"All the Songs in the World": The Story of Emma Dusenbury
"All the Songs in the World": The Story of Emma Dusenbury
by Robert B. Cochran
The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 3-15
"All the Songs in the World": The Story of Emma Dusenbury
By ROBERT B. COCHRAN*
Department of English, Communications Building 333
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701
Her life is a great saga, one of our state's best, but thus far it has been told only in brief hints and glimpses. "Ever since the day when I heard, for the first time but not the last, this song [a ballad called "Lord Banyan"] sung in a leaky-roofed, decaying cabin by an old, blind, and illiterate woman, dressed in flour-sack clothes, whose repertory consisted of nearly a hundred such ballads, I too have regarded the Ozarks as a magic land. . . ." The writer here was John Gould Fletcher, Arkansas's most famous poet, the year he remembered was 1934, the cabin was near Mena, Arkansas (in the Ouachitas, not the Ozarks), and the singer was Mrs. Emma Dusenbury, then seventy-two, who lived and died in poverty and obscurity even as she awed her better known and better heeled listeners to the highest utterance each could command.[1]
Another famous visitor was John A. Lomax, the nation's best known folksong collector, who recorded Mrs. Dusenbury in 1936 and remembered her in his autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. Lomax recalled that Mrs. Dusenbury "had the serene face one finds in the pictures of saints and martyrs," and reported that she sang "almost continuously" for two days, during which time "records were made of eightytwo songs for the Library of Congress." Lomax was especially impressed by the rarity and antiquity of her songs: "Among her songs was the greatest number of the 'Child ballads' [a collection of 305 songs, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited and published in five volumes from 1882 to 1898 by Francis James Child, a Harvard professor] ever recorded from one person, so far as I know."[2]
The recordings Lomax made in 1936 are still housed in the Library of Congress, along with forty-four songs recorded by another collector, Mrs. Sidney Robertson. Mrs. Dusenbury's contributions to the library's Archive of American Folk Song were so impressive to the scholars in Washington that Benjamin Botkin, the archive's director in 1945, used her name to make a point about its purposes: "Like Emma Dusenbury, about 120 of whose songs are in the collections, the Archive seemed to have 'made a resolution to learn all the songs in the world.' "[3]
All the world, or at least those parts of it interested in folksongs, had learned about Emma Dusenbury, too, or so it seemed in early 1977 when a short letter arrived in Fayetteville from Helsinki, Finland, addressed simply to "Folksong Professor" and asking for information about "the great singer of ballads, Mrs, Dusenbury." I was new to Arkansas in 1977, and Emma Dusenbury was no more to me than a name and a photograph in Vance Randolph's great Ozar\ Folksongs, so I took the letter to him.
"She was the greatest ballad singer I ever knew," he said, and went on to describe his own visits to her cabin near Mena. She had been born in Georgia, he recalled, but had come to Arkansas as a young girl and grown up in the Ozarks. Her husband had died "sometime around 1930" but had been "crippled up for a long time before that," and Mrs. Dusenbury lived "way back in the woods" with her daughter Ora. "I saw lots of pretty hard-up people when I was working in the mountains," Randolph concluded, "but I don't think I ever saw anybody worse off than they were. People were always planning to do something for them, but nothing much ever came of it." [4]
Randolph's recollections of his visits with Mrs. Dusenbury were as vivid as those in the writings of Fletcher and Lomax, but what was surprising at the time was the nearly total lack of real information. Randolph didn't know when she'd died, other than to "guess it was before 1950," and he told me nothing of any consequence had been written about her either. There had been, back in 1936, a piece by Fletcher, "The Ozark Singer," which T. S. Eliot had published in The Criterion, a prominent literary quarterly published in London, but it did not name Mrs. Dusenbury.[5] What began to emerge, in 1977, was a strange and somehow disturbing situation where a woman from Arkansas with as good a claim as any other to being the nation's outstanding singer of traditional ballads was honored and famous in Washington and Finland and London, but forgotten in her home state. Even the date of her death and the place of her burial were matters for research.
