s ethical standards would seem normal by today’s standards, but in light of the actions of her mentors Seeger and Lomax, her actions and attitudes stand out as ahead of their time.

Another unique aspect of Robertson’s collecting was her desire to record the music people were singing in California and the music people wanted to sing for her, which she valued over any other standard or ideal. Purity in folk song collecting has always been an issue for song collectors and proved particularly tricky in the 1930s with the recent popularity of recorded music. In his history of the nation’s music, American Music: A Panorama, Daniel Kingman writes: “Folklorists traveling through the South in the 1930s, in the first wave of collecting on behalf of the Library of Congress and others, ‘discovered’ and collected songs that their singers had learned from the commercial recordings of Jimmie Rodgers!”[18] While Robertson did not intend to collect songs commercially written or recorded, she also felt strongly about collecting the music of Californians in 1938 through 1940. Robertson frequently recorded songs that the singers wanted to perform for her, regardless of their authentic folk merit.

            One example of Robertson’s preference to record what she thought was valuable, regardless of it’s true folk authenticity, was the collection she made from a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Byron Coffin, Sr. (Mrs. Byron is not identified by a first name). This married couple lived in Alameda and had played music in saloons during the rough and tumble days of the Barbary Coast. Robertson’s recordings feature snippets of songs remembered by Mr. and Mrs. Coffin, with both Mr. and Mrs. Coffin singing and Mrs. Coffin playing piano. Song’s such as “I’m Glad My Wife’s in Europe” and “Snooky-vo-kums”, illustrate the playful ragtime flavored music performed along the Barbary Coast during the 1890s.  After playing a song called “Molly Dear,” Mrs. Coffin, describes of learning the song from a medicine show performer in the 1890s.[19] While many of these tunes were written for commercial purposes, they nevertheless offer a glimpse into California’s past, and one that Robertson saw fit to preserve. In contrast to this, John Lomax over the course of his collecting became more and more particular in his requirements for recording, eventually preferring prisons over any place else because he felt it was there, hidden away from society that some forms of African American music were most pure. [20] Robertson throughout her career maintained a much more egalitarian view towards collecting.

            Reading the correspondence of Sidney Robertson in the WPA archive one gets a strong sense of her lively personality, her sense of both humor and adventure and also her keen ability to tell good stories, and relay the life of a song collector. In one instance, she writes of accompanying a man to his job cleaning saddles at the home of an undertaker, where she spends several hours with her typewriter propped atop a coffin in the barn taking dictation while her source recited texts of songs as he cleaned the saddles. She tells another story of finding a woman fiddler in California who learned to play the fiddle one string at a time. In an article in the archive reprinted from an article Robertson wrote for the California Folklore Quarterly in 1942, she writes this account of Mrs. Ben Brown and her fiddle,

…she can’t read a note and is glad of it. You can’t keep both feet on the ground when Mrs. Scott begins to play. She learned to play the fiddle as a child, in the foothills of the Coast Range east of the Salinas Valley. There was an old violin in the family which her older brothers encouraged her to play by equipping it gradually, one string at a time. When she could manage the G string, they saved up enough to buy her a D. When she could get around on those two strings, they added the A, and so on. She played on that fiddle for several years before it had all four of its strings, and she hasn’t yet forgotten what a great moment it was when at last her fiddle was as complete as anybody’s.[21]

            In coming to collect folk music in California, Robertson wondered if she might find a folk music specific to California. She did not. Because many of the people living in California had come from other states or other countries, their songs had not been in California long enough to become distinct. Again in her 1942 article for the California Folklore Quarterly, Robertson writes of her findings,

The situation with respect to traditional music among English-speaking people in the State is exactly like that among the newcomers from Europe and the Orient. Each group sings the songs it brought from somewhere else. A California folk song is not yet, therefore, a song (in whatever language) which has been sung long enough in the region to have taken on characteristics it didn’t have when it came here; it can only be defined at present as a traditional song surviving in California today.[22]

These findings could provide a possible third explanation for the virtual erasure of Robertson from the annals of ethnographic folklore collecting, perhaps because the songs she collected were not distinct, and were most likely captured in similar forms by others as well, her collection was deemed derivative. In listening to the songs she collected though, in hearing her talk and laugh with her performers and in reading her voluminous correspondence it is clear what a masterful and innovative song collector she was. Despite the fact that her collection contains many previously recorded, at least Anglo-American songs, her collection is incredibly rich in historical value and she is a woman whose name and work clearly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Seeger and Lomax when the topic of great song collectors in the 1930s arises. 

-----------------------------------------------