Music and Culture History among the Yurok and Neighboring Tribes of Northwestern California

Abstract

As George Herzog (1935) once observed, repertories of Indian music are not typically homogeneous, but rather they usually contain "foreign elements" and "survivals" as well as songs in the predominant style. This presents serious difficulties for the generalist who seeks to define the music of a given tribe or culture area in unambiguous terms, but it also suggests interesting possibilities for the scholar who takes a historical approach. This study isolates the various "strains" or substyles in a large corpus of recordings collected among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians between 1900 and 1980 and speculates on what each seems to represent in terms of local culture history and in the broader sphere of North American Indian music. Besides what it accomplishes from an interpretive perspective, this paper demonstrates the shortcomings in our standard (synchronic) approach to Indian music and proposes a diachronic model for future comparative studies.