I sent back a brief and apologetic letter to Helsinki, including the few references to Mrs. Dusenbury provided by Randolph, but then several months passed, perhaps as much as a year, before Mary Parler Randolph, Vance's wife, in talking about the activities of the Arkansas Folklore Society in the 1950s, mentioned that she had actually journeyed to Mena to arrange for a memorial plaque for Emma Dusenbury's grave. "But I couldn't find it," she said. "Nobody knew anything about her. They were so poor they couldn't afford a grave marker."[6]
Mrs. Randolph, it turns out, was wrong. Emma Dusenbury is buried beside her husband in the cemetery at Rocky, Arkansas, some eight miles west of Mena. Her grave is marked, too, but the stone identifies her as Emmer Duesberry. She was born in 1862, according to the marker, and died in 1941. But this is jumping ahead - it was 1982 before I found the marker. Both Randolphs, reminded again of Mrs. Dusenbury by the talk of their search for her grave, recalled that her long life did have one moment of glory, in 1936 again, when she was the featured singer at celebrations in Little Rock commemorating the 100th anniversary of Arkansas statehood. "She sang on the steps of the capitol building," said Mrs. Randolph, and Vance added that Laurence Powell, the director of the Arkansas symphony orchestra who took Lomax and Mrs. Robertson to Mena, "wrote it all up in the Gazette."[7]
It turned out that there were two substantial Arkansas Gazette articles devoted to Mrs. Dusenbury. The one done by Powell was the feature story in the Sunday magazine section for October 18, 1936, and the other, unsigned, was a front-page account on October 26 of her appearance at the Arkansas Centennial Music Festival the previous afternoon. Both articles were accompanied by photographs of Mrs. Dusenbury - the one with Powell's article was taken at her home, and shows her seated in a wooden chair with her hands folded in her lap, while the other pictures her singing at the festival, with Powell himself holding her microphone. Mrs. Randolph's memory of "the steps of the capital" was not substantiated by either story (the program was presented in the Little RockHigh School auditorium), but both pieces provided solid biographical information and leads for future research.[8]
Emma Dusenbury was born Emma Hays " 'somewheres, I don't know exactly where' " in Georgia, on January 7, 1862, "lived chiefly in Habersham and Rabun counties," and came to Arkansas in the winter of 1872. The family stayed briefly in Crittenden County before moving on to Batesville by steamboat in February 1873, where they were met by a grandfather who had arrived earlier and taken by ox wagon to their new homestead in Baxter County, near Gassville,[9] Emma Hays lived in Baxter County until she was at least eighteen.[10]
Her mother, long an invalid, died during this period and her father evidently remarried. The unsigned Gazette account includes a description of her Baxter County years:
. . . doing the housework, working in the field, cooking on coals of a crude fireplace, tending cows and chickens, washing, ironing, waiting on an invalid mother, helping a crippled grandmother who spent most of her time at a loom where she wove cloth for the family's clothes. Sundays she went to singing and church. Sunday "evenings" (afternoons) the young folks gathered at some house in the community and they sang and told riddles until it was time to go home and milk. Perhaps three months of each year she went to school part of the time and sat on a puncheon bench in a schoolhouse without windows.[11]
This sounds like a life of much work and little pleasure, but Emma Dusenbury in later years remembered learning "lots, nearly all" her songs in Baxter County. She recalled walking three miles on Sunday mornings, after finishing her work, to the "singings" that began at 9:00.
