Songs of Joshua Tree: An Odyssey Through the Music History of the Park and Its Surrounds

By Lauren Beth Eisenberg Davis

Songs of Joshua Tree explores music over the course of history in the area that now comprises Joshua Tree National Park and its gateway towns. This book is the result of the author's work as artist-in-residence at the park in 2014. It provides a folk-life ethnohistorical look, in an accessible story form, at music of the Native Americans who inhabited the park starting in the 1600s; the songs of the homesteaders, miners and cattlemen of the 1800s and 1900s; and the contemporary music scene of the last 50 years.
The geographic area covered by the book is Joshua Tree National Park itself, and the towns of Twentynine Palms, Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Pioneertown, and Landers – towns whose history is intertwined with that of the park property. The musical genres covered include sacred and leisure music of the Indian tribes, folk music, rock and roll, jazz, classical, and non-traditional forms of music such as therapeutic sound baths, and the natural sounds of the park wilderness. The focus of the book is primarily on music of the people who made the area their home, but also touches on famous musicians who have come to Joshua Tree, to perform, to reflect, to create.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543971927

Book preview

© 2019 by Lauren Beth Eisenberg Davis

All rights reserved

This book was produced in conjunction with the Artist-in-Residence Program

at Joshua Tree National Park

Print ISBN: 978-1-54397-191-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54397-192-7

Front cover photography by Lauren Beth Eisenberg Davis

Back cover photograph by Lacy Ausman Ditto

Praise for Songs of Joshua Tree

"As much as its paths, rivers, and people, the story of a place is also in its music. Lauren Eisenberg Davis tells this story beautifully, from the musical traditions of the Cahuilla that have been preserved over thousands of years, to the Tinariwen who brought the music of a different desert halfway around the world, to the songs sung at the author’s one-person seder, to the music from around the world which has drawn thousands of people to it. Songs of Joshua Tree conveys the rhythms of one of the hardest places on earth both to live, and to explain - the desert." 

~ Moses Gates

Author of Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the

World’s Great Metropolises: a Memoir of Urban Exploration

"Elegantly and joyfully written, this musical and social history explores a flourishing area of the American Southwest, tracing its heritage from its ancient native communities to the present-day inhabitants. Pulsing with spiritual chants, sacred ceremonies, the pioneer settlers’ lusty songs, and the current classical, jazz and pop, the book captures the time, place, music, and the rhythm of creative expression throughout the ages.

A fascinating read.

~ Toby Devens

Author of the novels My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet); Happy Any Day Now; and Barefoot Beach

"In Songs of Joshua Tree, Lauren Eisenberg Davis goes into the desert with a guitar and a goal, and comes out with an impressive work that encompasses just how interictal a part music has played in the desert over thousands of years. From song traditions of native Americans, such as Cahuilla Bird Songs, to the music of incoming pioneers, homesteaders, ranchers, and miners, Songs of Joshua Tree sings to lovers of words, culture, and music alike. Just as cave paintings or historic documents illustrate history, the song traditions examined in this book show how music can both preserve culture and evolve into today’s reality. Sit back and enjoy this love song to a unique desert region."

~ Eric D. Goodman

Author of Setting the Family Free, Womb: a novel in utero,

and Tracks: A Novel in Stories

In memory of Frank McCourt, my teacher and mentor,

who wrote in his book Teacher Man:

Sing your song, dance your dance, tell your tale.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Time

