This story aired in the April 06, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Are there certain songs that have been passed down in your family — that you sing together at gatherings, or that parents sing as lullabies?
If you moved across the country or across the world, what songs would you bring with you to remind you of home?
Back in the 1930s, an adventurous woman named Sidney Robertson went on a quest to document those kinds of songs across Northern California.
With support from the federal government, Sidney and her small staff were able to collect and catalog hundreds of songs, capturing the music people brought with them when they moved here from all over the U.S. and the world.
These recordings became a soundtrack that celebrates the cultures that make up the Bay Area, and they show how music has the power to connect us across generations and communities.
In this story, reporter Sheryl Kaskowitz meets a family in Oakland who discovered the power of these recordings for themselves.
It’s the fourth episode of The Public Works, her series about how the New Deal transformed the Bay Area and what lessons we can learn from it today.
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Story Transcript:
Sound of cars driving on nearby freeway
REPORTER: I’m standing outside a house on a corner of a quiet neighborhood in East Oakland, just off 580.
Sound of door opening
MAGDA CALDERÓN: Hello? I’m Magda.
REPORTER: Hi. It’s great to meet you. I’m Sheryl.
CALDERÓN: Very nice to meet you.
REPORTER: Thanks so much.
CALDERÓN: Come on in.
REPORTER: Magda Calderón is in her eighties. She was born in West Oakland and has lived in different parts of the city her whole life. And so has her daughter, Linda Richardson, who invited me to meet them here at Magda’s house to talk.
RICHARDSON: You can have a seat right there. If you need that tray … (fades out)
REPORTER: I’m here because about eight years ago, Linda says their family got some surprising news about her grandmother, who passed away in 2006.
RICHARDSON: I wanna say it might have been Lisa, my cousin, might have found it, coming across it.
REPORTER: She doesn’t remember all the details…
RICHARDSON: But I do know that there was an email link sent to me, and we opened it up.
REPORTER: The link was to something called the California Folk Music Project, archived at the Library of Congress. It was a collection of songs, sung and played by Californians who had roots all over the U.S. and the world, recorded in the late 1930s.
And when Linda clicked on the link, she saw her grandmother’s name, Aurora Calderón, and a recording of her voice as a young woman, singing a song she learned in Puerto Rico.
Archival recording of “San Serenin,” sung by Aurora Calderón, plays
I asked Magda what she thought when she first heard her mom singing.
CALDERÓN: That it was Mom. I mean, Mom was always out there and looking for things to do, especially if it was about Puerto Rico.
REPORTER: Linda said she wasn’t surprised either.
RICHARDSON: Because she was always part of the community. She was always very helpful and she was always ready to educate. So she was there to sing and let you know a little bit about the history of Puerto Rico.
REPORTER: Linda’s grandmother Aurora came to Oakland from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 1936. Linda remembers her talking about it.
ROBERTSON: She said it took forever because there was a boat and there were buses, and she came pulling into the downtown Greyhound station.
REPORTER: The only person she knew in Oakland was her fiancé — a young man named Isidoro Calderón, Linda’s grandfather.
ROBERTSON: They met each other in Puerto Rico, but she — my grandfather came first –– and then she came to be married.
REPORTER: They settled in West Oakland, and soon connected with the small community of Puerto Ricans here. That’s where she met her neighbors, Elinor Rodriguez and Cruz Lozada, who are also recorded singing in the collection that Linda and Magda found. Cruz sang a lullaby.
Archival recording of “Nino Querido,” sung by Cruz Lozada, plays
And Elinor sang a popular ballad known as “Lamento Borincano.”
Archival recording of “Lamento Borincano,” sung by Elinor Rodriguez, plays (The recording appears as “Bolero Sentimental” in the collection.)
Linda and Magda both told me they didn’t know Elinor could sing like that.
RICHARDSON: Wow. She sounded really good.
REPORTER: It turns out, these recordings of Elinor, Cruz, and Aurora — and all the recordings in the California Folk Music Project, were made as part of a federal government program.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, one of many “New Deal” programs that put unemployed people to work during the Great Depression. A lot of WPA projects involved doing physical work, like building roads and parks.
But the New Deal government put people to work in all kinds of jobs — including as collectors and archivists. The WPA sent unemployed writers out to collect the life stories of Italian granite carvers in Vermont, folktales and folksongs of African American communities in Florida, and interviews of jazz musicians in Chicago. These government workers collected thousands of stories and songs across the country, all now archived at the Library of Congress.
Here in the Bay Area, the WPA funded one woman’s quest to record traditional songs in communities across Northern California, for what was called the California Folk Music Project.
CATHERINE HIEBERT KERST: She always said, I want to record what people are singing in their communities.