" 'We could hear the singing a long way off in those days,' " she said, " 'and when I got down the road a piece to where I could get the sound, I didn't hardly hit the ground until I got to the church door. I was so happy I couldn't walk- I just ran.' " She also told Powell and Lomax about the "sweethearts" she had for the play parties - "one for every Sunday of the month," she said, and the remark is preserved to this day on her Library of Congress recording of "'The Chimney Sweeper." Powell's article includes as well her account of what happened to one young fellow who attempted an unwelcome kiss: " 'before he knew whar he was, he was a-gettin up at t'other end o' the room.' "[12]
Sometime after 1880, in a move which may have resulted from her father's remarriage, Emma Hays left her home and went west into Marion County, near Yellville, where for seven years "she nursed the sick throughout that section for her board and $1 a week." It was here, too, that she met and eventually married Ernest (or Earnest) Dusenbury, a young man from Illinois who first arrived to set up seats for a circus operated by "Davy Crockett's youngest daughter and her husband, whose name was Willingham." Two years later the Dusenburys had their only child, a daughter they named Ora. Two years after this " 'I took down sick and lay sick two months, and I ain't seen since - I haven't seen Ory since.'"13
For fifteen years, from about 1890 to 1907, the young family "went to ramblin'," with the husband working in packing houses, on railroads, in a soap factory, at a lime kiln. They picked cotton in the summer, and Emma would take a row between her husband and daughter, feeling her way up the stalks and "picking 40 to 60 pounds daily." These were hard times - "the days when they wandered from place to place with their young child, working at whatever they could get to do" - but once again there was music to take away trouble. Mr. Dusenbury loved music as much as his wife did, and often fiddled while Emma sang or danced. " 'I wasn't blind in my heels, nohow/ " she said. In 1907 they came to western Arkansas and settled near Mena, trying to squeeze a living from a small farm. But times stayed hard, and sometime around 1917 Mr. Dusenbury was thrown from a buggy pulled by a runaway horse and "crippled for life." He died some fifteen years later, in 1933, and his short obituary from the Mena Evening Star, August 29, 1933, makes clear the desperate situation of the family. "E. L. Dusenberry, aged 71, an afflicted man who has lived many years in Polk County, died Monday afternoon at the family home north of Rocky. His death is particularly distressing in that a blind wife and an invalid daughter are the only survivors."[14]
Less than a year later, in June 1934, Fletcher visited for the first time. Randolph had been earlier - six songs from Ozark Folksongs are credited to her singing on September 4, 1930. Laurence Powell came for the first time in 1935, brought by Fletcher, and he in turn brought Lomax and Mrs. Robertson in 1936. Powell's Arkansas Gazette story, like Fletcher's account and Lomax's autobiography, is written in a highly romanticized prose - like the poet and the folksong collector, the trained musician was stunned by Mrs. Dusenbury's accomplishments and dismayed by the poverty of her surroundings. "Hidden away in the Arkansas wilderness, near Mena," he begins, "in a tiny shack with a leaky roof, lives a 74-year-old woman with an amazing memory, a clear unwavering voice - and sightless eyes." Included in her vast store of songs, Powell wrote, were old ballads from England, Civil War songs, singing-game songs, and pioneer songs from "the Arkansas hills and the Mississippi valley." Mrs. Dusenbury, he concluded, "knows more Arkansas folk songs than anyone else in the world," and is "a valuable resident of Arkansas and of the nation, not only for her songs, but for herself." Powell hoped, he wrote, that "the dream of her life" - which included a house with windows and a good roof, with a kitchen and a chicken coop and "a garden where flowers can grow" - would be realized "with greater recognition of her worth and a wider realization of how much she means culturally to Arkansas and the nation." Powell, who at one time hoped to aid Mrs. Dusenbury directly by publishing a collection of her songs, was so impressed by her singing that he based the final movement of his own Second Symphony on three of her songs.[15]