…And Place

Prologue

Part 1: The Native American Era

Chapter 1: Cahuilla Indians

Chapter 1A: The Gourd Rattle

Chapter 1B: Cahuilla Music History

Chapter 2: Serrano Indians

Chapter 2A: The Flute Lesson

Chapter 2B: Serrano Music History

Chapter 3: Chemehuevi Indians

Chapter 3A: The Bill Williams River

Chapter 3B: Chemehuevi Music History

Part 2: The Pioneer Era

Chapter 4: Cattlemen

Chapter 4A: The Ranger’s Command

Chapter 4B: Music of the Cattlemen Era

Chapter 5: Homesteaders

Chapter 5A: A Shell of a Radio

Chapter 5B: Music of the Homesteader and Early Settler Era

Chapter 6: Miners

Chapter 6A: Mural #7

Chapter 6B: Music of the Mining Era

Part 3: The Contemporary Era

Chapter 7: Popular Musicians Associated with the Park

Chapter 7A: Tinariwen

Chapter 7B: On the Outside Looking In

Chapter 8: Local Musicians

Chapter 8A: Europe ‘74

Chapter 8B: Those Who’ve Called it Home

Chapter 9: Classical Music

Chapter 9A: The Straw Bale House

Chapter 9B: Classical Music

Chapter 10: Mysticism

Chapter 10A: The Sound Bath

Chapter 10B: Mysticism

Chapter 11: Invited Musicians

Chapter 11A: Twin Tanks

Chapter 11B: By Invitation Only

Chapter 12: Social Action

Chapter 12A: Seder in the Desert

Chapter 12B: Music as Social Action

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

References

Foreword

When Lauren asked me to write a foreword for this book, I hesitated to say yes. What, after all, qualifies me to weigh in on the music history of Joshua Tree National Park? I am no expert in this area, and my knowledge of the park resides primarily in the fields of natural and cultural history, i.e., its plants, animals, geology, and human habitation of the region. But then I reassessed my reluctance and began to understand that what I could say had everything to do with the value of this book.

Although I was aware of the role that music played in this human history, I had but few tangible examples of it. I knew, for example, that the Native peoples who lived in the region for thousands of years had sung songs describing their origins and celebrating important life events, and that miners, ranchers, cattlemen, and homesteaders had undoubtedly played instruments around their campfires, on their front porches, and at community gatherings. I was also vaguely cognizant of the more recent presence of musicians writing, producing, and recording their compositions in and around the park.

Now, after reading her book, I can add another element to my interpretive repertoire: Lauren has written an extensive overview of the music produced and performed in the national park over a period of thousands of years that adds an important dimension to our understanding of the place that millions of people now visit annually. Readers of this book will come away from it with a fresh appreciation of the intersection of the desert’s natural landscape and the human response to it. It is a window into that terrain where the land has had a profound impact on the people who inhabit it, and the impact that people have had on the landscape.

As the program manager for the park’s Artist-in-Residence program from 2006-2017, I had the pleasure of getting to know dozens of artists working in a wide variety of disciplines. Joshua Tree National Park’s program was unique in that its application process was open not only to visual artists (painters, photographers, printmakers, watercolorists, and sculptors) but also to writers, choreographers, musicians, and performance artists. This breadth of artistic disciplines to be reviewed posed a unique challenge to the jurors making the selections, but it also met the goals of making the AIR program accessible to as many creative individuals as possible. Our park’s program thus became a model followed by other national parks hosting artists within their boundaries.

Meeting Lauren, who spent a period of three weeks in the park in 2014 as an Artist-In-Residence, gave me the opportunity to get a glimpse of other aspects of the park’s rich history through the lens of her interests and expertise as a musician. But it was merely a glimpse. This book is the culmination of several years of research. One can only do so much during a three-week period, but Lauren made the most of it while she was here: she visited sites both in and surrounding the park, she sought out primary sources whom she was able to interview, and consulted documents both in the park’s library and in other institutions that house the works of those who recorded their experiences living in the Mojave and Colorado deserts. The seriousness of her research is impressive, and readers will therefore come away with a deeper appreciation of the role music has played in the park’s prehistory and history.

One of the principles that interpretive park rangers are taught is that it is of paramount importance to respect the sovereignty of the visitor: each person who visits a national park is entitled to experience the site on his or her own terms. No one else is to say what a visitor ought to do, see, hear, or feel. For some that experience involves recreation: hiking, camping, rock climbing, enjoying the warmth and beauty of an evening campfire, or simply stopping along the road to look for wildflowers. For others, it is an opportunity to escape the crowded and noisy conditions of life at home in an urban setting, and enjoy the solitude and silence a natural area provides. Others are interested in history and seek to better understand it by standing in the very place in which certain events occurred. And then there are those who are inspired to create art in a place that offers spectacular vistas and an opportunity to focus on one’s work without the usual distractions of one’s home turf. During her residency, Lauren turned her attention to her stated objective when applying for the AIR program: the manifestations of song, instrumental music, and dance produced by those who lived here and responded to the desert landscape through music. She was able to follow her interests and intuition by seeking out all forms of music related to Joshua Tree National Park, and her efforts are reflected in the manuscript she produced. For anyone interested in learning more about the role music has played in the history of Joshua Tree National Park, Lauren’s book is an invaluable resource.

