When John Donald Robb drove the dirt roads of northern New Mexico in the 1940s with a wire recorder on the back seat of his car, he was chasing something that professional musicologists in New York and Vienna did not believe still existed: living musical forms that had not changed materially since the sixteenth century. In the adobe-and-stone villages of the upper Río Grande watershed — in Córdova and Truchas and Abiquiú, in the Jémez Mountains and the Taos plateau, in the communities along the Chama River that were established when Shakespeare was still alive — he found elderly men and women singing romances, alabados, corridos, and décimas in melodic modes that belonged to the musical world of Renaissance Spain. He found them singing without accompaniment, or with a guitarrón or bajo sexto, or with nothing but the clap of hands and the stomp of feet. He found them singing in Spanish that preserved archaic vocabulary, grammatical forms, and pronunciations that educated Spaniards had abandoned centuries ago.
What Robb documented over four decades of fieldwork — more than 2,700 individual items, now housed at the University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research as the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music — is the most comprehensive record of a regional folk music tradition in the United States. It is also one of the most remarkable acts of cultural preservation in the history of American ethnomusicology. And the literature that documents it — from Robb's own massive 1980 compendium through the earlier folkloric studies of Espinosa and Campa, through the living-tradition documentation of Loeffler and Lamadrid — constitutes a collecting specialty of unusual depth and significance, still largely overlooked by collectors who focus on the better-known New Mexico genres of santos, pottery, or Western Americana.
This guide maps the full collecting market: the foundational scholarly works, the field recording documentation, the folk drama music, the corrido as political and historical document, the alabado as musical-literary tradition (as distinct from its devotional context, covered in my companion Death Customs pillar), and the modern trajectory from the viejitos of Robb's recordings to Al Hurricane's regional pop synthesis. It covers three tiers of the collector market — from common trade guides at modest value–25 through the mid-range Robb-Rael-Campa scholarly core at common reading copy prices–200 to the rare Stark 1969 and early Espinosa items at mid-range collectible prices–700 and above — with points of issue for key editions and strategic guidance for building a serious collection in this category.
Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred
John Donald Robb and the Great Compendium
John Donald Robb (1892–1989) came to New Mexico music from an unlikely direction: he was trained as a lawyer at Harvard, practiced briefly, then turned to music, earning a doctorate in composition at the Juilliard School and eventually a position on the UNM faculty. He became Dean of the UNM College of Fine Arts in 1942, the same year he began his fieldwork. That combination — institutional position at UNM, portable recording equipment, a car, and four decades of systematic collecting — produced an archive without parallel in the region.
Robb was not the first scholar to document New Mexico Hispanic folk music; Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa and Arthur L. Campa had both preceded him with important textual-literary studies. But he was the first to approach the music as an ethnomusicologist rather than a folklorist — concerned not just with the texts but with the melodies, the performance contexts, the voices, the instruments, the regional variation, and the musical-historical significance of what he was hearing. His wire recordings, and later his reel-to-reel tape recordings, preserve the actual sound of musicians who were performing traditions they had learned from parents and grandparents born in the mid-nineteenth century — a direct auditory link to the musical world of early American New Mexico.
John Donald Robb, Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self-Portrait of a People (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1980 first edition). The book is enormous: 879 pages, clothbound in the OU Press tan-and-brown institutional style, with a bibliography, discography, index of song titles, index of first lines, and musical transcriptions of the full corpus. Robb organizes the material by genre — romances (medieval ballads), corridos, alabados, inditas, décimas, villancicos (carols), children's songs, dance music — and within each genre by regional variant, textual type, and melodic family. The transcriptions use standard musical notation with guitar chord symbols; the scholarly apparatus traces the sources and variants of individual songs across the broader Hispano musical world from Spain through Mexico to New Mexico.
The book's subtitle — A Self-Portrait of a People — signals Robb's central argument: that the folk music of New Mexico Hispano communities is not a collection of amusing local curiosities but a coherent self-expression of a people's history, theology, social organization, emotional life, and aesthetic values. The corrido is not just a ballad; it is the community's newspaper, its courtroom, its memorial service, its political commentary, and its entertainment, all simultaneously. The alabado is not just a hymn; it is the community's primary vehicle for theological reflection, emotional processing of grief, and expression of devotion in a region where professional clergy were often absent for years at a time. The décima is not just a game; it is a sophisticated intellectual exercise that trained the mind, preserved the tradition, and established the social hierarchy of verbal skill.
Points of issue: The 1980 OU Press first edition is identified by its University of Oklahoma Press imprint on the spine and title page, its 1980 copyright date, and the absence of any subsequent printing statements on the copyright page. The cloth binding is tan-beige with brown lettering on the spine; the dust jacket — when present — reproduces a black-and-white photograph of a Hispano musician. The dust jacket is the key condition variable: the book is enormously heavy and the jacket is thin; most surviving copies have significant jacket wear, and truly fine-with-jacket copies are uncommon. An unsigned first in fine-with-jacket condition: respectable collectible value. Unsigned in near-fine cloth without jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Robb signed copies at UNM events and ethnomusicology conferences; his signature pool closed in 1989. Robb-signed first editions command serious collector territory.
