"Tunes from Our Backyard” at Mill Valley’s Sweetwater Music Hall on Sunday, October 19, celebrates the WPA California Folk Music Project, a collection of field recordings of traditional ethnic folk songs recorded around the Bay Area during the Great Depression.

Between 1938 and 1940, San Francisco musicologist Sidney Robertson, working out of offices at UC Berkeley with funding from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), documented the music of ethnic communities around Northern California. With a small team hired from the state’s relief rolls, Robertson collected 35 hours of folk songs in 12 languages, along with photographs and drawings of musical instruments immigrants brought with them when they left their home countries for California. Robertson was the first collector to record folk songs of ethnic immigrants and call them “American.”

The collection, archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and the UC Berkeley Music Library, inspired composer and musician David Gerald Steinberg to create “Tunes From Our Backyard.”

A selection of these traditional ethnic folk songs, interwoven with Robertson’s original field recordings and artifacts from the WPA California Folk Music Project, will take place at the Sweetwater Music Hall, a nonprofit arts organization in downtown Mill Valley that has played a central role in the Bay Area music scene since 1972. Performing with Steinberg (woodwinds) will be vocalists Mae Powell and Karla Rivera Lozada, guitarist Mark Dzula and accordionist/cellist Ami Nashimoto.

The program also includes the newly released music video by Berkeley songwriter Alexis Harte. “Your Rose Garden,” is musical tribute to the storied Berkeley Rose Garden, built by the WPA in the 1930s and a beloved community space to this day.

$30 advance. $35 at the door. TICKETS AND INFO