Viola Ruth's Pioner Western Folk Tunes
1948
Viola Ruth (1892-1979 lived in Arizona for the first half of the 20th century. She was an important dance fiddler and long-time state fiddle champion.

She published this collection of 130 tunes in 1948. Now to get them all transcribed ...

A lot of the tunes have numbers, but the numbering is a bit odd and can't be used to reproduce the tune order of the book. There are several "sets" of tunes that have just one number for a set. The tune files here have names of the form PPN_Tune_Title.abc, where PP is the 2-digit page name and N is the tune number on the page, and spaces in the titles are replaced with underscores (to make life easier for compuer software;-).

To handle the numbering that most of the tunes have, which is positioned to the left of the (indented) first staff, I've adopted the practice of using a V: line with a name= field containing the number. The tunes without a number are give a blank name to prevent ABC formatters from treating them as part of the previous tune. This gimmick does label each numbered tune as in the book, but it's not really what the V: header line was designed to do. The problem is that the publisher put the tune numbers in the position that (in orchestral and band music) is used for the voice/instrument name. If you extract just a few tunes from the collection, it's probably best to delete the V: lines, because they really have nothing to do with the tune.

If you see PWFT.ps or PWFT.pdf files here, they are temporary PostScript and PDF files created for proofreading. They'll disappear eventually. Feel free to download copies if you like. Note that they contain all in "info" lines, also for proofreading. In general, it's best to just downloat the .abc files. You can then reformat and print/display them as fits your needs, with the ABC tools of your choice.

Here's a tool to list the files and return them in various formats: Tune lister.