Southwest Folklore Center field recordings collection
Collection area: Borderlands
Collection dates: 1943-ongoing
The collection includes dubbed versions of selections from the Center’s Pre-1980 Sound Disc Collection as well as field recordings of the University of Arizona Folklore Committee. These include regional music such as Mormon hymns, cowboy songs, Mexican American music and corridos, Native American music, and fiddle and banjo tunes. Recorded interviews concern family life and traditions, home remedies, Native American languages, Tucson slang, and oral histories.
During 1974 and 1975, James S. Griffith collected field recordings while working for the Smithsonian Institution Office of Folk Life. Contributions of field recordings were made to the Bicentennial Festival of American Folk Life held in Washington, D.C., in 1976. The collection includes original copies of these tapes.
Recordings made after 1980 were collected by James S. Griffith in southern Arizona, and relate chiefly to cowboy music and songs, corridos, oral history interviews about Tucson history and family life, and the annual Wa:k Powwow All O'Odham Fiddle Orchestra Contest.
This collection is part of the Southwest Folklore Center collection. The Southwest Folklore Center was founded in 1979 after the dissolution of the University of Arizona Folklore Committee and collected information about folk communities, arts, music, and other humanities-related materials. This collection was previously SWF 011. The materials were transferred to Special Collections in 2017.
The University of Arizona Folklore Committee, founded in 1943 by Frances Gillmor, collected songs, tales and general folklore from all parts of the state. Upon its dissolution in 1979 the Southwest Folklore Center was created and continued its activities of collecting folklore material in the field in Arizona, the Southwest, and northern Mexico. The field collection topics varied by interests and needs of the community as well as changes in the nature of folklore collecting. Major field collecting on reel-to-reel tapes was done in the areas of cowboy songs and poetry, and Tucson history.
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