George Boswell Papers

George Worley Boswell (1919-1995), son of Rubye B. Worley and George Stone Boswell, was born on 29 March 1919 in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended David Lipscomb Junior College before enrolling in Vanderbilt. Boswell earned a B.A. in English from Vanderbilt University and M.A. from George Peabody College for Teachers in 1939. During this time, Boswell began collecting folk songs in conjunction with his doctoral research. He was briefly a high school teacher before being drafted into the Army's Signal Corps during WWII. When he returned from the war, he enrolled in Peabody College to obtain his PhD. While attending Peabody College, Boswell began collecting folk songs in conjunction with his doctoral research. His efforts produced some 800 songs from country and city folk alike, to amass what is regarded as a major anthology of Tennessee folk songs. He completed his PhD in 1951 and became a professor. Around this time, he married Emily Hall, a native of Gurley, Alabama, who was living in Nashville.

Boswell taught English at Austin Peay State University (Clarksville, Tennessee), Morehead State University (Kentucky) and the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1989 Professor Boswell retired from teaching. He maintained a lifelong interest in folk singing and music from a young age, possibly inspired by his two aunts who taught piano.

Boswell was a prolific writer. He and J. Russell Weaver published Fundamentals of Folk Literature in 1962. His journal articles include “The Kinds of Folksongs,” “Otherwise Unknown or Rare Ballads from the Tennessee Archives,” “A Shiloh Cante Fable,” “Three Tennessee Folksongs,” “Pitch: Musical and Verbal in Folksong,” “Mississippi Folk Names of Plants,” “Folk Recipes of the South,” and many others relating to folklore in Tennessee and Mississippi. He also contributed essays to the book Folksongs of Mississippi and Their Background. In 1997 noted music scholar, Dr. Charles K. Wolfe edited and annotated Boswell's fieldwork. The resulting volume, Folk Songs of Middle Tennessee: The George Boswell Collection, brought together for the first time those tunes most representative of the folk traditions of the region. Boswell also wrote prolifically and served for many years as the president of the Tennessee Folklore Society. Boswell died in Tupelo, Mississippi on 2 March 1995.