Sidney Robertson Cowell and the WPA California Folk Music Project, 1938-40.

Catherine Hiebert Kerst discusses how, as a young woman of 35, Sidney Robertson proposed, organized and directed a California Work Projects Administration project designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. Her efforts generated the WPA California Folk Music Project (1938-1940), a remarkable multi-format ethnographic field collection (with recordings, photographs, sketches and drawings of the musical instruments, and field notes) that captured a unique cross-section of the music that people of many backgrounds were performing at the time.