The book is organized chronologically. The reader first discovers the music associated with the Native Americans of the region: the Cahuilla, Serrano, Chemehuevi, and Mojave Indians. Included are descriptions of the instruments that were made from native materials, such as gourds, seeds, and animal skins. Following the period of contact with Euro-Americans (miners, cattlemen, ranchers, and homesteaders), there are detailed descriptions of the music performed by those settlers, both their original compositions and those they brought with them to the desert from elsewhere. Then Lauren guides us into the modern period, and the reader learns about songwriters such as Allie Wrubel of Twentynine Palms; the accurate details surrounding the band U2’s association with the park; Gram Parsons of The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds, whose death from a drug overdose at the Joshua Tree Inn makes for a tragic and dramatic chapter in this music history.

Finally, readers are introduced to the present music scene with discussions leading into the 21st century that include profiles of Teddy Quinn and Josh Homme, among others. The ongoing sound baths held at The Integratron enlighten the reader as to the long presence of spiritual seekers in the area, and the ways in which music has been employed as a means of achieving transcendent states of mind--hearkening back, perhaps, to the earliest inhabitants and their relationship to music.

Lauren dedicates this book to Frank McCourt, to whom she ascribes the quote, Sing your song, dance your dance, tell your tale. Lauren’s music history of Joshua Tree National Park is a tale well told, and one that will add another resonant voice to the chorus of testimonies that seek to honor this stunning and inspiring land of stark and daunting beauty.

Caryn Davidson

Joshua Tree, CA

March 2019

Introduction

Living alone at the remote Lost Horse Cabin — beyond the Service Road Only sign, beyond the Locked Gate Ahead sign, beyond the Do Not Enter sign, up the long, winding dirt road flanked by Joshua trees, Mojave yuccas, fields of desert dandelions, occasional stands of purple lupine, blooming cacti, and other desert wildflowers — I spent two weeks as Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park in California. This book is the project that resulted from my residency.

The area containing and surrounding Joshua Tree National Park, spanning both the Mojave Desert (high desert) and Colorado Desert portion of the Sonoran Desert (low desert), has seen, over the course of history, many people and peoples living there and passing through. In April 2014, I became one of them.

My application proposed the following project: a work of literary art — using oral history, documented artifacts, and my experience living in the region for several weeks — that brings to life the people of this confluence of two deserts and the symbiotic relationship between them, their environment, and their art. Clearly, I was treading a fine line between Artist-in-Residence and Scholar-in-Residence. However, during the first few

weeks of research in the nine months between selection and arrival, I concluded that the project was too massive to tackle — even just to lay the foundation — in two weeks.

I noticed that an existing body of literature explores the visual arts and crafts of the region, but coverage of music was scant. This intrigued me. I have a background in music: I’ve studied, and taught, piano; my undergraduate research involved using probability theory to compose music of different historical periods; my graduate research explored music as a method of encryption. Music has trickled into my writings as well, both memoir and essays, from music as comfort to music as nostalgia to music as social action.

The revised project description became: a work of literary art — using oral history, documented artifacts, and my experience living in the region for several weeks — exploring music over the course of history in the area that now comprises Joshua Tree National Park and its surrounds. In the end, I discovered that I had underestimated the enormity of the reduced project as well.

During my tenure at the park, I met with descendants of pioneer families and musicians from the three primary Native American tribes that had inhabited the park; I explored the park seeking places and artifacts of musical significance; and I attended local music events. I kept a daily travel journal. Each night I fell asleep to the sound of the wind howling through the park, and awoke in the morning to the who-who, knock-knock-knock of the great horned owl and ladder-backed woodpecker in my yard, which served to underscore that in addition to the music people sang, played, and wrote here, the desert makes its own music. Because there was no Internet connectivity or cell phone reception at the cabin, the lack of digital distractions opened all senses to the desert environment. I felt a heightened awareness of the sounds around me.