The Robb compendium is not the book you read cover to cover; it is the book you consult, the way you consult a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Its value to collectors lies precisely in its comprehensiveness: if a New Mexico folk song genre, melody, or textual tradition is documented anywhere in published scholarship, Robb almost certainly has it. If a song surfaces in another context — in Loeffler's interviews, in Lamadrid's analysis, in a community festival program — Robb provides the transcription and the comparative analysis. No serious collection of New Mexico folk music literature is complete without it.
The Corrido: Folk Newspaper, Border Ballad, Community Document
In the Hispano communities of New Mexico, the corrido functioned as the primary medium of public information for events that mattered to the community but that no Anglo-American newspaper would cover. The death of a beloved community elder, the execution of a man whose guilt was contested, the flooding of a village acequia, the arrival of the railroad in a formerly isolated valley, the outrages committed by Anglo land speculators against Hispano families — these events generated corridos that traveled from village to village at the speed of a traveling musician, preserving the community's account of what happened against the official record that often told a different story.
The corrido's structure made it an ideal news medium. The octosyllabic quatrain format — four lines of eight syllables each, with the second and fourth lines rhyming — is memorizable even after a single hearing by a practiced singer. The narrative convention of third-person storytelling with direct quoted speech, character identification by name and place, and a temporal sequence (this happened, then this, then this) follows the same logic as journalism. The typical corrido opens with a formulaic stanza establishing the date and location, identifies the main characters, narrates the events, and closes with a despedida (farewell stanza) in which the singer addresses the audience directly, sometimes in the voice of the deceased. This structure is so consistent that a New Mexico corrido from 1880 and one from 1940 are immediately recognizable as belonging to the same genre by any listener familiar with the tradition.
The corrido's political dimension is most fully developed in the border ballad tradition documented by Américo Paredes (1915–1999), the University of Texas scholar whose landmark study With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (University of Texas Press, 1958) established the scholarly framework for understanding corridos as expressions of Hispano resistance to Anglo-American political and economic domination. Paredes's case study — the corrido of Gregorio Cortez, a Texas Tejano who shot a sheriff in self-defense in 1901 and became a heroic outlaw-fugitive in the corrido tradition — demonstrated that corridos were not simply folk entertainments but complex political statements that preserved the community's own version of events against the official Anglo narrative. Paredes's argument applies with direct force to New Mexico corridos of the land-grant era, the Lincoln County War period, and the political upheavals of the early territorial period: the corrido corpus is, in many instances, the only surviving record of the Hispano community's perspective on events that Anglo-authored histories narrate entirely from the Anglo viewpoint.
Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1958 first edition). This is the foundational work for understanding the corrido's political and social dimensions throughout the Greater Southwest, including New Mexico. Paredes was a UT Austin professor of English and anthropology of Texas-Mexican heritage; his work inaugurated a scholarly tradition of treating Mexican-American cultural production — corridos, folk tales, verbal art — as worthy of rigorous academic analysis on its own terms, rather than as regional curiosities. The 1958 UT Press first edition with dust jacket is a Tier 1–2 collector target at respectable collectible value in fine condition; signed Paredes copies (his pool closed in 1999) command serious collector territory. The book has been continuously in print in various UT Press editions and is readily available in paperback at common reading copy range making the scholarly content accessible; the first edition is the collector target.
Arthur L. Campa, Spanish Folk-Poetry in New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946 first edition). Campa (1905–1978) was born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, of New Mexico Hispano heritage, and spent his career at the University of Denver and earlier at UNM, documenting the folk poetry traditions of the New Mexico Hispano community with the authority of an insider. His 1946 UNM Press monograph covers the corrido, décima, romance, and associated forms, with textual analysis and historical context. This is the first serious scholarly monograph specifically devoted to New Mexico Hispano folk poetry, and its 1946 publication predates Paredes by twelve years. The UNM Press 1946 first hardcover is a Tier 1 collector target at respectable collectible value in fine condition; good reading copies without jacket available at solid mid-range collectible value.
Campa's later work extended and deepened the corrido analysis. His Hispanic Culture in the Southwest (University of Oklahoma Press, 1979) is a synthetic survey of Hispano cultural contributions to the American Southwest — music, folk drama, folk art, cuisine, architecture — that situates the corrido within the broader cultural landscape. Less specialized than the 1946 UNM volume but more accessible, it is the standard introductory reference for collectors new to this category. The 1979 OU Press first hardcover in fine condition commands solid mid-range collectible value; paperback first at common reading copy range.
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Juan B. Rael and the Alabado as Musical-Literary Tradition
The alabado enters this collecting guide in its capacity as musical-literary tradition — as a body of text and melody that constitutes the most sustained creative achievement of the New Mexico Hispano oral-literary world. Its devotional and funerary dimensions are covered in the companion Death Customs pillar; here the focus is on the alabado as a musical genre: its sources in medieval Spanish religious poetry, its melodic structures, its preservation of archaic musical practices, and its specific New Mexico development.
The Spanish Catholic devotional hymn tradition that produced the alabado reaches back to the medieval cantigas — the Galician-Portuguese songs in honor of the Virgin Mary collected by King Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth century — and to the broader tradition of vernacular religious verse that the Council of Trent (1545–1563) simultaneously encouraged (vernacular devotional practice) and constrained (by limiting the use of non-liturgical music in formal worship). The result was a rich tradition of semi-official devotional music that circulated outside the liturgy proper: the villancico (Christmas carol), the romance espiritual (spiritual ballad), and the alabado — songs that could be sung at home, at the velorio, at community gatherings, and in the morada without requiring a priest's presence or a church building.
