Charles Fletcher Lummis

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.

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.

My piece on Charles Lummis’s days as a pioneering photojournalist appears in the February-March issue of Cowboys & Indians magazine. It is the Dallas-based magazine’s annual photography issue. As I recount in the article:

Photography was a passion of Lummis’ from the moment he acquired his first camera in 1886. He set off with it on a reporting trip through Arizona and New Mexico a few months later. As he noted in one of his reports for the Los Angeles Times from that trip, “One of the regrets of my lengthy paseo of two years ago was my lack of ability to bring away pictorial reminiscences of the countless places along the road.” He had resolved to “learn light-writing — the expressive name which photography has borrowed from a language that knew nothing of these later wonders” so that wouldn’t happen again.

Recent advances in technology had paved the way for his photojournalistic forays. The dry-plate process perfected over the previous decade unchained photographers from darkroom wagons of the sort that Mathew Brady had to haul around during the Civil War. The wet plates Brady used had to be made shortly before exposing them and developed soon after. By the 1880s, dry-plate negatives could be purchased in bulk and stored for months. Lummis carried 90 plates with him on his 1886 reporting trip. He could go practically anywhere he cared to lug his Dallmeyer lens, camera, and tripod, a kit that tipped the scales at a mere 40 pounds. With a shutter speed of one-twentieth of a second, he could take reasonably sharp action shots of Indian dances.

Read the entire article here: Charles Fletcher Lummis: Character with a Camera.

I’ll be holding forth on Charles Lummis, and showing slides of some of his photographs, at a monthly luncheon meeting of the Huntington Westerners historical association in Pasadena on Saturday, Nov. 5. The location is the Women’s City Club, 160 North Oakland St., Pasadena, and the luncheon gets underway at 12:30. The cost is $25 per person. Advance reservations are required, and can be made by contacting: Carol Criqui at carol@criqui.com or (626) 345-9069.

Here’s the blurb about my talk from the Huntington Westerners flyer:

“Charles Lummis was one of the most talked-about characters in Los
Angeles from the moment of his arrival in 1885, when he strode into town
after crossing the country on foot to take a job at the Los Angeles Times.
He had a knack for attracting attention that lasted for the rest of his life.
Sometimes the publicity was unflattering: his many failed marriages and
affairs were grist for gossip for years. But with his boundless energy an d
the influence he wielded as crusading editor of an influential regional
magazine, Lummis racked up one impressive achievement after another,
from helping save California’s crumbling Spanish missions and founding
the Southwest Museum to nurturing a generation of Western writers and
artists and forcing constructive reforms in federal policies towards
Native Americans. Mark Thompson will discuss the colorful life of
Charles Lummis, and will show slides of photographs from Lummis’s
archives, at an upcoming luncheon talk.

“Thompson is author of American Character, a biography of Charles
Lummis, which was honored by Western Writers of America as best
biography of 2002. Thompson now lives in Philadelphia and is associate
editor of Current History magazine.”

I launched this website, CharlesLummis.com, when my biography of Lummis, American Character, was published 15 years ago. Over the years since then, the site remained largely unchanged, until now. After all these years, I’ve finally gotten around to revamping it and relaunching it on WordPress. Among the new features is this “Lummis Sightings” blog, where I’ll be posting occasional items about new developments of interest to scholars and assorted aficionados of Charles Lummis. Also new is the comments section on this blog. It seems there will be a fair number of “sightings” to report about these days, amid what seems to be a growing awareness of and curiosity about one of the most colorful and influential characters in the late 19th and early 20th century Southwest.

Lummis was little known by anyone other than serious Southwestern history buffs when  American Character appeared in 2001. He has become something of a cause celebre these days. Concern about the fate of the Southwest Museum, which was founded by Lummis, is one reason. It has merged with the much larger and richer Autry Museum in recent years, and much of its world-renowned collection of Native Indian artifacts has been moved to the Autry’s modern facility several miles away in Griffith Park. That has left the fate of the historic old museum in Highland Park up in the air.

Many residents of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood have rallied around the cause of saving the old facility for special exhibits and events, even if it will no longer house the bulk of the museum’s collection. A thriving annual neighborhood festival was started more than a decade ago to help spur awareness of the museum and its precarious status, and to showcase the neighborhood’s multicultural charms. The aptly chosen name for the festival is Lummis Day. Charlie would be delighted by that.

A number of other Lummis-related ventures have recently launched or are in the works including  books, major magazine articles and film projects. I’ll intermittently post here about those projects and other news related to the ongoing rediscovery of a most fascinating American character.