San Francisco Welcomes You

Words and music by Chief Caupolican, “San Francisco Welcomes You” was published in 1945 in San Francisco. The sheet music lives in the San Francisco Public Library’s Dorothy Starr Sheet Music Collection.

Born in 1876 in Chile, Chief Caupolican was a major Vaudeville star and a well-known performer at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where, as the New York Times put it in 1922, he “h[eld] vast audiences in thrall.” Among many other entertainment industry accomplishments, Chief Caupolican also starred in the Ziegfeld-Goldwyn Technicolor screen adaptation of “Whoopee” in 1930 with Eddie Cantor.

Chief Caupolican lived in San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s, until he moved away to Seattle in 1959.