By this time, of course, I was much impressed myself, and more troubled than ever by the lack of attention to such a magnificent figure. Finally, in 1982, 1 got down to Mena myself, where several local residents helped me to locate the gravesite, find Emma Dusenbury's obituary in the Mena Evening Star for May 10, 1941, and identify other townspeople who remembered the family. My wife visited the Beasley-Wood Funeral Home, where Emma Dusenbury's burial record gave her father's name as Jasper Hays and her mother's maiden name as Iza Pitts. The obituary notice, for its part, specified her birthplace as Rome, Georgia, and both records gave her birthdate as January 9, 1862, instead of January 7. Best of all, an article titled "Who Was Emma Dusenberry?" by Inez Lane appeared in the May 1982 issue of the Looking Glass, a magazine concerned with "Life in the Ouachitas," which mentioned my research and printed the recollections of several area residents. There was even a photograph of Mrs. Dusenbury and her daughter - the first picture of Ora I'd seen, and still the only one.[16]
Later in the summer, with this article in hand, I returned to Mena to visit Dollie Storey and her daughter, Johnye Faye Terrell - except for Vance Randolph they were the first people I'd talked with who had actually seen Emma Dusenbury. And they had seen her often. In 1935, when Dollie Storey and her husband John purchased a farm near Mena, they inadvertently bought into the life of Emma Dusenbury, since she and Ora were living, rent free, in the property's house. Push came to shove on the first day of 1936 when the Storeys (husband, wife and two year-old Johnye Faye) arrived late at night to take possession only to find the Dusenburys still in residence. Mrs. Dusenbury, in fact, refused at first to let the Storeys inside, crying, "You are trying to put us out in the cold under a tree." Finally, after Mrs. Storey promised repeatedly that the Dusenburys would not be evicted that night and would be helped by the Storeys in finding another home, Mrs. Dusenbury at last opened the door.
The families lived together for three months, and Mrs. Storey in 1982 recalled hearing Mrs. Dusenbury sing in the evenings, adding that the old woman also greatly enjoyed hearing Mrs. Storey read aloud. Johnye Faye Terrell, for her part, still remembers sitting in Emma Dusenbury's lap for songs, but only one piece, "Put My Little Shoes Away," has survived in her memory. Mrs. Terrell still owns a doll's tarn crocheted for her by Emma Dusenbury, and it was she who supplied the photograph for the Looking Glass article.[17]
All in all the work in Mena was a great pleasure and a resounding success. I was beginning to get a better picture of Emma Dusenbury. I knew when she'd died, and I'd located her grave, and, better yet, I had more places to go. The 1936 newspaper articles had mentioned two counties in Georgia, and her obituary in Mena had named a town in a third. The burial record provided her with named parents. It was time to go to Georgia. There was also the Library of Congress in Washington, where some 120 Emma Dusenbury songs (and several by Ora as well) were available on tape. I still didn't know how people like Randolph and Fletcher found out about Mrs. Dusenbury in the first place, either - that would bear looking into as well. There was, in short, plenty of work still to do, but now, like Fletcher and Lomax and Randolph and Powell before me, I was hooked on Emma Dusenbury. It seemed to me she was one of the region's great figures, and her oblivion struck me as deeply wrong.