When this tradition arrived in New Mexico with the Franciscan missionaries of the 1598 Oñate expedition and the subsequent colonial settlers, it entered a musical environment unlike any other in the Spanish colonial world: a remote, high-altitude frontier with no professional musicians, no music printing, no conservatory training, and no institutional mechanism for musical updating. The alabado texts and melodies that colonists and missionaries brought in 1598, and those that arrived with subsequent waves of settlers through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were passed down orally from generation to generation with the fidelity that oral tradition maintains and the gradual drift that inevitably characterizes transmission without a written score to anchor the melody.
Juan B. Rael, The New Mexico Alabado (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1951 first and only edition). This slim but dense monograph — under 200 pages — contains the musical-literary analysis of over two hundred alabado texts collected by Rael across New Mexico and Colorado Hispano communities between the 1930s and 1950s. Rael was himself of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, Hispano heritage, a Stanford Romance Languages PhD who returned repeatedly to the communities of his youth to document what his elders were singing. The musical transcriptions in the book use standard notation and preserve the modal scales — particularly the Dorian mode (a minor scale with a raised sixth) and Mixolydian mode (a major scale with a flattened seventh) — that are characteristic of pre-Baroque European music and that survive in New Mexico alabados long after they disappeared from mainstream Catholic music elsewhere in the Americas.
Rael's textual analysis traces individual alabado texts to sources in peninsular Spanish devotional poetry — the Coplas de manrique, the Marian poetry of the sixteenth century, the colonial Mexican religious theater — demonstrating that the New Mexico alabado tradition is not an isolated folk development but a branch of the broader Spanish-language religious poetic tradition, maintained with remarkable textual fidelity through oral transmission over three centuries. This argument — that New Mexico folk culture is not a degenerated or simplified version of its Spanish sources but a faithful preservation of those sources in a protective geographic environment — runs through all of the best scholarship in this collecting category, from Rael through Campa through Robb.
Points of issue: The 1951 Stanford University Press first edition is the only edition; no subsequent Stanford printing was issued. The book is bound in dark blue-gray cloth with gilt spine lettering; no dust jacket was published. The principal condition variables are library stamps and markings (most surviving copies carry them) and dampstaining or foxing (common in copies that spent decades in basement or attic storage). A clean copy without library markings in near-fine cloth condition: respectable collectible value. Signed copies — extremely scarce given Rael's limited public circulation as a Stanford academic and his 1993 death — command the high three-figure to low four-figure range.
The Rael volume is most productively read alongside the recordings that Robb made of the same tradition: the Robb Archive contains alabado recordings that directly correspond to texts Rael transcribed, and the combination of Rael's textual-musical analysis and Robb's audio documentation gives a fuller picture of the tradition than either source provides alone. For the collector who cannot access the UNM archive recordings directly, the Loeffler volume (described below) provides the next best approximation through its CD companion recordings of elderly masters singing in the living tradition.
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa and the Spanish Origins Question
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa (1880–1958) was the founding figure of New Mexico Hispano folklore studies — the scholar who established, against the prevailing scholarly skepticism of his time, that the folk traditions of New Mexico Hispano communities were not debased survivals of a moribund culture but sophisticated, living extensions of the great tradition of Spanish-language folk culture reaching back to medieval Iberia. Born in Carnero, Colorado, of New Mexico Hispano heritage, he earned a PhD at the University of Chicago and spent his career at Stanford University, where he founded the department of Romance Languages and trained several generations of students in the methods of comparative folklore and Romance philology.
Espinosa's central methodological contribution was the comparative approach: rather than treating New Mexico folk songs, tales, and proverbs as isolated regional phenomena, he traced them to their Iberian and colonial Mexican sources, demonstrating that the New Mexico variants were not degraded forms of Spanish originals but legitimate branches of a living oral tradition with roots in the medieval romancero, the Golden Age lyric, and the colonial mission theater. This argument had profound implications for the cultural self-understanding of the New Mexico Hispano community: it meant that their folk culture was not a marginal curiosity but a genuine link to one of the world's great literary traditions.
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest: Traditional Spanish Folk Literature in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1985, posthumous first book edition). This volume, edited by J. Manuel Espinosa (Aurelio's son, also a distinguished scholar of New Mexico colonial history), collects and synthesizes Espinosa's decades of scholarship on New Mexico folklore into a single comprehensive treatment, organized by genre: folktales, ballads (romances and corridos), proverbs, riddles, and children's rhymes. The musical dimension is addressed primarily through the ballad chapters, where Espinosa's comparison of New Mexico romance and corrido texts to their peninsular Spanish sources is the most authoritative analysis in the literature.
The book's posthumous character reflects the fact that Espinosa's major work appeared in journal form throughout his career — in the Journal of American Folklore, the Romanic Review, the Revue Hispanique, and his own edited volumes — rather than in a single synthetic monograph. The 1985 OU Press volume, assembled by J. Manuel Espinosa from the published corpus, is both a scholarly convenience (bringing the essential Espinosa arguments into a single accessible volume) and an independent publication that establishes the synthetic framework his individual articles could not provide. For collectors, it is the essential single-volume Espinosa acquisition.
Points of issue: The 1985 OU Press first and only hardcover edition is identified by its University of Oklahoma Press imprint, its 1985 copyright date, and J. Manuel Espinosa's name as editor on the title page. The dust jacket features a decorative border and a sepia-tone photograph appropriate to the subject. Surviving copies in fine-with-jacket condition are uncommon — the book had a limited academic print run and the jacket is thin. Fine-with-jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Good reading copy without jacket: the common reading copy to mid-range zone. No paperback edition was issued.
