Folksong Hunters in Missouri
by Vance Randolph and Ruth Ann Musick
Midwest Folklore, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Apr., 1951), pp. 23-31Published
Folksong Hunters in Missouri
By VANCE RANDOLPH AND RUTH ANN MUSICK
The field of folksong has been pretty well covered in Missouri, at least by comparison with surrounding states. Much of the material is not easily available now, and this paper is a brief record of the work which has been done to date. It seems a good idea to write such an account immediately, while most of the collectors are still alive and known to us personally. Scattered references to old songs doubtless appear in obscure pioneer literature, but the systematic collection of folksong in Missouri, so far as we can find out, began shortly after the turn of the century.
The whole thing was started by H. M. Belden, for many years head of the English department at the University of Missouri. Dr.
Belden was collecting folksongs from his students as early as 1903, and in 1906 he founded the Missouri Folklore Society. The Society issued a pamphlet A Partial List of Song-Ballads and Other Popular Poetry Known in Missouri (Columbia, Mo., August, 1907, pp. 6) containing fragments of seventy-six ballads, in order to stimulate further collecting. An enlarged and revised version of this booklet (11 pages, 145 items) was published in June, 1910.
Belden's students did a lot of work in the period between 1906 and 1917. The largest collection was made by Miss Goldy Hamilton in Howell, Adair, Gentry and Sullivan counties. Miss Leah Yoffie gathered many children's singing-games in St. Louis. Miss Maude Williams did good work in Clinton county. So did Mr. W. S. Johnson at Tuscumbia, in Miller county. Miss Lois Welty sent in songs from Linn and Holt counties. Miss Ethel Lowry worked in Dade county, Miss Colquitt Newell in St. Francois county, and Mr. Earl Cruikshank in Lewis county. Mr. C. H. Williams, assisted by his brother George, collected some good texts from Bollinger county. Mrs. J. S. Lichtenberg set down both texts and tunes as she heard them in Harrison county. Except for Mrs. Lichtenberg, it appears that these collectors brought in texts only, and made no attempt to record the tunes.
Nearly all of their manuscript texts were deposited in the Archive of the Missouri Folklore Society, which was a large cardboard box in Dr. Belden's study. Out of the material in this box Dr. Belden published the following papers, with examples of Missouri folksong: "The Study of Folksong in America" (Modern Philology, II, 105, 573-579); "Ranordine, Rinordine, Rinor" (JAFL XVIII, 1905, 322); "Old-Country Ballads in Missouri" (JAFL XIX, 1906, 231-240, 281-299); "Old-Country Ballads in Missouri-Geordie" (JAFL XX, 1907, 319-320); "Popular Song in Missouri-the Returned Lover" (Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, CXX, 1908, 62-71); "Three Old Ballads from Missouri" (JAFL XXIII, 1910, 429-431); "Balladry in
Missouri" (JAFL XXV 1912, 1-23); and "Folksong in Missouri- Bedroom Window" (Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen
und Literaturen, CXXXVI, 1917, 403-431).
To insure the safety of the material, Belden deposited carbon copies of the unpublished Missouri songs in the library at Harvard University. George Lyman Kittredge, professor of English at Harvard, included twenty-six of these pieces in two papers: "Five Old-Country Ballads" (JAFL XXV, 1912, 171-177) and "Ballads and Songs" (JAFL XXX, 1917, 283- 369). These studies by Belden and Kittredge dealt with texts only.
Meanwhile Mrs. L. D. Ames, of Columbia, Mo., published a paper "The Missouri Play-Party" (JAFL XXIV, 1911, 295-318)
containing thirty-three texts and twenty-nine tunes from Boone and Audrain counties. And Miss Goldy Hamilton, one of Belden's prize students, got out "The Play-Party in Northeast Missouri" (JAFL XXVII, 1914, 289-303) with thirty-eight texts from Linn, Monroe, Montgomery, Schuyler, Davis, Adair, Putnam and Macon counties.
