The Ozarks is a reissue of the 1931 Vanguard book by Vance Randolph, a book that possibly a vast number of folklorists today do not know anything about. It was Randolph’s first book on the Ozarks, the region that he became identified with (and it with him). The book was a smashing success, reviewed very favorably nationally in the New York Times Book Review, the Saturday Review, and in academic journals, although not the 1981 Journal of American Folklore. It is distinctly a book of its time and also distinctly a Vance Randolph book. Those are both precious qualities.
Reading old texts available from an earlier period of your academic life is like reading them anew. It’s kin to the experience of re-reading favorite fiction at an older age: you uncover new insights gleaned from your older perspective. In revisiting Vance Randolph, I found myself swathed in a comfort zone, and I feathered out the edges of my room as I sank into the chair, reading, chuckling, re-imagining.
Randolph had been a commissioned writer covering a wide variety of subjects, mainly scientific and psychological, prior to Vanguard’s hiring him to write this book. Quite accomplished as a writer, he found work fairly easily. But diving into the Ozark world through his writing must have created a swirl of continuing revelations for him. For one thing, the publication was the first of all his work to become widely acclaimed. But for another, he realized that he had come across a goldmine of potential life work, right in his backyard. He had written some academic articles on the Ozarks in the 1920s, published in specialized journals, but this book was something different for him. Neither the writing nor the presentation was academic--he did not include footnotes, he did not linger long to examine correlations or variations for the Ozark folk beliefs, play-parties, art forms, customs, or dialects he so deftly captured. While he garnered positive reviews of The Ozarks by such prominent academics as Louise Pound and Robert Redfield, members of the academy came to castigate him (prominently Richard Dorson, but others as well) for not including the academic details they expected. They saw him perpetuating a quaint image of folk culture while they were attempting to provide muscular disciplinary structure, principles, and prestige to the field. Vance Randolph was oblivious to those academic concerns--he meant to capture a people his way. And he meant to entertain.
Beginning with his "Author’s Preface" and "Old Trails and Campfires," Randolph neatly divides the book into folksy topics, which become chapters: "The Hill-Billy at Home"; "Womenfolk and Social Life"; "The Ozark Dialect"; "Signs and Superstitions"; "The Passing of the Play-Party"; "Ozark Folk Songs"; "Ways That Are Dark" (liquor); "Shooting for Beef" (guns); "Jumpers, Giggers, and Noodlers" (fishing); "Fool’s Gold" (treasure hunting); "The Coming of the 'Furriners.'" For his stories and data, Randolph relied primarily on interviews he conducted and on conversations with and observations of neighbors, but also on library research (rarely cited). He seemed to attempt to recreate in the telling of each subject a nostalgic yet lived affirmation of a viable, disappearing way of life. He infuses each chapter with a sense of awe for these survivors of a past way of life, mixed with his skeptical wonder that the people could live such lives and believe such beliefs. His literary recreation of the research is gilded with both an earthy romance of the past and (I would contend) a sense of what would be called later in literary circles magical realism: he portrays the people as cultural time-remnants from the Elizabethan Age caught in the mountainous wilds of Arkansas and Missouri, which cultural evolutionism would doom, destined to be replaced by modern society. In depicting rural people in an otherworldly way as living a traditional life, a strong parallel arises between what Randolph was doing in 1931 and what William Faulkner (often credited as an inspiration for Gabriel García Márquez) was creating as Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, in exactly the same period. And both relied on their neighbors for their depictions of a gritty, folk cultural way of life.
No, as fieldwork, Randolph’s work cannot be absolutely corroborated, since he did not cite. He didn’t even include a bibliography. And yes, he did on occasion stretch the truth or play loose with facts, particularly to create reactions, as Bob Cochran is ready to note. But the approach that this work champions--providing the narrative depiction of a lived society in many of its facets, while keeping it pure of burdensome comparison or explanation--has a simple value for today’s folklorists, in our world of deep research coupled with increasingly refined theory in a quest to explicate how people artistically create their society and culture. Randolph recognized that earlier song catchers and culture researchers--such as Horace Kephart, Josiah H. Combs, and John C. Campbell, and Dorothy Scarborough, who reviewed this book favorably--focused on the folklore itself as a pathway to understand people: the songs, beliefs, tales, folkways, customs. Refreshing ourselves with Randolph’s approach can reinvigorate our sense of responsibility to the people whose lives and ways we are complicit in recreating, on paper, in video, in exhibits, and digitally. Randolph’s work represents the root impulse in all of our work.
Herbert Halpert’s obituary for Randolph in the 1981 Journal of American Folklore cited him as a folk culture documenter who anticipated the crux of the folklife studies movement, in that he tried to capture the full round of a people’s social and cultural lives rather than collecting one genre, as was a norm in Randolph’s time period (such as song catchers). In his invaluable and instructive introduction, Robert Cochran mentions that Randolph in fact had aspired to be a cultural anthropologist, in the holistic vein of Margaret Mead writing Coming of Age in Samoa, but had been rejected by Boas. In re-issuing Randolph’s 1931 work, Cochran, as well as Brooks Blevins, the Chronicles of the Ozarks series general editor, could be seen as simply promoting their own interests in Ozarkiana. But the significance of this work goes well beyond any regional constraints. Despite Randolph’s obvious Tylorian bias against the staying power of “primitive” society, any folklorist reading his work would comprehend more fully the power of folklore’s raw material. Our humanity in all its possibilities, good and bad and indifferent, vibrates in the narrative that people construct of their lives, through their actions, words, and beliefs. Collectors like Randolph understood that, and were able to transmit what they collected through their own superbly crafted narratives.
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[Review length: 1090 words • Review posted on August 23, 2018]