The Politics of Identity in the Recording of Folk Music in 1930s California

Mark Davidson
Musicology
UC Santa Cruz

In the 1930s, under the auspices of the New Deal, government sponsorship of folk song collecting reached its pinnacle. This music was viewed by the FDR administration as an important marker of cultural and regional identity. Ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson‚ of the Works Project Administration folk song project in California, represents one of the most diverse collections made. Between 1938 and 1940, she recorded nearly 1000 songs from a panoply of native cultural groups from across Northern California in order to uncover what might constitute a “Californian” folk song. At roughly the same time, with so many disaffected Americans flooding into California in search of relief from widespread poverty and hunger, folklorists Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin documented migrant workers in state settlement camps. The research juxtaposes these two collections in order to understand how folk song was used to negotiate identity in the contested space that was 1930s California.