Rosendo Uruchurtu recording at El Alisal, 1904. | Photo: Courtesy of the Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum of the American Indian/Autry National Center. Artbound revisits early Los Angeles to explore one of its key and most controversial figures: Charles Fletcher Lummis. As a writer and editor of the L.A. Times, an avid collector and preservationist, an Indian rights activist, and founder of L.A.'s first museum, Lummis' brilliant and idiosyncratic personality captured the ethos of an era and a region. Watch Artbounds season eight debut episode, Charles Lummis: Reimagining the American West, premiering Tuesday, May 10 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.
If you had chanced upon El Alisal, the stone craftsman home of Charles Fletcher Lummis, circa the early 1900s, you might have come upon the sight of someone singing into what would have looked like an inverted traffic cone. That horn tapered down to a stylus which, in turn, carved its way into a spinning cylinder of brown metallic soap, leaving behind tiny scraps of wax. Once complete, the cylinder could be played back on the same rig, with voices and instruments preserved via what was once the dominant recording system of early 20th century.
Invented by Thomas Edison in the 1870s and developed into a commercial product a decade later, wax cylinders were originally pitched as a dictation device, predating the modern tape recorder by nearly half a century. However, while they did become popular as dictation machines, far more people found entertainment value in them, using cylinders to record and play back the popular music of the day, or in the case of Charles Lummis, of the past (or at least, so he thought).
Lummis was one of Southern California's most influential boosters at the turn of the 20th century: an impresario, a journalist, and most passionately, a documentarian of the Southwest. Situated in the arroyo that now borders Highland Park, Lummis began inviting friends and acquaintances over to El Alisal in late 1903 to record what he thought were traditional Mexican and Native American folk songs. He eventually produced over 450 cylinders in a few years, a remarkable feat for the era considering that he started around a year before composer B la Bart k took an Edison recorder into Hungary to record folk songs, while Alan Lomax wouldn't begin his storied field recordings of American song styles for another three decades. That collection, which includes hundreds of other cylinders that Lummis acquired from others, resides within the Braun Research Library at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian.
Boxes containing wax phonographic cylinders recorded by Charles Fletcher Lummis. | Photo: Vlasta Radan, courtesy of the Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum of the American Indian/Autry National Center.
Lummis' original goal, as he explicitly explained in his 1923 book, Spanish Songs of Old California, was to save the Old Songs from oblivion, insisting that, it is sin and a folly to let each song perish. He was an unabashed nostalgist for a fantasy of a California he felt was on the verge of being wiped out by the forces of modernity, thereby obligating people such as himself to save whatever we may of the incomparable Romance which has made the name California a word to conjure with for 400 years. There's a certain irony in Lummis, seeking to preserve cultures he thought were being lost to modernity, using an Edison cylinder, a veritable symbol of modernity itself. Moreover, as editor of Out West, he was helping to promote Southern California in such a way to hasten the process of transforming the area into a modern metropolis.
Regardless, Lummis was never shy about embellishing his own accomplishments and with his song project, he boasted that his efforts were barely in time: the very people who taught them to me have mostly forgotten them, or died, and few of their children know them. High (self) praise but also likely overstated. It's undoubtedly true that Lummis, in some cases, recorded the only extant versions of specific songs that exist today. However, in other cases, Lummis' push towards preservationism was undermined by his amateurism as a music historian.
Musicologist Dr. John Koegel of CSU Fullerton first heard about the Lummis cylinders thanks to a late 1980s episode of Huell Howser's California Gold television show. The collection became the center of Koegel's graduate school research and he remains the leading expert on it. Lummis had a particular kind of sound in mind Spanish songs of old California, he explains, pointing out that like most collectors, Lummis' curatorial impulses favored some styles while rejected others. For example, the corrido tradition of narrative ballads, arguably one of the most popular and important Mexican song styles going back decades, is barely to be found in Lummis' collection. Instead, he favored canciones, a popular lyric song style that could be found throughout the Southwest and one that Lummis romanticized as having roots that lead back to Spain.
A close-up of a cylinder phonograph. | Photo: Vlasta Radan, courtesy of the Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum of the American Indian/Autry National Center.
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However, when musicians sat in front of Lummis' recording horn, they didn't always explain to him what they were performing or where those songs came from. For example, a small number of the recordings were of contemporary Mexican theater music rather than the older folk songs Lummis thought he was preserving. In many cases, the songs were far from in danger of disappearing. Some of these songs existed in popular sheet music at the time, Koegel explains, adding that it was easy for Lummis to miss these things because he didn't go to Mexico regularly, there was no radio,
