Category Archives: Charles Lummis

Lummis’s Recordings of the Spanish Songs of ‘Old California’ Online

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.

Lummis as One of L.A.’s First Bohemians

A book recently published by San Diego State University Press casts Charles Lummis as one of the first in a long line of free-spirited and free-thinking creative types who have flocked to Southern California for more than a century.  He and his artistically inclined neighbors who began building their Arts and Crafts homes in the Arroyo Seco in the late 19th century were the predecessors of the beatniks, surf bums, gay rights pioneers and hippies who were drawn to the region in the second half of the 20th century, according to the book, Bohemia in Southern California.

Each of those subcultures is covered in a chapter. I contributed a chapter about Lummis and his home El Alisal, which was at the center of the community of artists and writers who settled in the arroyo. “Taken collectively, they suggest that when la vie bohéme arrived in the land of sunshine, a unique way of being unconventional was created,” observes Jay Ruby, a Temple University professor emeritus who edited the volume, wrote the introduction and contributed a chapter about Coffee House Positano, a bohemian hangout in Malibu from 1957 to 1962.

In Southern California, Ruby writes, bohemians were liberated not only from the need to seek shelter from hostile weather. They were also unburdened by calcified eastern traditions. Drawing inspiration from the region’s colorful mixture of native, Spanish, Mexican, and immigrant Anglo cultures, they could create their own, wholly new alternative lifestyle—which is just what Lummis did at El Alisal.

Jessica Holada, director of special collections and archives at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, contributed a chapter on the Arroyo Seco, a “vibrant if scattered enclave of nonconformists,” focusing on the book printers who settled in the neighborhood. As I note in my chapter about Lummis, who started building El Alisal in 1894:

“The Arroyo Seco by the early 1890s was beginning to fill up with the homesteads of writers, artists, musicians, photographers, eccentric entrepreneurs and other free-spirited bohemian types. There was an ostrich farm a couple of miles up the arroyo, a quirk Lummis liked. At the upper end, in South Pasadena, Horatio Nelson Rust, a legendary abolitionist and noted archeologist, was developing one of the region’s first large-scale commercial citrus orchards. Rust was one of a number of like-minded neighbors who would become collaborators in Lummis’s crusades and regular visitors to his home.

“Indeed, El Alisal fit right in to the vibrant, offbeat intellectual and artistic community that was emerging in the arroyo. In the considerable wake that Lummis created, other artists and writers moved in. By the first decade of the 20th century, El Alisal had become the cultural haven’s epicenter. As Ward Ritchie, a book printer and publisher who set up his shop in the arroyo after Lummis’s death in 1928, put it in a memoir he wrote about life in the bohemian enclave, ‘The dominant figure in the Arroyo Seco culture was undoubtedly Charles Fletcher Lummis.’ ”

His stint of more than a decade as editor of an influential regional magazine, initially titled Land of Sunshine and later renamed Out West, was especially important in spurring the growth of the community of artists and writers in the neighborhood. He published the work of many of them in his magazine and was instrumental in helping launch the careers of some who went on to win wider acclaim including Mary Austin, one of a number of contributors to Lummis’s magazine who moved to the arroyo, inspired by his example. As my chapter in Bohemia in Southern California concludes:

“His iconoclastic lifestyle undoubtedly was also an inspiration to other bohemians in the Arroyo Seco who were marching to their own drummers and promoting their own artistic, literary and intellectual endeavors.”

Article on Lummis as a Pioneering Photojournalist

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.

Rallying Support for El Alisal at a ‘Holiday Noise’

The house that Charles Lummis built will resound on Sunday, Dec. 11, with a “Noise”–as he called the festive soirees he regularly hosted at his home more than a century ago. The occasion this time is a fundraiser for organizations that are rallying to save the historic site from the limbo in which it has been stuck for the last several years since the state declined to renew a lease with the Southern holiday-noiseCalifornia Historical Society, its occupant and caretaker since the 1960s. The stumbling block is the question of who should pay the steep costs of maintaining the stone structure, built by Lummis himself and teams of helpers over a period of time from the 1890s into the 1910s and named by him El Alisal.

One potential savior is nearby Occidental College’s Institute for the Study of Los Angeles, one of the sponsors of the “Holiday Noise.” The other sponsors include the Highland Park Heritage Trust, which rented the home for the occasion, and the Lummis Day Community Foundation.

As a Highland Park Heritage Trust notice about the event explained, “Themed in the manner in which Charles Lummis enjoyed the visits of people of all walks of life and talents, this ‘open house’ emphasizes our collective responsibility to this historic landmark gathering place in our community.”

The Holiday Noise, which is open to the public free of charge, will be held at the Lummis Home, 200 E. Avenue 43, Los Angeles, 90031, on Sunday, December 11, 2016, from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.

Talk on Lummis at Huntington Westerners Luncheon

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.”

Website, at Age 15, Gets a Facelift

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.

lummisdayMany 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.