In one of his characteristic bursts of artistic productivity, Charles Lummis oversaw the recording of more than 450 folk songs from the Southwest between 1903 and 1905. The spark was the acquisition by the newly formed Southwest Society of an Edison machine, a windup device that funneled sound through an acoustic horn into a weighted stylus, which carved grooves in a wax cylinder that could be played back.
For decades the fragile wax cylinders languished in cardboard canisters in the Southwest Museum’s archives. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a new generation of scholars led by Cal State Fullerton musicologist Dr. John Koegel rediscovered and began restoring and studying Lummis’s song collection, a story ably recounted by Oliver Wang in a 2016 article for KCET, the L.A. public television station.
Spanish Songs of Old California
Lummis’s wax cylinder recordings, archives.org
Pena Hueca, played and sung by Lummis
La Noche Esta Serena, sung by Turbese Lummis
Mock Mass, sung by Francisco Amate
El Joven, sung by Susie del Valle
Lummis has come in for some criticism from contemporary scholars for the narrow scope of the collection, but he wasn’t aiming for a comprehensive survey of the region’s folk music. He was looking for songs with roots in Spain, in line with a life-long project of his: assembling an encyclopedic catalog of everything there was to know about the Spanish heritage of America’s Southwestern borderlands. He organized the information in an ever-growing collection of index cards, which ultimately must have numbered in the thousands. In the final decade of his life he beat the bushes for a publisher for the multi-volume encyclopedia he had in mind, to no avail. He did manage to self-publish one of an expected multi-volume set of transcriptions of some of the recordings, called Spanish Songs of Old California.
The index cards have apparently vanished, or are awaiting rediscovery in an attic or archive somewhere. The hundreds of wax cylinders with recordings of Spanish songs are a remnant of his collection that has survived. Dozens of Lummis’s recordings are now freely accessible in the online repository of digital content, archives.org.
On the scratchy recordings, the high-pitched, warbly voices of the singers faintly pierce the crackles and pops, sounding as they are, voices out of a distant past. On one of the recordings, a song called Pena Hueca, Lummis sings and accompanies himself on the guitar. In another recording his daughter Turbese sings La Noche Esta Serena.
Local singers from “old California” families with roots in the region dating back to Spanish colonial times contributed other songs to Lummis’s collection. Manuela Garcia, of Los Angeles, recorded 84 songs. Adalaida Kamp, of Ventura, contributed 64 songs. Lummis often asserted, including in a note in Out West in 1904 about the music-recording project, that the region’s Spanish heritage was on the brink of being erased and forgotten. “Miss Kamp’s songs are of so long ago that few people alive remember any of them,” he wrote. The recordings were part of his personal crusade–also reflected in his campaign to preserve California’s crumbling Spanish missions–to make sure that part of the region’s cultural heritage was saved and got the respect it deserved.
Lummis’s interest in highlighting Spain’s contributions to America were part of his larger effort to counteract the anti-Spanish prejudice that, in his view, had led to the wrong-headed Spanish-American War and U.S. occupation of Cuba and the Philippines. But without doubt, the songs he collected also reflected his personal nostalgia for his early experiences with what he called the “incomparable romance” of old Spanish California.
Spanish culture had been an obsession of Lummis’s perhaps since the days of his childhood when he devoured the swashbuckling adventure novels of Mayne Reid, some of which were set in the American Southwest and featured sultry senoritas in peril. He had first-hand intoxicating exposure to the warmth of family life in a Spanish hacienda during a brief stopover with the noble Chavez family in northwestern New Mexico during his “tramp across the continent” in 1885, and over the next several years during idyllic retreats with the del Valle family at Camulos Rancho, northwest of Los Angeles, where Lummis, then in his mid-30s and married, had a head-over-heels but utterly futile infatuation with teenaged Susie del Valle, who would later add several songs to the collection.
Francisco “Pancho” Amate (Autry National Center)
The most prolific contributor to the sampling of songs available on archives.org is Francisco “Pancho” Amate, who contributed a couple dozen of them. Lummis met him for the first time when he showed up at a party at El Alisal, Lummis’s bohemian enclave in the Arroyo Seco. He accompanied Rosendo Uruchurtu, a blind Mexican virtuoso of the one-string harp who often provided the musical entertainment at social gatherings at El Alisal, which were sometimes called “noises” and were the hottest ticket in town during Lummis’s heyday.
Here’s what I wrote in American Character about that first encounter which, by Lummis’s account, left him smitten:
Rosendo handed his guitar to Pancho, his friend of several days who had arrived in Los Angeles from his native Andalusia, Spain, just a few weeks earlier. “Pancho swept the strings thrice,” Lummis recalled. “I shall never forget the little rattle of forks laid down, and then the dead hush. Just that question of his fingers to the chords stopped everything else…. He was a weazened, grizzled, shaven man of 58, and about 95 pounds….. He could barely write his name; and a dozen words would have covered his English…. But in the space of a minute, and for the space of two hours, he was Master.”
Amate returned to El Alisal to entertain at festivities on the next two Sundays. After the third, he waited until the company had left before approaching Lummis with a bold request. “I not like your country – it is cold in the heart,” he said. “But I like this! You are like Home. Would your excellency mind if I came to live with you?”
“I looked him up and down. It was too good to be true! Get the Last Minstrel for my own,” Lummis recalled. “It is your house. Come, and God be with you.”
“For six years he was the most interesting person in this house – or in this region,” Lummis declared.
Lummis’s beleaguered third wife Eve begged to differ. Amate was a major irritant in her life, all the more so after he killed an Indian boy and houseworker named Procopio, one of Eve’s favorites, in a fight over a garden hose. Lummis cavalierly brushed off the killing, and defended Amate, who he insisted had acted in self-defense. During divorce proceedings three years later, one of Eve’s conditions for saving the marriage was the eviction of Amate from the premises—a demand that Lummis rejected, helping seal the demise of the marriage.
