Jaime de Angulo

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Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950) was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905 to become a cowboy, and eventually arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the great 1906 earthquake. He lived a picaresque life including stints as a cowboy, medical doctor and psychologist. He is best known as a linguist, novelist and ethnomusicologist.

He began his career at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to L. S. (“Nancy”) Freeland. During this period he and his wife lived among many native Californian tribes often becoming fully integrated into their daily lives, in an attempt to study their culture, language and music. As a linguist he contributed to the knowledge of more than a dozen native Northern Californian and Mexican languages and music. de Angulo was particularly interested in the semantics of grammatical systems of the tribes he studied, but he was also a skilled phonetician and a pioneer in the study of North American ethnomusicology, including his recordings of native music. As an intellectual, de Angulo was treated as a colleague by Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Edward Sapir, and received considerable support for his fieldwork from Boas’s Committee on American Native Languages.

In the end, de Angulo’s Bohemian lifestyle kept him from pursuing a normal academic career, and his involvement in Native American research effectively came to an end following the accidental death of his son in 1933 and his retreat to an isolated hilltop ranch at Big Sur. At this point his writings took a wild turn into fiction and poetry. Much of his fictional works attempted to recognize and embrace the native “coyote tales”, or the trickster wisdom inherent in native storytelling. Ezra Pound has called him "the American Ovid” and William Carlos Williams "One of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered." de Angulo also went on to tutor numerous famous authors including Jack Spicer in linguistics, and Robert Duncan in North American shamanic sorcery; and appears in Jack Kerouac's books.

Perceptions of de Angulo swing wildly, ranging from an irresponsible and failed amateur, to an ‘‘Old Coyote,’’ an anarchist hero and gifted subversive[link]. However, it cannot be denied that de Angulo shaped and diversified the native Californian landscape. Bohemian to the core, he was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Cowell, Franz Boas, Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and many others.

The Works of Jaime de Angulo

Coyote Man and Old Doctor Loon

Coyote's Bones

Indians in Overalls

Indian Tales

Old Time Stories, Volume 1: Shabegok

Old Time Stories, Volume 2: How The World Was Made

Jaime de Angulo

The Works of Jaime de Angulo

Further reading

References