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Vance Randolph was born February, 1892 in
Pittsburg,
Kansas, and he moved to southern
Missouri in 1919. He spent the rest of his
life in the Ozark Mountain region and became one of
America's most important folklorists and folk collectors.
He
worked for over forty years with great intensity gathering lore of the
Ozarks. Because he lived in the Ozarks for most of his life,
successively in Pineville,
Missouri, Galena
Missouri, Eureka Springs
Arkansas, and Fayetteville
Arkansas, he came to personally know the
people and was therefore able to obtain and learn much more from them
than could an outside folklore collector who only passed through the
region briefly.
Randolph enjoyed enormous academic respect
but he also become a bit of an icon in the Ozarks among those seeking to
maintain the cultural identity and the unique spirit of the Ozark
region. He was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in
1978, and published many popular and scholarly works, including
Ozark Magic and Folklore ,
a work of fiction,
We Always Lie to Strangers ,
Ozark ghost stories ;: Gruesome and humorous tales of the supernatural
in the backwoods of the South , many
Little Blue Books and some juvenile fiction.
His major work is
collected in the four-volume
Ozark Folksongs, an outstanding and insightful
collection of folksongs he published between1946 and 1950. All
the work over the first twenty years involved
Randolph writing out the texts with a variety of 'musically literate'
associates noting the melodies.
In 1941, the Archive of Folk Culture, headed by Alan Lomax, commissioned Vance Randolph to undertake a recording expedition
in southern
Missouri
and northern
Arkansas. He recorded
many of the songs - in some cases performed by the same singers - that
he had already collected from in the late 1920s and 1930s. The result
was approximately two hundred aluminum discs that have been copied on
tape and are accompanied by field notes and correspondence. Several
Library of Congress recordings include selections from the collection.
Randolph limited his work to southern
Missouri
and northern
Arkansas. He insisted on the importance of
collecting tales, dance tunes, songs, jokes, folk speech, superstitions,
oral history, games and expressions as they were originally told.
Randolph and his wife, Mary Celestia Parler, never left the Ozarks.
He died November 1, 1980 in
Fayetteville,
Arkansas. |
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