Ragnar Hasselgren

Who is Ragnar Hasselgren?

Ragnar Hasselgren was a Swedish-born singer and recording artist, who was active on the West Coast during the 1940s and 1950s.

Hasselgren was born in 1905 in the Swedish province of Dalarna. His birthplace was the town of Strömshyttan, which is located between Hedemora and Vikmanshyttan. He emigrated with his parents when not quite two years old and as a child spoke only English. When he was eighteen, he was hired by a Swedish building contractor in California, who gave preference to Swedes and people of Swedish descent. A company benefit enabled workers to learn English. Since Hasselgren already knew that language he learned Swedish instead.

Ragnar Hasslegren played guitar and sang at Swedish-American clubs in the Bay Area for much of his life and recorded nearly two dozen songs in the 1940s and 1950s. His recordings were distributed by Harmony Music of Berkeley and Gaare Records of Oakland. Performing in Swedish and English, he had a repertoire that encompassed Swedish folk songs, American popular music and novelty numbers in Scandinavian dialect.

In the early 1960s Harmony Music released a Scandinavian comedy album with seven songs by Ragnar Hasselgren and other tracks by Hans Berggren and Yumpalong Yanson. The Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research had one Hasselgren recording on its album "From Sweden To America", which was released as an LP in 1981 and as a CD in 1996. In 2011 the twenty-three tracks on the CD were released on iTunes and Amazon mp3.