The Library of Congress research was accomplished in several stages, most of it from August 1982 to June 1983. The Emma Dusenbury recordings exist in two groups - the first consisting of songs collected by Lomax and Powell, the second of those preserved by Mrs. Robertson and Powell. There are eighty-six total items in the Lomax/Powell group, of which three are performances by Ora, who sang one song and recorded two animal calls. Mrs. Dusenbury also recorded one selection of animal calls (which included "calling hogs, cows, calves and dog; setting dog on calf"). The other eighty-two items are songs sung by Mrs. Dusenbury (though at least two songs are recorded twice). In several instances conversation between Lomax and Mrs. Dusenbury is recorded - this occurs most often to explain the movements of play-party songs - and on at least one occasion the Library of Congress found itself the proud possessor of the recorded quacking of Ora Dusenbury's ducks. With one exception, the Lomax/Powell recordings are dated to August 1936 (and I'm inclined to regard the exception, dated July 1936, as an error). The Robertson/ Powell recordings were made in December 1936, and consist of forty-three items, all by Mrs. Dusenbury. According to Vance Randolph, Mrs. Robertson paid "day wages" to Mrs. Dusenbury, who "took her job seriously and insisted on working a full eight-hour day." They evidently drove into Mena each day "for the sake of the electric current necessary to the recording machine," and returned home "in time to milk the cow at 4:30 p.m."[18] These recordings include no animal calls, but several (at least seven) are second singings of songs already recorded by Lomax and Powell. If this figure is correct, and only two songs were recorded twice by Lomax and Powell, then Mrs. Emma Dusenbury of Mena, Arkansas, is represented in the national archives of our traditional music by 116 different songs. "Of the hundreds of folk singers who recorded for the Archives of the Library of Congress," wrote one researcher in 1959, "perhaps none could surpass Emma Dusenberry, the blind woman from a little dirt farm near Mena, Arkansas."[19]
The Georgia research, in April 1983, came up empty in Rome and in Floyd County, but was successful in Clarkesville, seat of Habersham County. The marriage record in the county courthouse- in Book B, page 179 - had preserved the issuance of a license and the registration of a wedding between William Jasper Hays and Mary Jane [a third name is illegible] Pitts on March 25, 1860. The date was appropriate, the surname of the bride and the full name of the groom matched those entered eighty-one years later on Emma Dusenbury's burial record in Mena. It was too much for coincidence - these were Mrs. Dusenbury's parents, and they had come here, to this town, to marry, 123 years ago.
Back in Arkansas, I ran into trouble trying to document the marriage of Emma Hays and Ernest Dusenbury. Neither Marion nor Baxter counties had marriage records as far back as the likely dates, and I came up empty in Little Rock, too, at the Vital Records Division of the Arkansas Department of Health. No marriage records there go back beyond 1923, and I was denied a copy of the Dusenburys' death certificates in accordance with a bizarre state law restricting access to members of the "immediate family" and attorneys with demonstrable "tangible" interest. In the case of the Dusenburys, Ora had married, after her mother's death, too late to bear children, and the family at no time possessed sufficient of the world's goods to interest even a desperate attorney.[20]
But all this was small change. Emma Dusenbury's wealth was in her head, in her tenacious memory and her clear, unhesitating voice. And thanks to the labors of Powell, Lomax, Fletcher, Robertson, and Randolph, that wealth has been preserved in a form available to anyone who asks. The tapes are there, in the Library of Congress, where any citizen can walk in off the street and listen to them.
I finally had a good answer, too, for the question of how Lomax and the other collectors first contacted Mrs. Dusenbury, and that answer introduced her saga's second hero, unmentioned to this point but second only to Mrs. Dusenbury herself in importance. His name was F. M. Goodhue. He was a scholarly New Englander of whom little is known other than that he taught mathematics and statistics at Commonwealth College near Mena, and he was the first to realize that the blind old lady who lived nearby was a national treasure. It was Goodhue who brought her to the attention of Randolph and Fletcher, and set in motion the chain of events which ended with the songs on tape in Washington. In 1979, when I first asked him, Randolph recalled that Mrs. Dusenbury had initially contacted him in connection with his folksong column in Ozark Life magazine, and it is true that her mention there in the May 1930 issue marks her earliest appearance in print. But Randolph's own citations contradict this account, since he recorded songs from Mrs. Dusenbury as early as November 1928, according to the dates given in Ozark Folksongs?[21] That Goodhue corresponded with Randolph is certain- fourteen songs, most if not all obtained from Mrs. Dusenbury, are credited to him in Randolph's citations.
