Holly Ransom lives by the philosophy that language and art go hand in hand. Ransom, who teaches French and European Studies at San Diego State University (SDSU), grew up surrounded by French language and culture throughout her childhood. Her interest in the language stemmed from a desire to understand what people were talking about around her.
“My dad and my grandmother spoke French, and so it was in my interest to figure out what they were saying,” she said. “So then when I got to school where they finally had French, I started [studying] it. And then [my dad] said, ‘You really need to go to school in France.’ So, they sent me to the Sorbonne in Paris.”
Alongside her childhood immersion in French culture and language, Ransom was also surrounded by another art form: music. A calendar hangs on the wall of her Storm Hall office, full of photographs of concerts and the scenery of southern France. As she flips through each month, she talks about her summers in her French summer house and her band, Snake Oil Burlesque, which she formed with her now-husband, David Thomson.
“When I was 5, everyone tells me all I did was sing around the house,” she said. “My mom was into musicals and things like that, like American musicals. So they were always playing around the house, and they told me that I knew all the words, all the lyrics and the music, and I could just go around the house singing ‘The Sound of Music’ or whatever it was.”
Ransom’s affinity for music only grew stronger as she got older. What began as dancing around the house, singing show tunes and performing songs for her parents’ guests, transformed into marching band rehearsals and learning everything she could about a variety of musical instruments and genres.
“In junior high, high school and college, I was in formal music programs,” she said as she described her wide range of musical experiences. “I played classical and jazz saxophone, flute, and was in wind ensembles, jazz bands, all that kind of stuff. I was even in the marching band.”
Ransom’s determination in pursuing music continued into her undergraduate studies, where she began her college career in pursuit of a degree in music. Her dedication to music and confidence in her talent never waned; as time went on, however, a new shadow of doubt began to loom as her concern regarding the practicality of a career in music grew stronger.
“I needed to be able to completely support myself and not rely on my family,” she said. “Music is not a guaranteed field, and so I switched to French because I thought, well, it’s on the same side of my brain. It’s really the same kind of wiring and it’s part of my culture and all of that. And it’s much more practical, so that’s how I can take that same creative part of me and use it for something similar.”
Her family, which had been supportive of her decision to study music, was skeptical of her choice to switch majors.
“A lot of my relatives said, ‘Oh, you should have stayed in music,’” Ransom said. “‘Oh, you could have done it,’ you know, all that stuff – but it just wasn’t as guaranteed for me. I’d known a lot of people who hadn’t succeeded, because sometimes it’s just the luck of a draw: you don’t get a good agent, you go to LA and it doesn’t work out, your band’s not quite in sync with you, it doesn’t work out. Too many ifs.”
After completing her undergraduate degree, Ransom continued her French studies in her Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. She attributes her own experience with studying French, both at the Sorbonne and at UC Berkeley, to how she structures the curriculum for her French classes.
“[At UC Berkeley], you really had to be ahead of it, or else they or else they would just smash you like a bug,” she said.
Ransom continued to reflect upon what learning French at the Sorbonne was like for her and how this has contributed to the empathy that she has for her students.
“I kind of know what everyone’s going through in my classes, as opposed to someone who is literally ‘French only,’ like they don’t know English growing up and they only know French,” she said. “They can’t hear it from the English perspective. They don’t know what the blockages are and what’s not going to work for you by definition because English is structured this way. Going to school in France and having native speakers who didn’t understand that, you’d ask them why, ‘pour quoi…’ and they’d be like, ‘C’est comme ça,’ that’s just the way it is.”
At SDSU, Ransom teaches a wide range of both lower- and upper-division French language and culture classes. Her students can attest to her love for Francophone culture as well as her tenacity in pushing her students to succeed.
“Professor Ransom is very energetic and passionate about the material she’s teaching,” Peter Johnson, a second year at SDSU, said. “I like it when she forces us to go up to the board and try [to write], because she says, ‘I don’t want you to get it right. I want you to get it wrong so you can learn.’” Johnson, who began learning French in high school, is currently a student in Ransom’s French 100B course.
Ransom spends much of her free time practicing with her band, Snake Oil Burlesque, constantly working to improve as a musician by applying these same philosophies that she instills in her French students.
“I just keep practicing it over and over again, just like you guys are learning what you’re learning,” she said. “That’s why in French, they call rehearsal ‘répétition,’ because they know what it is.”
Ransom, whose voice has been described as reminiscent of other female rock acts such as the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Hole’s Courtney Love, plays the guitar and is the lead vocalist for the band.
“When I was a solo act, I was Snake Oil all by itself,” Ransom said. “So I would go out and just do acoustic, electric and just sing in clubs and things like that. And then when I met my husband, David, we joined bands. His band was Tokyo Burlesque and he was in LA, and so we put them together and became Snake Oil Burlesque.”
Mirroring Ransom’s variety in musical abilities and interests, Snake Oil Burlesque is not a band that can be categorized under one specific genre of rock. Recently, the band has worked to emulate the sounds of progressive rock, a genre that has been pioneered by bands such as Yes and Pink Floyd – a personal favorite of Ransom’s.
“We’re very eclectic,” she said. “We do spaghetti western instrumentals and surf rock sometimes, so it’s really a mixed up bag. When we do a show, we’ll do an intermission, a kind of midpoint where we do a couple instrumentals, and then off we go again in some other genres.”
Ransom is looking forward to what the future has in store for Snake Oil Burlesque. Looking back, she recognizes how important it was for her to not only establish a balance between her music and her career as a French professor, but to also find the convergence between the two.
“I started working professionally in French and realized that I couldn’t really leave music behind, not really,” Ransom said. “So I pulled out the dusty guitar and started [playing] again, and started writing music and songs and things like that, and started bringing that in. And that’s when I felt like, ‘Okay, now my life has balance,’ because I have to do both. That’s how it all works out.”
