California Folk Music: Ethnic, Cultural, and Language Groups

WPA California Ethnic, Cultural, and Language Groups

Anglo
Anglo-American performers in Alameda, Belvedere, Brentwood, Camino, Carmel, Central Valley, Columbia, Concord, Groveland, Hollywood, Lotus, Oakland, Pine Grove, Tuolumne County, San Jose, and Turlock singing English language songs and performing dance music, fiddle tunes, shanties, ragtime, Barbary Coast tunes, music from the Gold Rush era, immigrant songs, American popular song, and medicine and minstrel show tunes on the guitar, tenor banjo, dulcimer, harmonica, piano, and violin. Includes photographs and drawings.

Armenian
Armenians in Fresno and Fowler, singing and performing dance music, immigrant songs, love songs, ballads, children's songs in the Armenian language, and Armeno-Turkish music on the daph, dumbelek, saz, clarinet, blul, qanun, zurna, oud, kamanche, and violin. Includes photographs and drawings.

Assyrian
Photographs of an Assyrian from Soviet Georgia who lives in San Francisco and drawings of his tar.

Basque
Basques in Fresno singing unaccompanied songs in Basque from the Spanish Navarre.

Croatian
Croatians in Woodside, San Mateo, and Mountain View singing and performing Dalmatian dance music, Serbo-Croatian oral epic songs, and instrumental selections on the gusle, misnice, svirala, lirica, and dvorgrle.Includes photographs and drawings.

English
See Anglo

Finnish
Finns in Berkeley and Central Valley singing unaccompanied Finnish songs and epic poetry from the Kalevala. Includes photographs.

Gaelic
See Scots

Hungarian
Hungarians in Oakland singing unaccompanied Christmas songs, ballads, and songs of old Hungary in Hungarian.

Icelandic
Icelanders in Carmel, Berkeley, and San Francisco singing unaccompanied rimur, hymns, and immigrant songs in Icelandic and English. Includes photographs.

Italian
Italians, including Sicilians, in Concord, Martinez, Pittsburg, and Woodside singing unaccompanied songs in Italian and Sicilian dialect. Includes photographs.

Mexican
Mexicans in Carmel performing Spanish songs and music at a wedding.

Norwegian
Norwegians in Carmel singing unaccompanied songs in Norwegian.

Portuguese
Portuguese in Oakland and Richmond, performing dance music and singing fados, Christmas carols, and songs from Portugal and the Azores on the English guitar, guitar, mandolin, piano, triangle, and viola d'arame in the Portuguese language. Includes photographs and drawings.

Puerto Rican
Puerto Ricans in Oakland singing unaccompanied songs in Spanish.

Russian Molokan
Russian Molokan congregation from Potrero Hill, San Francisco, performing unaccompanied sacred music and preaching in the Russian language. The Russian Molokans, also called Molokan Spiritual Jumpers, Spiritual Christians of the Sect of Jumper, or Milk Drinkers, were a Russian peasant group that dissented from the Russian Orthodox Church at least as far back as the seventeenth century. The Molokans came to California from the Transcaucausus in the early part of the twentieth century.

Scots
Scots in Berkeley and Oakland perfoming unaccompanied Scots Gaelic, lowland Scots dialect, and English songs from Scotland and Cape Breton Island, Canada.

Spanish
Spanish Americans in Carmel and Monterey performing Spanish unaccompanied songs from the Asturias region of Spain and "Spanish Californians" (a term used by Sidney Robertson Cowell to denote Spanish-language performers whose ancestors in the state settled there before California became a state) performing topical and love songs.