The collection comprehensively covers the career of Turk Murphy and was assembled primarily by Jim Goggin and other members of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation. Similar sub-collections of materials about other traditional jazz musicians were added to this core collection containing items related to Murphy, Lu Watters, and Murphy's side men, such as William Miskell and Bob Helm, some of whom also had their own bands. The collection includes over 650 manuscript jazz arrangements (scores and parts) for the Turk Murphy band, musical arrangements by Lu Watters, and related groups; original transcription discs of unique sound and video recordings by Turk Murphy, Lu Watters, Kid Ory, and other musicians and bands; 218 loose leaf notebooks of materials compiled by Jim Goggin documenting the careers of Turk Murphy, Burt Bales, Clancy Hayes, Bob Scobey and similar jazz musicians; hundreds of recordings in various formats, including lacquer transcription discs, open reel tapes, audio cassettes, CDs, CD-Roms, and videocassettes; thousands of photographs documenting the career of Turk Murphy and other West Coast traditional jazz musicians; correspondence and business records of Murphy and his jazz club, Earthquake McGoon's; and numerous boxes of ephemera, posters, and realia relating to Earthquake McGoon's and Turk Murphy's performances there. In total the collection consists of about 300 linear feet of materials comprised of 155 linear feet of archival materials and 145 linear feet of sound recordings.