Espinosa's earlier publications — particularly his Studies in New Mexican Spanish (three volumes, Bulletin of the University of New Mexico, 1909–1914–1917), his contributions to the Journal of American Folklore beginning in 1907, and the New Mexico Folklore Record volumes in which he published extensively — constitute a pre-1940 scholarly corpus of considerable collector interest. These pre-war journal volumes and university bulletins appear infrequently in the trade at the mid-range collectible zone per volume depending on condition and content. The 1985 OU Press posthumous volume is the collector's standard reference; the pre-war publications are the trophy items for the most specialized collectors.
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Richard Stark and the Music of the Folk Plays
The three great folk drama traditions of New Mexico Hispano culture — Los Pastores (the Christmas shepherd play), Las Posadas (the Christmas inn-seeking drama), and Los Comanches (the historical battle drama reenacting Hispano-Comanche conflict) — each have their own musical tradition, distinct from the corrido, alabado, and décima of the village concert tradition but intimately related to them through shared melodic vocabulary and performance context. The music of the folk plays has never received sustained attention from mainstream ethnomusicologists; it has remained a regional specialty known primarily to Museum of New Mexico researchers and a handful of UNM folklorists.
Richard Stark, working as a staff ethnomusicologist at the Museum of New Mexico in the late 1960s, produced the only comprehensive study of this music: Music of the Spanish Folk Plays in New Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1969). Stark's methodology involved attending and recording performances of all three folk play traditions across northern New Mexico communities — each of which maintained its own locally transmitted version of the play and its associated music — transcribing the melodies, and analyzing the musical relationships among variants. His transcriptions reveal that the folk play musical tradition draws on the same modal-scale melodic resources as the alabado and romance traditions, uses similar unison and call-and-response performance conventions, and has similarly deep roots in the colonial-era musical world that Robb and Espinosa document from other angles.
Richard Stark, Music of the Spanish Folk Plays in New Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1969 first and only edition). The book is physically unusual for a scholarly publication: published in a large-format stiff paper wraps (not clothbound), with musical transcriptions in standard notation, black-and-white photographs of folk drama performances, and a text that balances scholarly analysis with practical documentation. Stark provides complete melodic transcriptions for the major song units in each of the three folk drama traditions, with comparative analysis showing melodic relationships among community variants. The book is not widely known outside specialist circles, and its institutional publisher (Museum of New Mexico Press, operating from the Palace of the Governors, with limited national trade distribution in 1969) kept it from reaching the broader market that a Robb or Campa publication would have found.
The folk play musical tradition that Stark documents has continued to evolve since 1969, and subsequent scholarship — particularly Lamadrid's work on Los Comanches in Hermanitos Comanchitos (UNM Press 2003) — has extended the analysis. But Stark's musical transcriptions remain the primary published source for the melodies themselves; Lamadrid's work, however sophisticated its cultural analysis, relies on Stark for the ethnomusicological foundation. No subsequent publication has superseded or replaced the 1969 Stark volume for its core contribution: the systematic musical transcription of the folk play repertoire.
Points of issue: Published in stiff paper wraps with no hardcover edition; no dust jacket was issued. The cover design uses a simple typographic treatment with a decorative border. The Museum of New Mexico Press imprint is identified on the title page and copyright page; the 1969 date is the key identifier. No subsequent editions or reprints were issued. Condition variables: the paper covers are vulnerable to wear, creasing, and spine cracking; internally the paper has toned to amber in most surviving copies (typical of 1960s institutional-press paper stock). A clean, tight copy with bright cover in very good condition: respectable collectible value. A reading copy with wear and toning: the mid-range collectible zone. The book is the rarest title in this collecting category's core bibliography.
Enrique Lamadrid and the Indo-Hispano Musical Complex
The musical traditions of New Mexico do not divide cleanly between Hispano and Native American; the centuries of coexistence, conflict, captivity exchange, and cultural borrowing between the Hispano villages and the Pueblo communities produced a genuinely shared musical-cultural landscape in which elements of both traditions appear in the other's ceremonial life. The Matachines dance — performed at both Pueblo communities and Hispano villages across northern New Mexico, documented in detail in my fiestas and cultural festivals guide — is perhaps the most striking example: a ceremony whose origins are contested (scholars variously derive it from pre-Columbian Mesoamerican ritual, from Spanish colonial theater, or from the encounter between the two in the mission context) that is performed simultaneously by Pueblo and Hispano communities as an indigenous ceremony of their own.
Enrique Lamadrid is the scholar who has most fully developed the analytical framework for understanding this Indo-Hispano cultural complex. His Hermanitos Comanchitos (UNM Press 2003) focuses on Los Comanches — the folk drama reenacting the Hispano-Comanche military confrontation of the late eighteenth century — but its intellectual contribution ranges far beyond that single genre to address the entire system of ceremonial forms through which Hispano communities process their historical relationships with both Native peoples and the broader colonial situation.
