"Singing the Golden State" Special Exhibition at the San Joaquin County Historical Museum

Popular songs about California, from the Gold Rush through the vaudeville era, are celebrated in the new exhibition "Singing the Golden State," which will be at the Museum from April 6 through June 1, 2014, Wednesdays through Sundays. The exhibition spotlights graphically striking sheet-music covers published from 1849 through the 1930s. It is a traveling exhibition from Exhibit Envoy developed by The California Society of Pioneers.

"In the 19th and early-20th centuries, publishers understood that potential sheet-music buyers judged pieces of music—like books—by their covers," says James M. Keller, curator of the exhibit.

In "Singing the Golden State," the subject is California—its history, its geography, its people. The exhibit includes sheet music organized by topics such as the Gold Rush, fairs and exhibitions, commerce and advertising, clubs and organizations, sports and amusements, children, minorities, transportation, and a tour of the Golden State. There is a section on the state song, "I Love You, California," composed in 1913.

Until the 1930s, when popular music shifted to radio, sheet music served as a form of media. "If something happened," says Keller, "there's a fair chance someone wrote a song about it." The examples in the exhibition include several songs relating to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 and the "California Flood Mazurka," memorializing the great 1862 flood in the Central Valley, the largest in California's recorded history.