Fletcher, writing to Randolph in 1947, said explicitly that "I was directed to her as a source by Professor F. M. Goodhue of Commonwealth College," while Powell, in 1936, wrote that "with Fletcher, I went out to Mena to meet Mrs. Dusenbury."[22] Powell also credits an unnamed "CommonwealthC ollege representative"a s the first to journey "through
the scrub-scatteredfo rest to the clearing where Mrs. Dusenbury and Ory, her 46-year-old spinster daughter, live."[23] Commonwealth College and Goodhue make an appearance in Randolph's recollections too, in a 1948 article, "Ballad Hunters in North Arkansas,'" where it is noted that Mrs. Dusenbury "sang often for the students at Commonwealth College, and Professor F. M. Goodhue of that institution called her songs to the attention of John Gould Fletcher of Little Rock."[24] It's a safe assumption, I think, that Goodhue served Randolph in a similar way, despite the folklorist's reluctance to say so. Randolph was accustomed to doing the guiding in the mountains, and it went against his grain to draw attention to himself in another role.
It was Powell, of course, who completed the chain, guiding Lomax and Mrs. Robertson as he was guided by Fletcher. But it all started with Goodhue, bless his memory, and it seems somehow inevitable that the best of our heritage should owe its preservation to a meeting of minds between two outcasts- a blind, impoverished, semiliterate old woman and a professor from the much despised "radical college" soon to be hounded out of existence by the forces of virulent decency.
So that's the story of Emma Dusenbury. It has its triumphs, certainly, since the tapes are safe in Washington and Emma Dusenbury has a larger lock on immortality than most of us. But it's also a sad story - how do you put from mind the picture of a frightened old woman crying in a January night for fear of being forced "out in the cold under a tree"? The scholars came in 1936 with their recording machines, and went away again, while Emma Dusenbury lived on in the same bonegrinding poverty until she died forgotten five years later and was buried by the county. Powell's dream of the house with windows and the garden with flowers was a sentimentalist's indulgence - it never happened.
Still, in all the squalor of her end, there was one moment when somebody, in an instant's assertion, gave Emma Dusenbury her due. The burial record in Mena has many slots which are filled in with the word "none." She had no Social Security number, for example, and no employer either. In the slot for the deceased's occupation, too, the person filling in the form started to write "none" again, but then took thought, remembered perhaps her moment of glory five years before, crossed it out and wrote in "singer." It is a perfect epitaph.
Footnotes:
*The author is associate professor in the English Department at the University of Arkansas.
1. John Gould Fletcher, Arkansas (Chapel Hill, 1947), 332. There are a number of references to Mrs. Dusenbury in various folksong collections and newspaper articles. John and Alan Lomax, in Our Singing Country (New York, 1941), include four songs attributed to her in full or in part. Waldemar Hille arranged Mrs. Dusenbury's version of 'The Dodger" for The People's Song Book (New York, 1948). Ethel Sure's "Emma Dusenberry's Voice Will Live Forever," Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, June 11, 1950, includes verses from several songs, and Jim Capaldi's interview with Lee Hays, Sing Out, XXVIII (1981), 2-7, has some good stories about Mrs. Dusenbury. Three short pieces about Mrs. Dusenbury also appeared in the 1940s: Henry Simon's "America Discovers Its Own Musical Culture," PM's Weekly, February 23, 1941, p. 44, prints a photograph of Mrs. Dusenbury singing for Waldemar Hille; the January 1949 issue of People's Songs Inc., Vol. Ill, No. 12, features Mrs. Dusenbury on the cover and prints a short piece titled "This Was Emma Dusenberry" (with music and lyrics to three songs) on pp. 6-7; and Direction magazine's "Summer Fiction Number" for 1941 (Vol. IV, No. 5), prints a "short story" about an "Ellen Duzenberry" by Myra Page on pp. 29-31.
There is a great wealth of material in the Special Collections Division of the MullinsLibrary at the University of Arkansas. The manuscript of Powell's collection is here, along with the Fletcher/Randolph a nd Fletcher/Powell correspondence, a marvelous c ollection of short postcards and letters from Emma and Ora Dusenbury to Fletcher, and other valuable papers pertaining to Randolph's collecting from Mrs. Dusenbury and F. M. Goodhue's work at Commonwealth College.
