This performance was inspired by the Library of Congress' ethnomusigraphical collection of the same name. Sidney Robertson Cowell was a San Francisco native who, although frequently mentioned in the same breath as her second husband, composer Henry Cowell, was an important figure in 20th century American music in her own right.
After getting a divorce at the age of 31 (in 1934!) Powell moved to New York, where she worked as an assistant to Charles Seeger (Pete's dad) and began her ethnomusicology work by documenting music from the Appalachias, the Ozarks and the Upper Midwest. Returning to California, Cowell marshaled resources from the Library of Congress, UC Berkeley, and the Works Progress Administration to create the Northern California Folk Music Project, which she headed from 1938 to 1940.
Sadly, Cowell's project is often overlooked when discussing the major ethnomusicologists of the 20th century like Seeger and Alan Lomax. After she married Cowell in 1941, though the pair traveled as State Department cultural ambassadors during WWII and contributed to the Smithsonian's Folkways Records, Henry's death in 1965 largely moved the focus of Sidney's work to her husband's music and legacy. Sidney lived in upstate New York—where she and Henry had relocated in the '40s—until her death in 1995: One of her last donations to the New York Public Library was a 19th-century songbook of shaped-note singing from the Woodstock area.
In an effort to keep the visuals consistent, with a few exceptions, all photos used in this performance were taken in 1938, 1939, and 1940, the years comprising Powell's project. Photographs from her collection were taken in San Francisco, the Peninsula, and the East Bay, the only geographical outlier are photographs shot at the Manzanar internment camp.*
I've chosen not to identify specific recordings used in this performance—much as I've chosen not to caption or identify photos—because I want to give a gestalt impression of what it might have been like to wander the Bay Area during the years depicted. You'll hear Russian, Portuguese, Scots Gaelic, Sicilian, Armenian, and Icelandic alongside English; the songs are everything from hymns to popular songs from other countries to nursery rhymes.
Additional resources for the material presented in this performance are the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information's collection of black-and-white negatives of San Francisco, many of which were shot by Dorothea Lange. Other LOC collections drawn from include The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) collection. Other images were sourced from the DigitalSF collection at the San Francisco Public Library, the William M. McCarthy Photograph Collection at the California State Archives, the GLBT Historical Society, and the Densho Project, dedicated to preserving the memories of Japanese-Americans who suffered internment by the U.S. government.
Two notes: Cowell's collection markedly lacks music from San Francisco Asian-American and African-American populations. One reason for this may have been due to the fact that Henry Cowell is widely credited as one of the first major American composers to engage with Chinese music as an inspiration and influence, and Sidney wanted to "steer clear" of his "beat," so to speak.
The lack of Black representation could be chalked up to garden-variety early-20th-century racism, though more charitably it's just unfortunately reflective of the demographic makeup of San Francisco at the time. San Francisco's Black population made up just .05% of the overall population until the "Second Great Migration" of Southern African-Americans, at which point from 1940 to 1950, the Black population of the city grew from 4,836 to 43,460.
But regarding the lack of Japanese voices—even prior to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's February 1942 executive order that resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese-Americans—the truth is that San Francisco and California have a long history of racism against the Japanese after Japan emerged victorious in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The same year the war ended, San Francisco citizens formed the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, and in October 1906 the city's Board of Education passed a regulation in October of 1906 mandating segregated education for Japanese students. Then, in May 1907, California nativists violently attacked Japanese San Franciscans as part of what are now collectively termed the Pacific Coast Race Riots of 1907, forcing the U.S./Japanese "Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907," in which Japan informally agreed to halt further immigration to the U.S. in exchange for the halt of U.S. sanctions on existing Japanese immigrants. By 1913, the California Alien Land Law was specifically created to prevent land ownership among Japanese citizens who were residing in the state of California; though it was overturned, it's illustrative of the era.
*All of which is to say I have deliberately included a section that includes remembrances from Japanese-Americans incarcerated at Manzanar, even though it breaks the geographical constraints I'd originally hoped to adhere to. Without bloviating at length about the Importance of Not Being Racist, especially during Times Like These, the important fact is this country disappeared these citizens for over three years, and to ignore that past is to risk its permanent return to our present.