Archives West Finding Aid

The Austin and Alta Fife Fieldwork Collection is comprised of the original fieldwork (acetate discs, reel-to-reel field recordings and field notes) and slides gathered/taken by the Fife's between the 1940s and late 1970s. Using summer vacations and weekends, the Fifes traveled all over the west–most intensively in their native Utah–with a camping trailer, recording equipment, camera and stenographic materials to collect the folklife of the American West, including cowboy songs, Mormon folklore and slides of vernacular architecture. On their fieldtrips, typically, one of them would interview someone while the other took notes or operated a recording device. They also visited libraries throughout the west, taking notes and making copies of songs and stories housed in regional and archival collections. Austin Fife took the slide images.

The fieldwork collection includes the Fife Mormon Collection (Mormon folksongs and narratives), the Fife American Collection (a large body of cowboy and western folksongs and ballads, including collections from N. Howard Thorp, Charles A. Siringo, Laurence White (called songs in the register), extracts from The Pacific Northwest Farm Quad, extracts from The Edwin Ford Piper Collection, extracts from the Stella M. Hendren Collection, extracts from the John Lomax Papers, and extracts from the Robert W. Gordon Collection, and the Robert W. Gordon: Oregon Collection), the Fife Slide Collection of Western U.S. Vernacular Architecture (slides of western American folklife: hay derricks, gravestones, mail box supports, fences, etc.), and their original fieldwork tapes and collected commercial recordings, which are housed in their respective collections.

Alta Fife methodically organized the fieldwork collections, including creating cross referenced finding aids and metadata cards for each image. In 1966, the Fife’s deposited their extensive fieldwork collections at Utah State University Library. In 1972, the Library established the Fife Library of Western Folklore (later renamed the Fife Folklore Archives) under the administration of the Special Collections Department. A 1993 grant from the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission allowed for the transfer of the Fife Mormon and American fieldwork recordings from acetate discs and reel-to-reel tapes to archival reel-to-reel tapes for long term storage and cassette tapes for normal research use, thus assuring both the security and accessibility of the Fifes' extensive fieldwork recordings.

Copy two of the Fife's original fieldwork (FMC and FAC, series one) was transfered to Brigham Young University's William A. Wilson Folklore Archives, September 2005.