I am grateful to Ellen Shipley and Ethel Simpson for unstinting aid with these collections; to Dollie Storey, Johnye Faye Terrell, Inez Lane, Holly Harshman, Cleo Tucker, the Mena Star and the Beasley-WoodF uneral Home for help in Mena; to Guy Carawan, Bill McNeil and the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress for help with the songs; to Suzanne McCray, Marian Neralich, and Robert Malcolm Cochran for aid in Georgia and in Baxter and Marion counties in Arkansas; and to the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities for funds in support of my research. Arkansas Times magazine printed an earlier version of this study in the November 1983 issue; I am grateful for permission to reprint part of that material here.
2 John A. Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York, 1947), 247-248.
3 B. A. Botkin, "The Archive of American Folk Song: Retrospect and Prospect," Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions, II (1945), 63.
4 Interview with Vance Randolph, Fayetteville, Arkansas, March 1977.
5 Fletcher, "The Ozark Singer," Criterion, XVI (October 1936), 1-13. 1 am indebted to
Ethel Simpson for help in locating this article.
6 Interview with Mary Parler Randolph, Fayetteville, Arkansas, March 1977. See also Donald M. Lance, "Max Hunter Remembers Vance and Mary," Missouri Folklore Society Journal, IV (1982), 22.
7 Mary Parler Randolph interview.
8 Laurence Powell, "Singin' in the Wilderness," Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Sunday Magazine section, October 18, 1936, p. 1. The unsigned piece is "Blind 'Star' of Centennial Music Festival Sings On at 74, Just for the Love of It," Arkansas Gazette, October 26, 1936, pp. 1, 6; cited hereinafter as Arkansas Gazette, October 18 and 26, 1936.
9 Arkansas Gazette, October 18 and 26, 1936.
10 The 1880 census reports her in Baxter County at this age. Her occupation is given as "servant." Her father, JasperH ays, is listed as thirty-seveny ears old and "married during the current year" (to his second wife). Four siblings are listed, two brothers and two sisters (ranging from fifteen to nine), and all born in Georgia. See Manuscript Census Returns, Tenth Census of the United States (1880), Baxter County, Arkansas, Whiteville Township, Schedule 1, Inhabitants, N ational Archives M icrofilm S eries, p. 6.
11 Arkansas Gazette, October 26, 1936.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 "E. L. Dusenberry Dead," Mena (Ark.) Evening Star, August 29, 1933, p. 2.
15 Arkansas Gazette, October 18 and 26, 1936.
16 Inez Lane, "Who Was Emma Dusenberry?" L ooking Glass( May 1982), 16-17, 35.
17 Interviews with Dollie Storey and Johnye Faye Terrell, Mena, Arkansas, July 1982.
18 Vance Randolph and Frances Emberson, "The Collection of Folk Music in the Ozarks," Journal of American Folklore, LX (1947), 122.
19 Ed Cray, "Some Rarities From Arkansas," Midwest Folklore, IX (1959), 21. Cray's article prints and comments on eight song texts from the Lomax/Powell and Robertson/ Powell collections.
20 Ora married Jones Wheeler of Norman, Arkansas (Montgomery County), on November 3, 1943. She listed her age as fifty-five; Wheeler listed his as fifty-seven. I was told of this marriage, and given a copy of the license and certificate of marriage by Johnye Faye Terrell.
21 Randolph's column in Ozar\ Life, which ran from December 1929 to September 1930, was titled "The Songs Grandfather Sang." For the dates of his own collecting from Mrs. Dusenbury, see Randolph, Ozark Folksongs (1946-1950; reprint ed., 4 vols., 1980). The earliestd ate is November 3, 1928,g iven for "The Lily of Arkansas"( 83B, Vol. I, 340).
22 Fletcher to Randolph, May 14, 1947. Powell's recollection is from his article in the Arkansas Gazette, October 18, 1936.
23 Arkansas Gazette, October 18 and 26, 1936.
24 Vance Randolph, "Ballad Hunters in North Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, VII (Spring 1948), 6.