For more than fifty years, Gordon McCann carried a portable tape recorder into Ozark living rooms, barn lofts, and fiddle contests, chasing down tunes that existed nowhere but in the hands of the people who played them. McCann, the self-described "cultural preservationist" who built one of the most complete archives of traditional Ozarks music in existence, died on July 17, 2026, at 94.

He was born August 27, 1931, in Joplin, Missouri, to Charles and Jadah McCann, and became a lifelong Springfield resident, according to Missouri State University Libraries. McCann graduated from Southwest Missouri State College in 1954, where he studied Spanish, French, and German with an eye toward teaching languages. Instead he spent more than four decades running his father's business, the Springfield Blueprint and Photocopy Company, retiring in 1996.

McCann started taping fiddlers and singers in the early 1970s. "The more I taped, the more I started realizing the repertoire these people had," he told host Jim Baker in a 2018 interview with KSMU. He put that instinct to institutional use as a contributing consultant to Missouri State University's Ozarks Watch video magazine for more than a decade. He hauled his recorder to house parties and jam sessions at places like Emanuel Wood's Ozark Opry, the Johnson Schoolhouse, the Oldfield Opry, and the long-running McClurg sessions, filling roughly 3,000 audio and video tapes over the following decades. He backed the recordings with more than 8,700 pages of fieldwork notes and a database exceeding 73,000 entries, most of them individual fiddle tunes, according to Missouri State University Libraries.

Not everyone understood the habit at first. "They thought it was odd. Why would you want to record stuff?" McCann recalled of the reaction he got at some of those early sessions, according to Ozarks Alive. He kept at it anyway, and grew particular about how the material was organized, once observing, "There's so many of these big collections, but no names, song titles, people," a gap he set out to close by logging performer names, tune titles, and dates alongside every recording.

Beginning in 1978, McCann performed alongside fiddler Art Galbraith, and the pair carried Ozarks tunes to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap, among other national stages, until Galbraith's death in 1993. McCann also produced or performed on five albums for Rounder Records, including the three-volume series Traditional Fiddle Music of the Ozarks. He worked closely with folklorist Vance Randolph, later recalling, "I never heard him cuss or use vulgarities unless he was telling a story," and co-authored the second volume of Randolph's Ozark Folklore: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 1987. He went on to co-write Ozarks Fiddle Music with Drew Beisswenger.

In September 2007, McCann gave his tapes and papers to Missouri State University's Special Collections at Meyer Library. Nearly 1,500 of the field recordings have since been digitized and made freely available online, left deliberately unedited so researchers could hear the side conversations along with the music. The Missouri Arts Council honored him with a Missouri Arts Award in 2002, and Missouri State University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2010. He also consulted for the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and advised filmmaker Debra Granik on the film Winter's Bone. In 2011 Springfield named him grand marshal of its Saint Patrick's Day parade.

Among the younger musicians he mentored were fiddlers Rachel Hoagland and Ashley Hall, along with David Scrivner, now a literature instructor at College of the Ozarks, who said McCann "helped me to understand more about what my heritage is." Tom Carter of Ozarks Public Television described him more simply: "Gordon is without overstating anything synonymous with the Ozarks." McCann put the stakes in his own words: "We're changing so fast here in this part of the Ozarks, and it's going to get lost if we don't really hang on to it."

McCann married Mona Gayle Pearce, born in 1934 near Wilson's Creek National Battlefield in Missouri, in 1952. She died in 2023 after 70 years of marriage. He is survived by their daughter, Abba Gayle Korosic, their son, Charles Pearce McCann, grandchildren Lauren W. Campbell and Charles Matthew McCann, and two great-grandchildren, Andrew Kennon Campbell and Charlie Anthony McCann.

The tapes McCann carried into hundreds of living rooms now sit in a public digital collection anyone can search from a laptop, filled with fiddlers whose only other record would have been silence. The three-volume Rounder series still carries his name in the credits, and the notebooks he filled by hand, thousands of pages of them, remain the reference point for researchers piecing together how Ozarks music actually sounded before it had an audience beyond the porch it was played on.