Josh Kun, Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California Annenberg, captured a misunderstanding of the desert: The most commonly held acoustic notion about the desert is not that it is full of songs, but that it is full of silence.¹ Kun went on to describe the acoustic properties of the desert: By listening to the non-silence of the desert, we are able to hear it as a non-empty landscape, not a void but rather a profound presence,² and furthermore, Anyone who has spent any time in the desert knows that it is bursting with acoustic environments, musical events, and sonic epiphanies.³

In fact, Richard Lerman, Professor of Media Arts in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University, created a sound map of the Sonoran Desert, which extends from Arizona into California and whose sub-desert (the Colorado Desert) comprises the eastern portion of Joshua Tree National Park. His work is described in the ASU Research Journal: …a gentle spring rain falls in the first hours after sunrise. Richard Lerman, strapped with video gear, headset, and cables is crouched next to a compass cactus weaving wires in and out of its needles. Attached to the wires are tiny, hand-built microphones carefully placed to record both the rain and the internal acoustics of the cactus. He stands back, adjusts the volume on his recording device, and takes in the sound. The rain gently plucks the cactus needles, creating music not unlike the plucking of violin strings.⁴

Here, every sound stands on its own. With no minuscule microphones, and no recording equipment, I recorded the sounds of the desert — both of human musicians and of the landscape itself — in the only way I know: with my words.

This book is meant to be neither an exhaustive inventory of every music event nor every song written in the area. It paints the landscape of music that touched and shaped the lives of people here. Each culture brought its own contribution to the history of the park, including music history. Sometimes these groups or individuals influenced each other, but there is not a holistic arc of music progression seen over the course of time; there are pockets of aha moments when something in a later era evokes something earlier in history, and there are specific instances of one group borrowing music traditions from another. To a large degree, the progression mirrored what happened musically everywhere in this country, but the specific landscape and events of this desert park contributed a unique slant and mysticism that can only be understood by looking at the physical features of the desert and its oases, and the historic events that took place here.

Experiential research from my boots-on-the-ground adventures combined with formal research at the Library of Congress, historical societies, and museums to create tandem chapters representing memoir and folk-life style documentary. The book is organized by era: Native American, pioneer, and contemporary — where contemporary is defined as after the homestead era, or approximately the rock and roll era, but conceptually covers far more than rock and roll. Geographically the book covers the area that eventually became the park, and its primary gateway towns.

Natalie Curtis wrote in The Indians’ Book, No claim is made that all work in this book is without error.⁵ I must make a similar statement. This book is as accurate as possible, under the conditions of occasionally conflicting research material, and of events that have been reported only in casual writing or oral history, and are subject to personal experience and interpretation. Paul Apodaca wrote, in Variations in Performances of Cahuilla Bird Songs, The researcher makes no claim of expertise in the subject of Cahuilla Bird Songs, the only experts being the singers themselves. The writing uses the actual words of Cahuilla singers whenever possible.⁶ The same holds true for this book. I make no claim of expertise in the music presented here; I rely on the expertise of those who lived it and sang it, and the scholarly researchers who documented, firsthand, environments and cultures of the past. I quote them liberally throughout the book.

Time

The history of the park covers thousands of years, but the recorded music history begins in the 1600s. The timeline below charts the major historical events related to music.

Timeline

…And Place

Joshua Tree National Park has very specific boundaries, although they have changed slightly over the course of its establishment, first as a national monument, and later as a national park. Defining the area comprising the park was easy. Attempting to define the area of its surrounds proved slightly more elusive.

For the purposes of this book, I define the park’s surrounds to be its gateway communities: the towns of Twentynine Palms, Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, and their slightly northern suburbs of Pioneertown and Landers. It may seem unfair to exclude the Coachella Valley area south of the park, containing Indio, Palm Desert, Coachella, and Palm Springs, especially in light of the famous Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. While I nod my head to that signature event, which has brought myriad A-list talent as well as emerging and local acts to the park’s southern neighbors, that area is more physically separated from the park than its northern counterparts.

From a purely geographic