There is this incredible cloud in the sky.

My dream again had come true.

Meaning a tone to speak out.

To be heard.

Why you are this.

You look at lives.

Every day in every day.

Who is he?

What is he doing here?

Why does he like this music?

And he said, my dear.

It's because it's the people's heart.

I found Nikolai goes back to where my halls are to be.

We have wonderful recordings that we would never have had otherwise.

He stands in the long line of composers who found folk music as being a tremendous inspiration for their own music.

The late John Donald Robb loved and composed all kinds of music, but his passion for the songs of everyday folk is what he is remembered for.

Most was roaming the countryside of the southwest during the 40s, 50s and 60s.

Rob recorded and transcribed over 3000 Hispano folk songs.

The largest collection of its time was there any drama?

No love for me back then.

You're the little girl.

I'll say it through the dim shadow.

Morton roaming around in battle.

But by the end of today, other folk music collectors refer to Rob's extensive archive found in his book Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico on the southwest.

This is the guy.

I did it all.

So I sold out the gallery to home.

Back in 1965.

John Robb actually recorded you.

Yeah, singing iguana.

And he says of you, the singer Frank McCulloch is an Anglo like me.

He has been captivated by the Hispanic folk music of the southwest, and he sings the songs with great gusto.

Well, why don't we take 12 bars of something here?

As well.

Yeah, I oh my God, I can't up there.

Yeah, the Monte Carlo I'm at the start up.

There's a little bit better, I just, I mean if I start, I go down.

But I it, I mean I know.

That.

Rob described folk music as being passed down the generations by ear, transposing stories not of a single individual, but rather the thoughts and emotions of a people.

Lyrical themes tumble over one another in a rich profusion nature murder, liquor, marriage, card games and cowboys.

Nothing is too mundane for the village composer.

To me, one of the most important things when I listen to a song, it's the song, but it's also giving an oral portrait of the moment in which the song happened, and it really contributes to the bigger understanding of the culture.

I understand that, you know, the song take a lot to go on Duniya well, yes.

It's an old favorite of mine.

I don't, I, you know, folk song.

Very old folk song.

Yeah.

Let's hear it.

All right there a lot there.

Well, I Buffalo my little brother can yet though sadly it can't over yet.

Though, sadly, that can't go yet.

The sadly the.

But I read on the album on the record as far as the take a lot of songs, well take a rotate means owl.

And of course the owl is is is great in the mythology of New Mexico.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, as in evil, and I think of it as, can't see.

It's a love song that also, it actually alludes to that.

There is a soldier in the Mexican-American War missing his lover.

So if I could just have the wings of the owl to fly back to my girlfriend, I'd be a happy camper.

And.

Rob's passion for music was a lifelong pursuit.

His older sister took him for the symphony when he was a young man, and years later, he wrote in his memoirs of the experience I have never dreamed of anything so beautiful.

And from that day on I knew I wanted to be a composer.

So I did what other composers did.

I practiced law for 19 years.

Despite his Harvard Law degree and a lucrative practice as an international bonds lawyer, Robb managed to practice music on the side.

He took up cello as a teenager.

Composition.

In college and while working abroad, studied with musical greats like Nadia Boulanger, who challenged Rob to leave law and take up music full time.

He'd been composing since his teen years, but that was at one point a hobby, except that he took his hobby very seriously.

If he knew much about him and you knew his accomplishments and where he'd been and who all he knew, the like, Stokowski and all the big names and worked with him and Horatio Parker and Nadia Buthelezi, who were greats in the music field.

And then you realize he was a terribly successful lawyer in New York.

He was where the formidable man, he was such a distinguished gentleman that when he had this openness of a kid.

Yeah, what I liked about him, he was just basically an adventurer looking for a good time.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Here's Rob the way remembering.

Yeah.

That's the way he used to look.

Yeah.

And Mrs.

Rob.

Yeah.

Who was a lot for some reason she was a lot shorter than he was.

It didn't show in the photograph.

She's probably sitting on a pillow.

Yeah.

I remember my grandfather as being ten feet tall.

And I was fascinated by his passion, but also his tremendous seriousness.

And he would look at all of the grandchildren and say, would anyone like to go with me?

I'm going north to record music.

And people would say, what are you?

And I said, I always volunteer.

I'd love to go with him.

And.

I mean, if you could imagine, after 100 years of Anglo-American, denigration of Native American and of two kind of cultural forms, that someone saying, oh, you have the most wonderful folk music here.

I just love your forms.

Do you have any artists?

Often people felt perhaps as if this was something that they should hide from the Anglo world that was looking for modernity.

So here was somebody who clearly appreciated what was very much appreciated and valued and treasured within communities.

There was a great fascination.

Who is he?

What is he doing here?

Why does he like this music?

Why let us go, love, and go back again?

On the other.

He and his wife would go up to northern New Mexico.