Enrique Lamadrid, Hermanitos Comanchitos: Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2003 first edition). The book comes with a companion CD of field recordings — performances of Los Comanches, the Matachines, and related ceremonial music — that makes it, alongside the Loeffler volume, one of the two published New Mexico folk music books that allow the reader to hear as well as read. Lamadrid's textual analysis situates the music within the broader cultural argument: that the Hispano folk drama tradition, including its music, encodes the community's processing of historical trauma (the captivity system, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the raiding-and-counter-raiding cycle with the Comanche, Navajo, and Apache) through ceremonial reenactment and symbolic resolution. The music is not incidental to this argument; it is the vehicle through which the community's emotional memory is activated and processed. The melodies Lamadrid transcribes and records are the same modal-scale, unison-singing tradition that Robb documented from other angles — but now in the context of living ceremonial performance rather than archival collection.
The 2003 UNM Press first trade paperback with companion CD is the standard working reference at the common reading copy to mid-range zone in fine condition; fine copies retaining the original CD in sleeve command premium over copies from which the CD has been separated. A small hardcover printing was also issued in the academic edition series; hardcover first at solid mid-range collectible value. Lamadrid is active as a scholar and teacher; signed copies are available through UNM bookstore appearances and academic conference sales at modest premium.
Lamadrid's collaborative work with photographer Miguel Gandert — particularly Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2000) — provides the visual complement to the Hermanitos Comanchitos textual analysis: a photographic documentation of living folk drama performances, Matachines dances, velorio and morada ceremonies, and village festival music that gives the reader the visual context Lamadrid's text describes. The Gandert photographs are extraordinary documents of the living tradition in the late twentieth century. Museum of NM Press 2000 first in fine condition: solid mid-range collectible value.
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Jack Loeffler and the Living Masters
By the time John Donald Robb completed his collecting in the 1970s, the musicians he had first recorded in the 1940s were gone — their voices preserved on magnetic tape in the UNM archive, but the living tradition they represented thinned by television, radio, migration to cities, and the general Americanization that the postwar decades brought to even the most traditional northern New Mexico communities. The question of what the living tradition looked like in the late twentieth century — who was still singing the old forms, how they had learned them, what they understood about what they were doing — was taken up by Jack Loeffler (born 1936), a New Mexico-based aural historian, radio producer, and writer who spent decades recording oral histories and field recordings across the Southwest.
Jack Loeffler, La Música de los Viejitos: Hispano Folk Music of the Río Grande del Norte (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1999 first edition). The book is organized around biographical profiles of elderly Hispano musicians — the viejitos (old ones) of the title — who maintained the folk music tradition into the 1980s and 1990s. Each profile combines Loeffler's interview documentation (often conducted in Spanish with translation) with musical transcriptions from Loeffler's field recordings, historical context situating the individual within the broader tradition, and photographs of the musician in his or her community environment. The companion CD, packaged in a sleeve bound into the book, provides actual recordings of the musicians profiled — many of whom were in their seventies, eighties, or nineties at the time of recording, and most of whom have since died.
The book's central subject figure is Cleofes Vigil (1890s–1980s), a Taos elder and master of the alabado tradition who had learned the Penitente morada repertoire from his father and grandfather, and who became one of the last individuals with a comprehensive, living command of the full Penitente musical tradition. Vigil's recordings in the UNM archive and in Loeffler's field documentation represent an extraordinary preservation: a direct auditory link to the morada singing tradition of the nineteenth century, preserved in the memory of a man who learned it as a child before the automobile, the radio, or the telephone reached Taos. Other musicians profiled in the Loeffler volume include accordion players, guitarrón masters, folk drama singers, and décima improvisers — a cross-section of the tradition in its twilight generations.
The 1999 UNM Press first trade paperback with companion CD is the most accessible entry point in the core bibliography of this collecting category: well-designed, richly illustrated, readable in non-specialist prose, and complete with an audio component that makes the music audible. Fine condition with CD intact: solid mid-range collectible value. Without CD: common reading copy range. A hardcover edition was not issued in the standard trade. Loeffler-signed copies are available through his public appearances and correspondence at modest premium.
Loeffler's broader body of work — his recordings for National Public Radio, his documentary film collaborations, and his book Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts (Harbinger House 1989) — places the New Mexico folk music documentation within a larger context of Southwestern environmental and cultural advocacy. His perspective on the viejitos is not merely musicological but humanistic: he was documenting not only what they sang but who they were, what their world looked like, and what would be lost when they were gone. This perspective gives the Loeffler volume an emotional directness that the more academic Robb, Rael, and Campa volumes lack.
The Indita: Songs Between Two Worlds
The indita genre occupies a unique and uncomfortable position in the New Mexico folk music tradition. These songs — the name simply means "little Indian woman" in its most literal translation, though the gender of the central figure varies — arose from the centuries of Hispano-Native contact that included both violent conflict and deep cultural interpenetration. Some inditas are laments for captive Hispano women taken in Comanche or Apache raids; some appear to be from the perspective of the captive herself; some celebrate Hispano military victories over Native raiders; some are apparently tender portraits of a romanticized Native woman that carry, on closer reading, darker subtexts of possession, othering, and colonial fantasy.
The genre's musical character is distinctive: many inditas use musical elements that scholars have identified as borrowed from Native musical practice — pentatonic scales, rhythmic patterns associated with Pueblo and Plains Indian ceremonial music, call-and-response structures that differ from the standard Hispano folk song conventions. Whether these musical borrowings represent genuine cross-cultural influence (Hispano communities were deeply enmeshed with Native communities through the captivity system, trade relationships, and long-term intermarriage) or a stylistic convention signaling "Indian-ness" to a Hispano audience is a question the scholarly literature has not fully resolved.
