American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) lived in San Francisco for a few years from the mid- to late 1920s. Although his occupation was that of a proofreader for the San Francisco News, he also played viola in the California Music League Symphony Orchestra (later known as the University of California Symphony Orchestra). He had read the theoretical works of physicist and pioneer acoustician Hermann Helmholtz and worked out exact string-length ratios on his viola, and he even wrote a string quartet in just intonation. His stay in San Francisco put him on the path to becoming America's pioneer of microtonal just-intonation music, to building his fabulous array of instrument to play it—and to a life that contained a large share of poverty, homelessness, and financial uncertainty.

Partch also developed theories of "speech-music" and started maintaining a notebook of speech that he had heard, including the calls of newspaper vendors in San Francisco. In 1943, while he was living in a friend's attic in New York, he received his first Guggenheim grant and began writing the works he had outlined in his grant proposal: a group of speech settings that at the time was called "Monophonic Cycle."

San Francisco is a brief vignette he finished on June 1, 1943. Two and a half minutes long, it imitates two vendors of the San Francisco Chronicle (who have a plaintive melody) and the Examiner (with a more brusque musical line) against a harmonic background that composer Lou Harrison called "the foggiest and dampest music I have ever heard." The accompaniment after the work's 1955 rescoring consisted of adapted viola, kithara (a plucked string instrument added in 1955) and chromelodeon (Partch's own reed organ). The sounds are mostly sustained and are dense and static—indeed like a San Francisco fog.

The work was premiered at a League of Composers Concert in Carnegie Chamber Music Hall in New York on April 24, 1944, an event that began establishing Partch's reputation as a musical maverick. Partch later grouped San Francisco with some other works based on "found" speech music, often stemming from his hobo and migrant farm worker days, under the general title The Wayward. In 1945, San Francisco was one of several works Partch recorded at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on 16 sides of acetate phonograph discs. These were his first important recordings, and San Francisco also figured in the early recording activities of Partch's private Gate Five Records label in the 1950s.

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