REPORTER: That’s Catherine Hiebert Kerst, who goes by Cathy. She’s a retired archivist at the Library of Congress and author of the book California Gold: Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project.
Sidney Robertson is the person who thought up the idea for the folk music project and served as its director. Her life was amazing and complicated, but here’s the quick version: She was born in 1903 to a wealthy family in San Francisco. She studied piano and taught music here, and then in 1935 she moved to DC to work for the federal government, and that’s where she learned how to record folk music. (I wrote a whole book about that part of Sidney’s life, if you want to learn more!) But anyway, Sidney was eager to put those skills to work here when she moved back to the Bay Area, so she got government support from the WPA to create the California Folk Music Project, and record as many songs as she could.
KERST: It was the very first recording collection where the focus was that area in Northern California.
REPORTER: From 1938 to 1940, Sidney drove all over the Bay Area and beyond, with a 50-pound Presto instantaneous disc machine in her trunk. She recorded about 35 hours worth of music in a dozen languages from all over Northern California. She was most interested in collecting the traditional music that people brought with them to California from all over the US and the world — like Aurora Calderón and her friends singing Puerto Rican songs in Oakland.
By focusing on those communities, Sidney was pushing against xenophobia at the time that was looking for scapegoats for the economic crisis of the Great Depression; that included Mexican-Americans who had lived in California for generations, Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, and Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Europe.
But in an article she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1938, Sidney pointed out that California was built by generations of people from all over the world, and they brought something valuable with them:
SIDNEY ROBERTSON (VOICE ACTOR): How can we believe that these successive waves of hard-working citizens contributed nothing to California beyond the work of their hands? What traditions came with them? What were they thinking and feeling? . . . Their songs will tell us, if we can find them.”
REPORTER: Cathy Kerst says it was a pretty daunting task just to find people to record.
KERST: I mean, she had her feelers out all the time looking for contacts.
Here’s how Sidney explained her strategy:
ROBERTSON (VOICE ACTOR): How does one find songs? They are everywhere at hand. A man changing a tire on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley last month sang an old ballad as he worked, and was startled by an urgent request to repeat it so it could be written down. A receipt for a bill paid to a Railway Express delivery man was signed with a Basque name; this led to a whole nest of songs.
Sidney worked hard to find people to record, but she also wasn’t doing it on her own. With the government’s support, she hired about 20 WPA workers to staff an office she set up in downtown Berkeley. They did things like create catalogs, transcribe lyrics, take photos of the musicians, and make sketches of their musical instruments.
And many of them also helped out with hunting down songs for the collection.
KERST: Sidney was very careful to choose people she knew who could help. So she found, for instance, Portuguese speakers.
REPORTER: Like Alice Limo Avila.
KERST: Sidney chose her because she had a radio program of Portuguese specials, once a week on KRE radio,
REPORTER: … an independent radio station in Berkeley. So Alice helped set up recording sessions with her friends in the Portuguese music community, where Sidney collected songs — like this waltz played by two string players in Oakland: Frank Cunha on mandolin and Joachim Flores on guitar.
Archival recording of “Vals Portugues” plays
Or these singers, Alberto Mendes and Manuel Lemos, a little farther north.
Archival recording of “Fado Portuguese” plays
KERST: The Portuguese Azoreans, in Richmond, sang fados, which are really cool.
REPORTER: Sidney also hired Spanish and Armenian speakers to help find singers in their communities. And one of her most valuable guides turned out to be an unemployed milkman. Sidney wrote about him in her field notes:
SIDNEY ROBERTSON (VOICE ACTOR): “Mr. Devere had a dairy route in Contra Costa County for years. … The result is he knows the area inside out.”
In the notes, Sidney described one of their outings in Pittsburg:
ROBERTSON (VOICE ACTOR): Mr. DeVere unearthed by accident a remarkable fellow, known as the “singing barber,” Mr. Russo by name, who sings well and knows the simple old songs we want.
REPORTER: Like this one …
Archival recording “Napoli e bello e stinco” plays
ROBERTSON (VOICE ACTOR): He was enthusiastic at the idea that the Sicilians had something we didn't, which he could give us. He recorded several songs, his wife sitting by in a wheel chair and several old ladies coming in and out to remind him of songs he knew.
But one thing that no one mentioned to Sidney was how risqué some of these songs are. Sidney might never have known — Cathy Kerst says she only found out herself when she had the text translated for her book.
KERST: The translator was saying, “Oh, I'm embarrassed. I can't believe that he's saying that to her because she probably didn't know what was being sung.”
REPORTER: So Sidney missed some things. And for all her hard work, she didn’t record people from all communities — there were blind spots about whose music was included.