Robb's Hispanic Folk Music compendium includes a substantial indita corpus — among the most important in the published literature — with transcriptions that reveal the full range of the genre's musical diversity. Lamadrid's analysis in Hermanitos Comanchitos provides the cultural-historical framework for understanding what the inditas were documenting: the captivity system (in which Hispano and Native captives circulated through raiding and counter-raiding, with New Mexico serving as a major market for the trade in human beings from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century, a history intertwined with the Comanchero trade), the complex emotional register of the captor-captive relationship, and the Hispano community's ambivalent construction of Native peoples as simultaneously terrifying enemies, trading partners, labor sources, and objects of romantic projection.
For collectors, the indita is a reminder that folk music is not a morally uncomplicated record. It documents what communities felt and believed, including feelings and beliefs that contemporary perspectives would find troubling. The scholarly literature on the indita — Robb's transcriptions, Lamadrid's analysis, the comparative work in Paredes and Campa — provides the tools for engaging with this complexity honestly.
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The Décima: Verbal Art and the Trovador Tradition
Of all the folk poetry forms in the New Mexico Hispano tradition, the décima is the one that most directly demonstrates the tradition's connection to the high literary culture of Renaissance Spain. The form — ten octosyllabic lines in the rhyme scheme ABBAACCDDC, named for the decade (ten lines) of the verse — was codified in Spain in the early sixteenth century and became the standard vehicle for improvised public verse throughout the Spanish colonial world. In Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and the Philippines, the décima became the signature form of the folk poet: the verbal athlete who could improvise on any theme, match wits with a rival singer in public, and demonstrate the same kind of mental agility and technical mastery that athletic competitions demonstrate in the physical sphere.
In New Mexico, the décima tradition was carried by the trovadores — the village trovadors, not professional entertainers but ordinary community members with exceptional gifts for verbal improvisation. The topada — the formal décima duel in which two trovadores improvise alternating ten-line verses on a theme proposed by the audience — was a community entertainment and a competitive sport simultaneously, drawing audiences who could evaluate the technical merits of each verse and appreciate the subtle barbs and compliments embedded in the improvised text. Campa's Spanish Folk-Poetry in New Mexico (UNM 1946) provides the most extended published analysis of the New Mexico décima tradition, with textual examples and discussion of the topada format; Robb's compendium includes musical transcriptions of décima performances recorded in the field.
The décima's literary significance extends beyond New Mexico: the form is one of the connections between New Mexico folk culture and the golden-age Spanish literary tradition of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (who wrote décimas as part of her literary production). When a trovador in a northern New Mexico village improvised a décima in the mid-twentieth century, he was working in a poetic form that Lope de Vega used in the early seventeenth century — a continuity of formal tradition across four centuries and two continents that the New Mexico folk music literature makes visible.
Vicente Mendoza and the Mexican Comparative Framework
No understanding of New Mexico Hispano folk music is complete without the comparative context provided by the broader Mexican folk song tradition, and no single work provides that context more comprehensively than the scholarship of Vicente T. Mendoza (1894–1964), Mexico's greatest ethnomusicologist and the author of the definitive study of the Mexican folk song repertoire.
Mendoza spent his career at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) documenting Mexican folk music with the same systematic comprehensiveness that Robb brought to the New Mexico field. His monumental La Canción Mexicana: Ensayo de Clasificación y Antología (UNAM, Mexico City, 1961) is the Mexican equivalent of the Robb volume: an encyclopedic classification and anthology of Mexican folk song genres — corrido, ranchera, canción, son, jarabe, chilena, huapango, and their subgenres — with textual transcriptions, musical notation, and comparative analysis. For collectors of New Mexico music books, the Mendoza volume is valuable as the essential comparative reference: when Robb identifies a New Mexico corrido variant, or when Campa traces a décima text to its Mexican antecedents, the Mendoza volume provides the baseline against which the New Mexico variants are measured.
Vicente T. Mendoza, La Canción Mexicana (UNAM, Mexico City, 1961 first edition). Published in Mexico City in a massive academic format, this volume is rarely encountered in the American book trade and is virtually unknown to American collectors outside specialist circles. Mexican university press publications of the 1960s had limited distribution to U.S. book dealers, and even most academic libraries in the American Southwest do not hold it. When a copy surfaces in the American trade — at a southwestern estate sale, through a dealer in Mexican and Latin American books, or at a Texas or California antiquarian book fair — it can be acquired for the mid-range collectible zone in good condition. Its scholarly value far exceeds that market price. Collectors who encounter it should acquire it without hesitation.
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Al Hurricane and the Modern New Mexico Sound
Albert Sanchez (1932–2017), who performed as Al Hurricane, spent six decades building and performing a sound that was uniquely New Mexico — a synthesis of the Hispano folk tradition that the scholarly literature documents and the commercial popular music genres (country, rock and roll, norteño, cumbia) that reached the state through radio and record distribution in the postwar decades. He was not a folk musician in the preservationist sense that Robb or Loeffler sought; he was a commercial entertainer who happened to be deeply rooted in the musical world his grandparents knew. His arrangements of traditional corridos and rancheras, his original compositions in the Hispano folk idiom, and his long career as the dominant figure in New Mexico's regional music scene made him the primary bridge between the old tradition and the contemporary New Mexico Hispano musical audience.
