Scripting heritage: broadcasting California's Cornish Christmas carols

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the capacity of radio to develop heritage narratives around migrant musical cultures in their new homelands. It focuses on two series of national radio broadcasts of Cornish Christmas carols made in the 1940s by a carol choir based in Grass Valley, California. Combining a close reading of the surviving scripts and recordings of these broadcasts with archival research, it examines how the choir (historically comprised of Cornish migrants), and their carols were portrayed to American listeners. Utilising Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's theorisation of heritage as a ‘value added’ process, it shows that the radio scripts developed particular values around the musical material and performers that became very important for local perspectives of the tradition, and eventually permeated scholarly perceptions of the choir and its repertoire. The article thus addresses how a specific migrant music culture was recoded for an American radio audience, and explores how radio dissemination may reposition migrant musics and identities within new socio-cultural contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Radio
• Cornwall
• Christmas carols
• Grass Valley
• heritage
• identity

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to acknowledge the kind assistance of Gage McKinney, Eleanor Kenitzer, Pat Chesnut and Brita Rozynski in Grass Valley and Nevada City (CA). I am also grateful to the staff at the Kluge Center, American Folklife Center, Manuscript Division and Recorded Sound Research Center at the Library of Congress. Finally, I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elizabeth K. Neale (Kate) is an AHRC-funded PhD student co-supervised at Cardiff University and the University of Exeter. Her PhD examines the transportation and development of Cornish Christmas carolling traditions to California and South Australia.

ORCID

Elizabeth K. Neale http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2612-2896

Notes

1 ‘CMCC’ is an abbreviation of two radio programmes titled ‘Cornish Miners’ Christmas Carols’ and ‘Cornish Miners Christmas Carols’, which were broadcast over CBS in 1941 and 1942 respectively. Episodes of the long-running ‘Death Valley Days’ series, the scripts are held in the Library of Congress's Unpublished Drama collections in the Manuscript Division. Full citations may be found in the ‘Archive Collections’ section of the references.

2 ‘Cousin Jack’ is an informal term for a Cornishman, apparently originating with regard to labour migration during the nineteenth century. Several theories as to its development exist, but the most popular suggests that upon gaining employment at a mine, Cornish miners would lobby the management for the employment of fellow Cornish miners, stating that a newcomer was his ‘cousin Jack’. The less well-known female equivalent is ‘Cousin Jenny/Jennie/Ginny’.

3 The fourth broadcast was locally preserved on disc and released on CD in 2001 to accompany the publication of Gage McKinney's history of the choir, When Miners Sang. The fifth and sixth broadcasts are preserved in the NBC archive at the Recorded Sound Research Center at the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. The author has transcribed these. Full citations may be found in the ‘Archive Collections’ section of the references.

4 The choir was presumably named after Thomas Merritt (1862–1908), a Cornish carol composer whose publications appear in the collections of Grass Valley choir members in the early twentieth century.

5 However, in his manuscript, Tremewan attributes it simply to ‘Broad’, another carol composer represented in Heath's collections.

6 The American Folklife Center holds a significant amount of Wayland Hand's correspondence, including a folder relating to Hand's ‘Metal Miners’ long playing album project which includes the correspondence cited in the text alongside the relevant dates.