Pioneer Western Folk Tunes

Pioneer Western Folk Tunes is a 72-page collection of dance music published by Viola “Mom” Ruth in Phoenix in 1948, gathering roughly 144 tunes played for square dances across Arizona. The title page and the 1948 copyright registration both credit Ruth as arranger rather than composer, and she described the contents in her own closing letter as Old Time Tunes. Tunes are printed as unaccompanied fiddle melody with tempo and bowing directions, frequently annotated with the dance figure or call they accompanied, as with “Beaver Creek,” marked as arranged to fit the call “Take a Peek.” Notated music occupies pages 1 through 48; the remainder holds Ruth’s letter, a section on calling technique contributed by Joe Boykin of Phoenix and John Stillman, and the calls themselves.

Viola Emma Hopen Ruth was born in 1892 in Arizona, and learned music from both parents, recording in this collection that she learned “After the Ball” from her mother at the age of three. She drew much of her dance repertoire from tunes she heard her father play on the ranch where she grew up in the Apache country of the northeastern part of the state, and from country dances she attended as a girl. She won an Arizona state fiddling championship in 1926 and another in 1945, and signed this collection “Arizona’s Champion Fiddler.” Through the Depression she taught square dancing on the WPA music project, reportedly reaching as many as 900 pupils a week, and during the Second World War she taught servicemen stationed at camps and airbases around Phoenix. She also arranged the music for Lee Owens’s American Square Dances of the West and Southwest (1949) and Advanced Square Dance Figures of the West and Southwest (1950). She died in Glendale, Arizona, in 1979.

Named contributors, all credited in Ruth’s letter: Joe Boykin of Phoenix and John Stillman for the calling axioms and patter; Jerry Long of Boise, Idaho, for The Spinning Wheel, Double Star, and The Four Leaf Clover; Pat Pattison of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for Double the Dose. Stillman is also the dedicatee of “Bake Those Hoe Cakes Brown” on page 41.

Copy consulted: A former Seattle Public Library copy, call number M787.1 R932P, now held by the University of Oklahoma. Borrowed on interlibrary loan, September 2026. This copy carries pencil annotations in an unidentified hand, some of them erased and partially recoverable in photographs.