Al Hurricane's relationship to the scholarly literature is indirect but real. Loeffler's La Música de los Viejitos situates him as a contemporary figure in the concluding sections of the book, drawing a line from Cleofes Vigil's morada alabados to Al Hurricane's dance-hall adaptations of the same melodic tradition. That line — from the unaccompanied morada singing of the nineteenth century to the amplified corridos of the Albuquerque ballroom circuit in the 1960s and 1970s — is the essential narrative of New Mexico Hispano musical continuity, and it runs through the book literature of this collecting category from Rael's 1951 Stanford monograph to Loeffler's 1999 UNM volume.
The book literature on Al Hurricane remains thin. No full biography or scholarly monograph has been published as of this writing, though newspaper archives (particularly the Albuquerque Journal coverage of his career from the 1950s through his 2017 death) and liner notes to his many albums and compilation releases provide the primary documentation. For collectors, the vinyl record market is more developed than the book market in this sub-category: Al Hurricane 45 rpm singles on Hurricane Records from the 1960s, and his early LP releases, are the analog-era collector targets. The liner notes to these recordings sometimes provide biographical and musical context that constitutes the most substantial published treatment of his work available outside newspaper archives.
The Robb Archive and the Problem of Access
The great limitation of collecting in the New Mexico folk music literature is the gap between the book record and the audio record. The most important single resource in this field is not a book: it is the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music, housed at the UNM Center for Southwest Research in Albuquerque, containing thousands of field recordings made between the 1940s and 1970s. This archive is the sound that the book literature describes — the actual voices of the viejitos, the actual melodies in the modal scales, the actual performance contexts (a kitchen table, a church hall, a morada, a dirt-floor sala) that the books analyze.
For most of the archive's history, access required a visit to the UNM reading room. Digitization projects, supported by NEH grants and UNM Special Collections funding, have progressively made archive materials available online through the UNM Digital Repository; as of 2025, a substantial portion of the Robb Archive recordings is accessible through the repository interface. But the full archive — including many items recorded on fragile early magnetic media — remains partially accessible and requires institutional coordination for full research access.
For collectors, this situation creates an important practical point: the books that describe the archive — the Robb compendium, the Rael monograph, the Loeffler volume with its CD companion — are not substitutes for the archive but guides to it. A collector who acquires the complete book literature of this category and then spends time with the UNM archive recordings will understand New Mexico Hispano folk music in a way that no amount of reading alone can provide. The books are the map; the archive is the territory.
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The Three-Tier Collector Market: Prices, Points of Issue, and Strategy
The collector market for New Mexico Hispano music and folk song literature is smaller than the markets for santos, pottery, or Western Americana, which creates genuine opportunity: foundational scholarly works can be acquired at prices that their intellectual significance does not justify, and the most important volumes appear underpriced in the hands of dealers who do not specialize in ethnomusicology or New Mexico folklore.
Tier 1 — Rare and high-value (upper mid-range to serious collector territory): The Stark Music of the Spanish Folk Plays (Museum of NM Press 1969) in fine stiff-wraps condition: respectable collectible value — the rarest standard reference in the core bibliography, with the smallest known surviving population of clean copies. Juan B. Rael The New Mexico Alabado (Stanford UP 1951) in near-fine cloth without library markings: respectable collectible value; Rael-signed (pool closed 1993): the high three-figure to low four-figure range. Arthur L. Campa Spanish Folk-Poetry in New Mexico (UNM Press 1946) first hardcover in fine condition: respectable collectible value. Signed Robb Hispanic Folk Music (OU Press 1980) first edition: serious collector territory (pool closed 1989). Pre-1940 Espinosa journal publications and University of New Mexico Bulletins containing his early folklore studies: the mid-range collectible zone per item depending on content and condition.
Tier 2 — Mid-range scholarly (the mid-range collectible zone): John Donald Robb Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest (OU Press 1980) unsigned first edition in fine-or-near-fine cloth with intact dust jacket: respectable collectible value; without jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest (OU Press 1985) first in fine-with-jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Enrique Lamadrid Hermanitos Comanchitos (UNM Press 2003) first trade paperback with companion CD intact: solid mid-range collectible value. Jack Loeffler La Música de los Viejitos (UNM Press 1999) first trade paperback with companion CD: solid mid-range collectible value. Arthur L. Campa Hispanic Culture in the Southwest (OU Press 1979) first hardcover in fine condition with jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Américo Paredes With His Pistol in His Hand (UT Press 1958) first edition with jacket: respectable collectible value; paperback working copy: common reading copy range. Vicente Mendoza La Canción Mexicana (UNAM 1961) — rarely seen in the U.S. trade, but available when encountered for the mid-range collectible zone.
Tier 3 — Common modern guides (common reading copy range): Popular corrido and ranchera CD compilations with liner notes; contemporary folk song anthologies; UNM Press and Museum of NM Press paperback reprints of Campa and Espinosa essays; general New Mexico music history overviews; Al Hurricane commercial compilation releases and liner booklets; commercially produced corrido lyrics collections. These are the working references and cultural-moment documents that belong in a comprehensive subject collection without constituting collector targets themselves.
