Trove of songs of Gold Rush
“The Lousy Miner” is a sorrowful Gold Rush song, set to the melody of the old English sea ballad “A Dark-Eyed Sailor” and sung by men laboring and longing in the gold fields of California.
“Oh, land of gold, you did me deceive/ And I intend in thee my bones to leave,” goes the final stanza. “So farewell home, now my friends grow cold/ I’m a lousy miner/ I’m a lousy miner in search of shining gold.”
The song — whose lyrics John Adams has composed new music to in his new opera “Girls of the Golden West,” premiering next month at San Francisco Opera — appeared in “Put’s Original California Songster,” first published in San Francisco in 1855.
The songbook, small enough to fit in the pocket of a pair of Levi’s, was compiled by an unsuccessful prospector named
John A. Stone, who under the nom de plume Old Put, wrote many of the tunes. He was San Francisco’s “foremost minstrel composer,” the late Oakland folklorist
Irwin Silber wrote in his 1964 book “Songs of the Great American West. ” Stone toured the mining camps with his singing group the Sierra New Rangers and got paid in gold dust.
Corey Jamason, the Bay Area harpsichordist and pianist who specializes in Bach, late 19th and early 20th century American musical theater and old San Francisco songs, plans to perform tunes by Old Put and other Gold Rush writers at the Opera’s daylong “Girls of the Golden West and Gold Rush Symposium” on Saturday, Oct. 28, at the Veterans Building’s Taube Atrium Theater.
Among other attractions, Adams and the opera’s librettist/director
Peter Sellars are scheduled to appear on a panel, and Jamason and two young singers from his group Theatre Comique,
James Hogan and Radames Gil, plan to offer a musical history of the Gold Rush.
Drawn from collections like Mart Taylor’s 1856 “The Gold Digger’s Songbook,” the tunes are sometimes humorous and punchy, “but most of them are heartbreaking,” Jamason says. “They’re about men who are very lonely and very disillusioned.”
Tunes like “The Unhappy Miner” are leavened with lighter, livelier fare like Old Put’s “Sacramento Gals,” a slyly bawdy ode to the prostitutes of the period.
Reading miners’ diaries and seeing old photographs evokes that world, “but somehow hearing the music brings it closer,” says Jamason, a professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he’s scheduled to lead a “Songs of San Francisco” performance Sunday, Nov. 5, featuring some of this music.
“You realize how much they suffered, and how difficult it was.”
For more information, go to www.sfopera.com.
Mad Men and West
Mads Tolling, the stylish jazz fiddler who has been improvising on 1960s movie and TV themes with his Mad Men band, plans to also play some of the Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and other ’60s songs in the repertoire of Paula West when the regal singer joins the band at Yoshi’s in Oakland on Nov. 12. It’s the first Tolling-West collaboration.
For more information, go to www.yoshis.com.
Art spectacle
The San Francisco Art Institute celebrates its new 67,000-square-foot campus on the waterfront at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture with a free public Grand Opening Spectacle Nov. 10-11. The inaugural exhibition features works in and around the building by faculty, alumni and other artists affiliated with the school. Among them: Gutzon Borglum, María Elena González, Bill Fontana, Mads Lynnerup, Alicia McCarthy and Mel Ziegler.
Visitors can wander through the new studios, buy student work and imbibe at the pop-up beer garden. One-night-only installations will be on view during the public party the night of Nov. 10, with music from the boisterous Extra Action Marching Band and others.
For more information, go to www.sfai.edu.
Green talk
The late, esteemed San Francisco architect Aaron G. Green, Frank Lloyd Wright’s man on the West Coast and a longtime teacher at Stanford University, is the subject of the new book “Aaron G. Green: Organic Architecture Beyond Frank Lloyd Wright.”
Written by Randolph Henning, the book was designed by Green’s son, Allan, a graphic designer and winemaker who owned Mendocino County’s Greenwood Ridge Vineyards, with an introduction written by architect Jan Novie, who joined Green’s firm in 1965 and became its president after Green died in 2001. Allan Green and Novie are set to talk about the book and sign copies Nov. 9 in the Showcase Theater of the Marin Civic Center, the graceful space-age structure that was one of Wright’s last major projects — for which Green was the associate architect.
For more information, go to www.marincenter. org or www.marinlibrary. org.