Ozark folklorist. Born into a middle-class family in Pittsburg, Kansas—his fadier was an
attorney and a Republican politician, and his mother was a librarian and a member of the
DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution)—Randolph was attracted early on to the
ethnic diversity and radical politics of the surrounding mining camps, and later devoted a
long lifetime to the collection and documentation in print of the traditional folkways of
the nearby Ozark Mountains.
After dropping out of high-school, working briefly for the Socialist Appeal to Reason,
graduating from the local col-lege and completing an M.A. in psychology at Clark
University, teaching high school biology, and spending most of a brief stint in the U.S.
Army in the hospital, Randolph moved in 1920 to Pineville, Missouri, where he spent die
next sixty years earning a living as a self-described “hack writer” while he collected and
published very nearly the entire traditional culture of his adopted regional home.
Randolph’s first scholarly efforts were 1920s studies of dialect in Dialect Notes and
American Speech, and studies of Ozark folk beliefs and play-parties in the Journal of
American Folklore. His first books, The Ozarks (1931) and Ozark Mountain Folks
(1932), went virtually unnoticed by academic reviewers and were sometimes resented by
local residents sensitive to the region’s reputation for “backwardness,” but they are
recognized in the late 20th century as early instances of what are now called folklife
studies.
The 1940s saw the first publication of Randolph’s work by a university press, when
Columbia brought out Ozark Superstitiow (later reprinted in 1964 as Ozark Magic and
Folklore) in 1947. His four-volume Ozark Folksongs was also printed at this time (1946–
1950). Randolph’s folktale collections were published in the 1950s—We Always Lie to
Strangers (1951), Who Blowed up the Church House? (1952), The Devil’s Pretty
Daughter (1955), The Talking Turtle (1957), and Sticks in the Knapsack (1958). His
book-length study of Ozark speech, Down in the Holkr, appeared in 1953.
Hot Springs and Hell, a collection of nearly 500 jokes and anecdotes praised by one
reviewer as the first “fully annotated jokebook” in American folklore scholarship,
appeared in 1965, three years after Randolph’s marriage to Mary Celestia Parler, an
English professor and folklore collector at the University of Arkansas. With the
publication in 1972 of Ozark Folklore: A Bibliography, a massive work featuring 2,500
annotated entries, and the 1976 appearance of Pissing in the Snow, another folktale
collection, which became the only portion of his bawdy materials to be published in his
lifetime, Randolph completed his long lifetime’s work in collecting and preserving in
print the songs, stories, beliefs, and speech of the Ozark region. Through most of this
period he also wrote, entirely for money and mostly under a variety of pseudonyms,
everything from an etiquette book and adventure tales for young readers to science
booklets and soft-core pornography.
Randolph was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1978, two years
before his death. A second volume of his bibliography appeared in 1987, followed in 1992 by the remaining bawdy materials in two large volumes, Roll Me in Your Arms and
Blow the Candle Out.
Robert Cochran
References
Cochran, Robert. 1985. Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cochran, Robert, and Michael Luster. 1979. For Love and for Money: The Writings of Vance
Randolph. Arkansas College Folklore Monograph Series No. 2. Batesville, AR: Arkansas
College.