Date/Time
Date(s) - 23 Feb 2012
5:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Category(ies) No Categories
A public reception for the exhibit Singing the Golden State takes place from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012 at the Society of California Pioneers, 300 Fourth Street (at Folsom) in San Francisco. James M. Keller, the curator, will lead exhibition tours at 5:15 p.m. and at 6:30 p.m. Cost: $5 admission at the door. For info: http://www.californiapioneers.org or 415-957-1849
Popular songs about the State of California, dating from the Gold Rush through the vaudeville era, are celebrated in the new exhibit Singing the Golden State, which is open now through Dec. 7, 2012 at The Society of California Pioneers. The show spotlights graphically striking sheet-music covers published from 1849 through the 1930s, along with other printed materials, sound recordings, instruments, and memorabilia relating to California and its early musical life.
“In the 19th and early-20th centuries, publishers understood that potential sheet-music buyers judged pieces of music—like books—by their covers,” says James M. Keller, curator of the exhibit. “And so, they accordingly lavished care on the creation of vivid, original art and design for the sheet music they issued.” These images are sometimes by notable illustrators and artists, who often provided ingenious depictions of the song’s subject. In Singing the Golden State, the subject is California—its history, its geography, its people.
All the music in the show is about California, rather than merely being music that was performed in California or even published in California. The exhibit includes approximately 150 pieces of sheet music organized to illuminate such topics as the Gold Rush, fairs and exhibitions, commerce and advertising, clubs and organizations, sports and amusements, children, minorities, transportation, and a tour of the Golden State, in addition to a section on the state song, “I Love You, California,” composed in 1913. Although the prominence of sheet music declined around 1930, when the dissemination of popular music shifted to radio, it served as a form of media during the period covered by this show. “If something happened,” says Keller, “there’s a fair chance someone wrote a song about it.”
The examples on display accordingly serve as an entertaining and surprising reflection of the state’s rich cultural history, including sheet music for the “Montgomery Street March” and “Hayes Valley Mazurka” (celebrating a San Francisco street and neighborhood, respectively), several songs relating to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915, at the current Palace of Fine Arts location), the “California Flood Mazurka” (memorializing the 1862 Sacramento flood, the largest in California\\\’s recorded history, when approximately 19.5 inches of rain fell during 69 consecutive days), “California Nights” (with a cover photo of Karyl Norman, “The Creole Fashion Plate,” a star female impersonator of the flapper era), and vintage advertising songs for such California products as Zee-Nut candy bars (from Los Angeles) and Hopsburger Beer (from San Francisco).
