California Gold : University of California Press : 9780520391314 : 0520391314 : 30 Apr 2024 : California Gold offers a compelling cultural snapshot of a diverse California during the 1930s at the height of the New Deal, drawing on the career of folk music collector Sidney Robertson and the musical culture of often-unheard voices. Robertson-an intrepid young woman armed only with a map, her notebooks, and the recording equipment of the time-proposed and directed a New Deal initiative, the WPA California Folk Music Project, designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. In California Gold, Catherine Hiebert Kerst explores Robertson's distinctive and modern approach to fieldwork and examines the numerous ethnographic documentary materials she generated with WPA project staff to capture a cross-section of the music that people were actively performing in their communities. Kerst highlights some of the most notab