And he said once in a while I would get into a bar and I would listen to that beautiful guitar and those beautiful sounds.

And I would ask him, why are you going up to the bars?

And he said, my dear, it's because it's the people's heart.

Then he would put his hand on his heart.

He said, that's the real music.

They.

After a successful run on Wall Street, Rob finally had an opportunity to turn his hobby of studying music into a profession.

Rob accepted a position at the University of New Mexico, where he became Dean of Fine Arts.

During his tenure in the 40s and 50s, he successfully expanded and transformed the university's music department.

Now based in New Mexico, Rob could turn his attention to composing his own scores, as well as taking interest in New Mexico's traditional folk music.

He negotiated other ways to live his life and to do his work.

His curiosity about coming to New Mexico, being in a new setting, continuing out into the hinterlands, his being influenced by European composers of the day.

All of this finds its way into his music and into his expression.

Rob was an eclectic composer, writing well over 300 compositions.

His body of work included everything from symphonies, sonatas, concertos and chamber music, a few operas, and a musical comedy.

For him.

On the way over in the library.

Much of the Hispanic folk music he collected resonated in his own compositions.

To my knowledge, there are no direct quotes from the folk songs he collected.

But the lilt, the inflections, the cadences are similar to the songs he would use, the inflection of the culture, the one, the cover, the gondola, the one like about the plague, the and He stands in a long line of composers who found folk music as being a tremendous inspiration for their own music, and didn't really care about the social class standing or the, ethnic group from which the other artists who performed composed the music came over the.

So they get a lot more from all the.

Miles on your feet was going.

Home for your walk with somebody.

We're here in, New Mexico playing the guitar.

And a little bit of music are the harmonica.

Tradition that's been around for a lot of years here in northern New Mexico.

All right.

Yeah, I heard that song way back in the years when I was a boy.

It's been around a long time, and he challenges a song that he would sing in the ranch.

No more wrestling a quiet day, you know, in the ranch.

And just people get around having just, a friendly talk or whatever, you know, is just, also heard in the dances, it was a little dance also.

Yeah.

When I was growing up in the 50s, we didn't really sing these songs anymore.

My mother would listen to, Bing Crosby.

You know, they wanted to listen to, popular, American music, American and television, of course, started in the early 50s.

I think we had the first television set in our little village.

And then once people had television sets, it just declined.

All right.

A lot of music that we played that then, you know, violins and guitars and going to people's homes and playing at the door, you know, when they would open you up and maybe didn't like Gene and House and everybody get together, you know, and have a good time.

He would just vacation around here.

I remember old timers sitting in the at the front of the house, just like these houses that are here, a little rocking chair and there'd be, accordions, harmonicas, violins, guitars, sometimes a banjo or, or a mandolin.

You know, I like to see this stuff really preserved, you know, Rob, you know, I could imagine, you know, back in those days, you know, he probably had there's people in every corner that he could record, you know, versus today, you know, it's even harder to find people that you can record.

And so I really see this as very interesting as part of my culture.

It's part of who I am, you know, as, as a new American or as a new Mexican.

Nobody, nobody did.

Sabino road, I mean, no one of you in Western Europe, met.

Okay.

Was still you.

I I'm probably going to screw up the guitar.

I usually have to practice a little bit before I do it.

I can try it one more time.

I feel grounded in my own culture much more.

As I heard those old voices.

I think the crackling old, sort of breathy, because there's this new Mexican sound.

The old people always have this kind of breathy, kind of crackly thing, and it might be because it's so dry coming up on the version with straws and, you know, they're like, oh, still in here lately?

The line for me, Ethan, that, is history that went for a long time, but that I hadn't really gotten to learn about in school, and I didn't really know it.

And that's when I also began to sing these songs and tell a history of New Mexico through them.

And so I always felt that Rob had made a tremendous contribution to my culture.

And me, though, could be anything he loved or lost fond of.

You know, when you do those.

By the new.

Green.

Those are the raw.

Where this comes, yellow.

You know, I love the.

But I get it on.

You know, the Hispano folk music spans centuries.

This song is still popular today is at least 500 years old, dating back to medieval Europe.

And, let me.

Folk music goes through permutations as it goes from one musical to the next.

You know it'll never be played or sung by the same person.

Exactly the same way.

And that's the nature of folk music.

Yeah.

Dean Robb obviously loved the folk songs.

He didn't just use them as thematic material for other works, and he didn't just collect them and forget about them.

And in the mid 1940s, he came across a book that was written by an author up in northern New Mexico.

He thought that would be a good vehicle to write an opera, that would allow him to use folk songs a little bit.

And then, you know, Hispano folk music shaped Robert's work once again, but in this case, directly la through a traditional lullabies.

The opening aria in Robb's opera Little Joe, a tragic coming of age story set in a spot on New Mexico.

All through, live all around the world.

