222 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
cowboy into a mythic fi gure, and the song offers a peek into his dreams. To
the superior men who live on the range, the song suggests, home is not just a
domestic arrangement but a state of mind: a reward for mastering a perilous
environment.SPANISH SONGS OF THE SOUTHWEST
Long before westward expansion began, parts of the Southwest and southern
California had been settled by people moving north from Mexico. A nd there,
Spanish-language singing traditions fl ourished, separate from the English-
language ones we have been discussing. Mexican American songs of the late 1800s
can be glimpsed through the work of Charles F. Lummis, a Massachusetts native
who crossed the country on foot in the 1880s and fell in love with the culture he
found in the West. Lummis came to believe that life in California “before the
gringo” arrived had been “the most beautiful life that Caucasians have ever lived
any where under the sun.” And he showed his love for the singing he heard there
by collecting Hispanic folk songs.
A journalist by trade, Lummis started transcribing songs in Spanish soon
after he arrived in Los Angeles in 1885. In the early 1900s he obtained a wax
cylinder machine and hired trained musicians to notate the recordings he
made. One who joined the project was American composer Arthur Farwell.
Visiting Los Angeles on a 1904 lecture tour, Farwell was invited to Lummis’s
house, and there he encountered “a little world of Spanish-Californians and
Indians.” Farwell was enchanted by their songs. “I swam in the musical atmo-
sphere of them—the suave or vivacious songs of the dwellers of the desert.” Far-
well spent the summers of 1904 and 1905 in Los Angeles transcribing hundreds
of the melodies Lummis had recorded. Almost two decades passed before any
were published, but Spanish Songs of Old California (1923), though containing only
fourteen songs, was a noteworthy collection.
In the manner of folklorists, Lummis identifi ed by name the singers he had
recorded. At the same time, although recorded with guitar, the songs were pub-
lished with piano accompaniments—an indication that Lummis and Farwell
were more interested in having them sung than in preserving them for study.
Indeed, by the early 1920s Farwell was involved in a movement to encourage
community singing by amateurs. “In community song movements under my
direction,” he wrote, the Spanish California songs “have been sung, and are
being sung, by large numbers of people year after year with increasing enthu-
siasm and delight.” In Farwell’s day, musical scholarship was still considered
an accessory of performance. Preserving a song was fi rst and foremost a step
toward singing it.
The Mexican American songs collected by Lummis and arranged by Farwell
offer glimpses of a sensibility different from anything found either in nineteenth-
century American sheet music or in Anglo-Celtic ballads. In “La hámaca” (The
Hammock) the singer lies in a hammock, musing about how sweet life can be
when one is in love. And “El capotín” (The Rain Song) is as much about romantic
disappointment as the weather. (Fearing that his passion is not returned, the
singer pleads for an end to his misery while the music continues its sprightly
raindrop imitation.) These songs were also musically distinctive, with fl exible
rhythm, melody, and form. Lummis and Farwell believed that the songs couldK Writer and folk song
collector Charles F.
Lummis (1859–1928),
photographed in Los
Angeles in 1903 with his
daughter Turbesè and son
Jordan.Mexican American
songs172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 222 23/01/13 11:29 AM