Southern Tepehuan songs and stories originally recorded on wire by John Alden Mason in Xoconostle and Durango, Mexico in Februrary 1948, with consultants Gerónimo Aguilar and Pedro Aguilar. Music includes mitote songs and some traditional and popular songs. Stories include autobiographical stories and numerous unidentified texts. Mason's trip to the Tepehuan Indians in Mexico was sponsored in part by the American Philosophical Society and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.

Northern Tepehuan songs and stories originally recorded on wire by John Alden Mason in 1951, 1956, and 1958 Numerous short songs, folkloric and unidentified stories, description of pottery-making, conversation in Spanish on indigenous peoples, and texts and speech in the Macoba dialect of Pima Bajo. Recorded in Baborigame (Chihuahua,) Hermosillo, and Onavas (Sonora.) Tepehuan consultants are Gerónimo Aguilar, Andrés Carrillo, Antonio Carrillo, Celestina Carrillo, Dolores Carrillo, Juan Carrillo, Lorenzo Carrillo, Carolina Chaparro de Carrillo, Catalina Carrillo De Onteveros, Dolores Molina, and Julio Estrella. The Pima Bajo consultant is Nacho Lucero Coyote. Some material was recorded by David M. Brugge or Burton Bascom.

The material in the collection is an assembly of unrelated recording collections made by multiple collectors. This collection consists of recordings on wire or phonograph discs sent by the APS Library to the Library of Congress in December 1970 in exchange for duplication of the material on to archival reel-to-reel tapes. The original formats are housed at the Library of Congress.

An archaeological anthropologist and linguist, John Alden Mason spent the majority of his career at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Penn in 1907, Mason received a doctorate at Berkeley (1911) for his ethnographic work on the Salinan Indians of California, but his diverse interests in later years ran the gamut from Puerto Rican folklore to Piman languages and cultures (including Pima, Papago, Pima Bajo, Northern and Southern Tepehuan, and Tepecano), Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology, and the languages of South American Indians. Mason was curator of the University Museum at Penn from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. The Mason Papers include both in-coming and outgoing correspondence, linguistic material, notes, and photographs relating to Mason's work in the southwestern U.S., northern Mexico, and South America. Centered on the years after Mason's return to Philadelphia in 1926, the collection covers all aspects of Mason's professional life, from reports on field work to answering casual questions referred to him through the University Museum to data and analyses on Piman and other languages. The collection also contains voluminous files relating to the Mason's editorship of the American Anthropologist (bulk: 1945-1948). Of special note are a series of class notes (1908-1910) kept by Mason for course work in ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under Edward Sapir and Frank Speck.