Focusing on Spanish speakers and people with roots in Europe left out a lot of Californians, including African Americans and Native Americans. She had hoped to expand the project to focus on Asian American music, but couldn’t secure the funding. And there was the problem of her coming into these communities as an outsider, which could set up this uncomfortable “us-versus-them” dynamic.
Still, Sidney worked hard to gain people’s trust.
KERST: One group that is fascinating and where she actually talks about working with the community is the Russian Molokans.
Archival recording of Matthew 11:28, sung by the Russian Molokan Congregation, plays
REPORTER: The Molokans are a spiritual Christian sect who fled persecution in Russia. This group settled in what was then a remote spot at the top of Potrero Hill in San Francisco.
Cathy says that church members were initially unsure about an outsider recording their music, but Sidney worked hard to make them feel comfortable.
KERST: By talking and meeting with smaller groups of people, prominent people from the congregation in their homes, they came around to understand how valuable it was.
REPORTER: So the Molokans allowed Sidney to record them singing hymns like this one in their church. And then more than 60 years later, in 1995, a group from that same church – descendants of those singers – visited Cathy at the Library of Congress in Washington.
KERST: I showed them pictures and I played some recordings, and they're [like], “That's my grandfather!” And that was so moving to me. I just couldn't believe how powerful it was for them.
REPORTER: So there’s something almost magical about these recordings, that connect people across generations. The same is true for the Puerto Rican songs that Sidney recorded, sung by Aurora Calderón and her friends in West Oakland, 90 years ago. Decades later, those recordings are a sort of sonic link to the past for Aurora’s daughter Magda and granddaughter Linda.
LINDA RICHARDSON: I think I may have the group picture where we're sitting on the steps in front of Grandma and Papi’s house.
MAGDA CALDERÓN: Oh yes.
REPORTER: Back at Magda house, her daughter Linda has just found a family photo on her phone,
REPORTER: Oh, that’s fantastic.
It’s of three generations sitting together on the steps of her grandparents’ house in West Oakland.
RICHARDSON: So this is my grandmother and grandfather. There's my mother …
REPORTER: The photo is from sometime in the 1980s,
RICHARDSON: That one was actually in the newspaper. I don't remember what the article was about.
REPORTER: It wasn’t rare for Aurora and Isidoro Calderón to appear in the paper, because they were prominent members of the Puerto Rican community here, as Magda explains.
CALDERÓN: Dad helped create one organization: Orden Fraternal de los Hijos de Puerto Rico. And mom was involved in that. She was involved with about three different Puerto Rican organizations, and held offices in those organizations as well.
REPORTER: So if Sidney was looking for songs that came to California from Puerto Rico, it makes sense that she ended up at Aurora Calderón’s house.
We listen to another of Aurora’s recordings. This one is a song called “La Tierruca,” an unofficial Puerto Rican anthem that describes the island’s beauty.
Archival recording of “La Tierruca,” sung by Aurora Calderón, plays, and Magda sings along.
I asked Magda if she remembers how she learned that song
CALDERÓN: Mom singing, because I think music — I am getting kind of … [breaks off with emotion]
RICHARDSON: It's okay.
RICHARDSON: There was always music. I remember, going to functions and participating and even in the living room, always music, always parties, always social. But music was always shared and that was something that we always did together.
REPORTER: These recordings carry intense emotional power. I ask Magda if she can put into words how she feels when she hears them.
CALDERÓN: Proud that the Library of Congress — or whomever — contacted Mom, thought enough of her and enough about the Puerto Rican community to have her and Crucita and Elinor sing. …
RICHARDSON: Yeah. I agree. I think the act of the collection is a pretty amazing thing. Because we have, our culture, we have, you know, who we are. It makes us who we are.
REPORTER: Linda says this goes beyond her grandmother’s recording — that the same was true for the other people whose songs were collected.
RICHARDSON: But all these, all these other people that were involved in this project brought the same with them, their love for music.
REPORTER: Thinking about it today, it’s also amazing to consider that these recordings were made as part of a federal government program. First of all, the fact that the government paid any attention to folk music at all is pretty remarkable. But more than that, this collection shows that these musical traditions that people brought with them from wherever they came from were a valued part of American culture. And they left us a soundtrack as a reminder of the power that music holds, for all of us.
The archival music in this episode came from the California Folk Music Project collection at the Library of Congress. Some live instrumental versions were played by Karla Rivera Lozada, Ami Nashimoto, Mae Powell, John Schott, and David Gerald Steinberg, who also composed the theme music. Angie Coiro voiced the part of Sidney Robertson.
This story was supported in part by the Living New Deal; KALW retains editorial control. You can listen to other episodes of The Public Works series at kalw.org/the-public-works.
