"Mother Lode Musical Theatre has revealed for us the tip of the iceberg of the cultural history of the American West, offering a glimpse of tradition, charm, elegance, and heritage of which to be proud."--Bruce Merley, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

For over three decades MLMT has been bringing California history to life. During her ten years on the University of California-Berkeley music faculty, Corinne Swall, a Julliard graduate, amassed a collection of authentic music of the California Gold Rush. In 1850, Swall's great grandmother Jane Wilson walked across the Isthmus of Panama en route to San Francisco. Inspired by her family notes, Swall began to collect the fast disappearing music of the Gold Rush era. Working with composer-conductor Monroe Kanouse, she created the original shows and operas for which they toured through Alaska, Australiea, Canada, and the fourteen Western states and Midwest. Described by the National Endowment for the Arts as "part museum, part contemporary art."

Swall and Kanouse found that the Hollywood stereotype of gun-slingers and naughty women was not broadly representative of the Victorian era. Further, Mother Lode's shows featured the first historical artists to brave that trip West. In addition to the Victorian parlour ballads Swall was collecting, their repertoire included the popular composers of the day, such as Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Stephen Foster. From this basis, Mother Lode recreated the style of the "cultivated tradition," the music itself the key to their programs' originality and charm.

From the Gold Rush we moved backward in time, first to early Spanish California, discovering with the help of Camillia Romo Wolfe the rare classical songs that were composed in Alta California from northern Mexico to Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. From there we worked with the late Lanny Pinola (grandson of the last full-blooded Coast Miwok Indian), who taught us Native American dances, blue elderberry flute making, and the stories handed down by his family. This led us inevitably to Sir Francis Drake and the first encouter at Drakes Bay, Point Reyes National Seashore, between Native Americans and Europeans in northern California

Alongside this research into the cultural richness of these eras, we supplemented reading into the original source materials and consulted with experts in history, archaeology, and anthropology. In this way, our art became even further grounded within the larger context of the state's development. As the history of California is being reinterpreted more as communities of "borderlands," the mixing and meshing of various cultural groups, we find our approach has been prescient in presenting a more fluid and complex understanding of the state. With the addition of California historian Clarice Stasz, projects are underway to expand the curricular topics into other times and themes invoking this borderlands paradigm.