Who, let me, Let who?

Not me.

Who?

I mean, he you do want wanna be a little more lumpy or lumpy?

I wanna do, the man, know, the, number.

Well, some genres of Hispano folk songs have persevered for centuries.

Other forms of disappear.

The travaux derive from the word troubadour or poet was a form Rob recorded, but is no longer sung of a man.

Though.

Como la la la la la.

Let's, let's take that from the top.

This trouble was being resurrected here.

During a recording session with popular folk musician Cyprian of The Hill and Professor and Rickie Lambert Reed from the University of New Mexico.

Senorita all day long coughing and throwing an argument on Como live, amigo.

Autoland Como La Paz are those who phone.

The Trouble is a song, that enacts, an argument very famous poets would get together and there would be famous encounters that people would remember and they would, become, inscribed into a wall that then people would learn and and repeat, the young aspiring man wanted to challenge the older man as being the, the singer or the poet of the community.

The upstart is is cafe.

He's the import.

He's the new one.

Well, the all has been around for so long.

In the land comes from corn.

It nourishes people.

No, no, no, no, coffee's more exciting.

Well, let's find out.

You're may.

I'm saying your.

I totally get a really, separate econ class.

My notes say about the meat, I do.

I have to close closely.

Maybe, me then leave Libras no knowing vanegas Como.

And lastly and thus master more songs.

I mean, the very Houston.

The old culture began to clash with everything new.

There was a viable culture here that lasted for 400 years, and suddenly it was completely undermined.

And so by the 1950s, a few people still had their songbooks.

And there were a few old singers who had people that Rob recorded.

I think Rob did a tremendous job in making sure that people remembered this music.

You idb you also have variables.

Lord, never throw away like Buenos Aires or this May baby boy.

Now, God, see, I south of Miami, Guatemala.

Y'all know I you can monsters.

Italy, Paris I can miazga novel.

The stylist of para service.

Coffee lost.

Sorry, folks.

Rob never retired from music, and his most prolific work composing and conducting was later in life, when he was not traveling or working in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, or Brazil.

Rob's sense of discovery and adventure prevailed in his studio, tinkering with a synthesizer and at the time, a cutting edge computer.

I remember one day my wife and I went in and, visit with him.

And did you say he was always meticulously dressed and, you know, his hair was always combed and all of that sort of thing.

And then all of a sudden he sat down at the Moog synthesizer and his hair was no longer combed, and he had this almost insane glint in a grin, and he started playing the moods.

There's a it was beautiful.

We study music of the past, explained Rob.

But now we are in the midst of a musical revolution full of dissonance and unfamiliar elements.

And so began Rob's experiments with the world's first forms of electronic music, which resulted in some 60 or so compositions.

John Rob stepped out of the box once again to go to the Bell Labs to study the technology, then come back and set up his own lab, which was unique, certainly out here and probably in many places in the country.

That's the kind of individual he was.

You know, 19th century is really my my bag, but I really like them quite a distance from Metal Joe.

What's left now?

They respect everything else.

The Dean did.

I loved him as a man.

I loved his music.

But this just leaves me.

It frost me.

And this is not based on it.

It's on the New Mexico folk to.

With his wife at his side, Rob traveled the world and explore the diversity of musical expressions.

And he always came back to the countryside of New Mexico, claiming that the rural areas are the storytelling region of any country, and these fine folk songs of New Mexico should be part of our American culture and.

My grandfather had a wonderful role in the 40s and 50s in terms of the documentation of this music.

But there were also other people who said, you know, he's a gringo.

Gringos come and take things from us.

What's he doing?

He wasn't going to get rich doing that.

He must have gotten a lot out of just recording them and knowing that he was collecting them.

For people like myself, who would look at them and be able to rediscover their own culture through them, that's one thing.

Now that's wonderful about having made digitally available these recordings is that, of course, people can interpret them in a variety of different sorts of ways.

They can take them back to communities.

They can change the documentation in terms of actually going back to the families and saying, well, you can tell us a little bit more about the social life of this song.

I think music is cool.

You know, music is something that we all share in common.

Everybody loves music, but it's this idea of being part of a musical culture.

And I think that that's how Rob was able to get Ahold of.

Rob lived a full 97 years and left an impressive legacy, he wrote in his memoirs.

Biographies are written about world famous people, and I am not in that category.

I have done some things that most never succeeded in doing, in that I have not been made a slave by any of my occupations, but I have insisted on living the good life.

The things that happen to all of us, like birth, death and children, are more important than the doings of great men.

It is humanity itself that counts.

If it were not for that, I would have long ago given up collecting folk music.

I enjoy doing these things.

I believe that the article I suggest I indeed right here I find that they began.

They try and give up your free time.

I don't either, I don't know and I understand.

Hey hey hey and hey.

And I hope, hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey.

And I hope, hey and hey hey hey hey and I hope.