Ruby Pickens Tartt

In 1975, the public library in Livingston was named the Ruby Pickens Tartt Library in her honor. In 1980, she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. Some 5000 of Tartt's folkloric manuscripts are held by the University of West Alabama.

In the Great Depression, Tartt and her husband suffered financial difficulties. Needing work, Tartt got a job with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in York, AL. In 1936, she was appointed chair of the WPA's local Federal Writers' Project (FWP) in Sumter County. Through the FWP, she began collecting the life histories, stories, lore, and songs of the area's former slaves. Her activities drew the attention of ethnomusicologist John Lomax, who was then recording songs for the Library of Congress (LOC). In 1937 Lomax joined Tartt for a joint expedition collecting folk songs around Sumter County; together they gathered over 300 songs. Tartt went on several further expeditions both on her own and with Lomax gathering more material for the LOC's Archive of American Folk Songs. In 1939 and 1940, they collected recordings of over 800 songs and stories and over 80 photographs of singers. One of the singers Tartt recorded was Vera Hall, now considered one of the twentieth century's finest blues and folk singers. Tartt worked with Lomax and his son Alan (another folklorist) on the folk music collections entitled Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads and Afro-American Blues and Game Songs. Tartt also worked with folklorist Ellie Seigmeister and with University of Alabama music professor Byron Arnold gathering material for his collection entitled Folksongs of Alabama, and she provided some material for poet Carl Sandburg's 1950 anthology New American Songbag. Later in the 1950s, she joined forces with folklorist Harold Courlander, who was then working with Folkways Records. Their collaboration led to Sumter County singers being included in a half dozen early collections including Folk Music U.S.A., Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Negro Songs of Alabama, and Negro Folk Music U.S.A. One of Tartt's friends was the writer Carl Carmer, who taught English at the University of Alabama. He credited Tartt with providing a considerable amount of local material like songs and customs for his 1934 book Stars Fell on Alabama. Carmer also based a character in this book (Mary Louise) on Tartt.