Administrative History
The California Folk Music Project (1938-1940) was the result of a joint effort of the Northern California Work Projects Administration, the Library of Congress, and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. The project was officially sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley and co-sponsored by the Library of Congress. The New Music Society and the Society of California Pioneers offered their support and encouragement for the collecting project. The effort also received some funding from the California State Relief Agency.
Prior to the California Folk Music Project, during 1936 and the early part of 1937, Sidney Robertson had collected traditional English- and foreign-language music for the Special Skills Division (KL) of the Resettlement Administration (RA). When the Resettlement Administration was liquidated late in 1937, and with it, Robertson's source of funds for recording, she looked for means to continue and expand the scope of her folk music collecting in her native California under the auspices of the WPA.
Robertson was eager to organize and conduct ethnographic and folk musical research on a nationwide basis in order to engage in more comprehensive field collecting than was being done at the time. She discussed her plans with Luther Evans, then Librarian of Congress and an old friend from Stanford University, who suggested that the WPA in California might be willing to fund her project. The WPA contacts Robertson made through Evans became convinced that such an undertaking might best be initiated on a state-by-state basis. Robertson was promised WPA funding for a prototype of her collecting plan in any single state, providing she could get the necessary 50% contribution for the equipment, supplies, and rent required for government projects of this kind. With such support, she was expected to devise work that could keep from twenty to forty people employed from the work relief rolls and also be acceptable to at least three sponsors. Robertson chose to pursue the project in California, where she sought sponsorship for it through the University of California at Berkeley late in 1937.
It was in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, under the chairmanship of Albert Elkus, that Robertson found a willing sponsor for her folk music collecting plans in California. With Elkus' help, Robertson's project received university support for space and equipment. And, because she conceived her collecting project as being of relevance to the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and ethnology, Robertson made contacts with interested faculty members in a variety of university departments, who offered her their support. With the University of California as an official sponsor, Robertson was then eligible to apply for WPA funds to hire personnel to assist her in the task of collecting and documenting traditional music in northern California.
Once WPA sponsorship of the project was established, the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, then under the Music Division's leadership of Harold Spivacke, agreed to co-sponsor it by providing 12-inch acetate discs for recording the music and offering cataloging assistance to organize the collection. For additional non-labor items, which the WPA did not cover, such as catalog cards and travel expenses, the project received financial support from the California State Relief Agency. In addition to the backing of official project sponsors, Robertson sought assistance and support for it from other academic sources. As an advisor on ethnographic standards for conducting fieldwork, the anthropologist Paul Radin offered guidelines that could be applied to the collecting of folk music. From George Herzog, Columbia University ethnomusicologist, Robertson received suggestions on techniques for the melodic analysis of folk music. Through Herzog's support, she developed a project that accorded importance, not only to preserving the texts of folk songs, but also to collecting traditional melodies and their variants so that they could later be analyzed musicologically. A duplicate set of recordings on disc were given to the University of California, Berkeley, for the purpose of establishing the Archive of California Folk Music in 1940.
Although the Archive of California Folk Music was never established, the recordings became part of the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley and in the early 1980s, they were put on permanent deposit in the Stanford University Archives of Recorded Sound. The Music Library at the University of California, Berkeley, also retained copies of administrative documents, English translations on folk music, material on music in the California missions, lists of California songsters and hymnals, song texts with references to California, material on Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American folk songs, and sketches, scale drawings, and tracings of folk instruments.