Market intelligence for this category: The Robb 1980 OU Press first is the most consistently underpriced significant book in this market. Dealers who specialize in Western Americana or general used books routinely misprice it at common reading copy range unaware of its scholarly significance. A collector who recognizes it at an estate sale or in a thrift store can acquire the most important single volume in New Mexico Hispano music literature for a fraction of its proper market value. The Stark 1969 Museum of NM Press volume, by contrast, is accurately priced when it surfaces — the institutional provenance of the Museum of New Mexico Press imprint and the 1969 date are recognizable signals to regional specialists — and clean copies are genuinely scarce. The Rael 1951 Stanford is frequently underpriced as well, for the same reason as the Robb: its slim scholarly appearance does not signal its importance to generalist dealers.
Building the Collection: A Strategic Framework
The New Mexico Hispano music collecting specialty rewards a genre-based organizational approach. The literature divides into five overlapping sub-libraries:
The comprehensive musical reference sub-library is anchored by Robb's Hispanic Folk Music (OU Press 1980) — the single indispensable volume — supplemented by Stark's Music of the Spanish Folk Plays (Museum of NM Press 1969) for the folk drama repertoire. These two volumes together provide the transcribed musical record against which all other collecting in the category is measured.
The corrido and folk poetry sub-library runs from Espinosa's foundational comparative work (OU Press 1985 posthumous, supplemented by his journal publications) through Campa's New Mexico-specific analysis (UNM Press 1946 and OU Press 1979) to Paredes's political-cultural framework (UT Press 1958). These three scholars define the corrido tradition from three complementary angles: Espinosa (origins in peninsular Spain), Campa (New Mexico development), Paredes (political and social function on the border).
The alabado and devotional music sub-library is anchored by Rael's New Mexico Alabado (Stanford UP 1951) as the textual-musical reference, supplemented by the Weigle and Brown volumes in the companion Death Customs collecting category for the devotional context.
The living tradition sub-library centers on Loeffler's La Música de los Viejitos (UNM Press 1999) — the last documentation of the tradition in the hands of its elderly masters — and Lamadrid's Hermanitos Comanchitos (UNM Press 2003) for the Indo-Hispano ceremonial music dimension. Both come with companion CDs that allow the collector to hear the tradition the texts describe.
The Mexican comparative sub-library requires the Mendoza La Canción Mexicana (UNAM 1961) as the baseline for understanding what New Mexico folk music variants are variants of — the Mexican folk song tradition that New Mexico's geographic and political isolation preserved, transformed, and in some genres uniquely developed.
A complete working collection — all five sub-libraries in good reading condition — can be assembled for the high three-figure to low four-figure range in current market conditions. A collector-grade version (fine or near-fine copies, original jackets or wraps where applicable, companion CDs intact) would require five-figure territory depending on the condition of the Robb first and the availability of the Stark 1969. A trophy-level version — signed Robb first, signed Rael, fine Stark 1969 in exceptional wraps condition, fine Paredes 1958 first with jacket — would require five-figure territory and considerable patience.
The book fairs and estate sale circuit of northern New Mexico — Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Española — are the most productive sourcing channels. Online platforms (AbeBooks, ABAA dealer sites) are useful for the better-known titles (Robb, Lamadrid, Loeffler) but rarely surface the Stark 1969 or pre-1950 Espinosa and Campa items in fine condition. The most productive sourcing strategy for the trophy items involves relationships with regional specialist dealers and attention to estate sales in communities with historical connections to UNM academic life — the estates of retired professors, archivists, and museum staff frequently yield precisely the kind of carefully preserved scholarly volumes that form the core of this collecting specialty.
The Músical Legacy and What Is Still Unwritten
The book literature of New Mexico Hispano music is substantial and, in the work of Robb, Rael, Campa, Espinosa, Stark, Loeffler, and Lamadrid, genuinely distinguished — a body of scholarly work that has produced analysis and documentation of regional stature comparable to the best regional folk music scholarship anywhere in the United States. But it is also incomplete in ways that define the frontier of the collecting specialty and signal where future scholarship will appear.
The biography of John Donald Robb has not been written. The man who spent four decades documenting New Mexico's folk music tradition, who produced the definitive compendium of that tradition, and who preserved thousands of voices that would otherwise have been lost deserves a full scholarly biography; none exists. The archive processing at UNM continues; digitization projects bring more recordings online; but the synthetic biographical and intellectual account of Robb's project remains unwritten.
Al Hurricane's musical legacy has not received monograph-length scholarly treatment. The Albuquerque Journal archives provide a journalistic record; oral histories with family members and collaborators exist in various forms; but the full scholarly account of how Al Hurricane synthesized the folk tradition with commercial popular music to create a distinctively New Mexico sound — and what that synthesis meant for the preservation and transformation of the tradition — is still to be written.
The female voice in the New Mexico folk music tradition is significantly underrepresented in the existing literature. Women were central performers in the alabado tradition (the rezadora, the female prayer leader at the velorio) and in the domestic music of the household, but the published documentation focuses overwhelmingly on male trovadores, corrido composers, and folk drama performers. The gender dimensions of who performed what, in what contexts, and how gender-specific repertoires developed within the broader tradition is a scholarly gap that future work will need to address.
The current collecting situation — with genuinely important scholarly works underpriced and underappreciated, the archive progressively more accessible through digitization, and a growing scholarly community at UNM and elsewhere interested in the tradition — suggests that this is precisely the moment to build a serious collection in this category. The books that will be recognized as the essential bibliography of New Mexico Hispano musical culture a generation from now are on the shelves and in the estate sales today, at prices that future collectors will find extraordinary.