It was in 1914, too, that DeWitt Clinton Allen read a paper "Old Ballad Days in Missouri" at a meeting of the Missouri Historical
Society in St. Louis. He sang fragments of song which he heard as a boy in Clay county in the 1840's and 1850's. It appears that nobody thought much of this paper at the time, but twenty years later, after Colonel Allen's death, somebody dug up the manuscript and published it in the Society's bulletin (Glimpses of the Past, St. Louis, Mo., II, November, 1935, 133-150). The printed version gives parts of twenty-two texts, but no music.
The Missouri Folklore Society did practically no collecting after 1917, although it continued to hold meetings until 1920. For a brief account of the Society's rise and fall see Dr. Belden's report (JAFL LVI, 1943, 176-177). It was not until 1940 that Belden published his monumental Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folklore Society (University of Missouri Studies, Columbia, Mo., XV, 1, 1940, pp. 530). This book contains 284 titles, 610 texts, and 70 tunes. Not every county in Missouri is represented, although the material came from all sections of the state. Belden did not print any play-party songs, since so much of this material had appeared already in the Hamilton and Ames papers mentioned above.
John Robert Moore, instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, published "A Missouri Variant of the False Lover Won
Back" (JAFL XXXIV, 1921, 395-397) which seems to be the only text of Child 218 ever reported from the United States. A paper by Vance Randolph and Frances Emberson "The Collection of Folk
Music in the Ozarks" (JAFL LX, 1947, 117) appears to cast some
doubt upon the authenticity of this item.
William E. Crissey, in a pamphlet entitled Warrensburg, Mo., a
History with Folk Lore (Warrensburg, Mo., 1924, 11) printed a text
of "William Riley" as sung by the pioneer settlers in Johnson county.
Rose Wilder Lane published fragments of twenty-two old Missouri
songs in her novels Hill-Billy (New York, 1926) and Cindy (New
York, 1928); she told us that these texts were collected near her
home at Mansfield, in Wright county. See also a text of "The Nightingale"
in the Missouri Historical Review (XXII, April, 1928, 400).
Otto Ernest Rayburn, who now edits the quarterly Ozark Guide
at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, included many folksong texts in Ozark
Life (Kingston, Ark., 1925-1930), Arcadian Magazine (Eminence,
Mo., 1931-32) and Arcadian Life (Caddo Gap, Ark., 1933-1941).
These were monthly magazines, which Rayburn edited and published
himself. The files of all three periodicals, in Rayburn's office, show
112 texts, but several issues of Ozark Life are missing. There are
scattered folksong references in many articles which Rayburn has contributed
to various newspapers (chiefly the Arkansas Democrat and
the Arkansas Gazette of Little Rock, Ark.) since 1930, but most of
these are reprinted from the three magazines mentioned above. Rayburn
used twenty texts, nine of them play-party songs, in his book
Ozark Country (New York, 1941). About one-third of all Rayburn's
folksong material was obtained from informants in southern Missouri,
mostly from Stone, Taney and Shannon counties.
W. H. Strong, a native Ozarker who was for many years employed
in the postoffice at Kansas City, wrote a series of articles on
folksongs for Rayburn's Ozark Life, beginning in July, 1927, and ending
in August, 1928. From readers of this magazine he gathered a
large pile of manuscript texts, which he intended to publish in book
form. Strong died some years ago, and his widow moved to Barnett,
in Morgan county. Letters addressed to her remain unanswered, and
we have been unable to locate the Strong collection.
Vance Randolph began collecting old songs in McDonald county,
in 1920. From February 19, 1927, to May 6, 1927, he conducted a
weekly column "The Songs Grandfather Sang" in the Pineville
Democrat, printing eleven texts, no tunes. He contributed a paper
26 Midwest Folklore
"The Ozark Play-Party" to JAFL (XLII, 1929, 201-233) with the
words and music of twenty-nine game songs. Next he edited a "Folksong
IDepartment" in Rayburn's Ozark Life from December, 1929,
to September, 1930, publishing about fifty texts. The following year
came Randolph's book The Ozarks (New York, 1931) with some forty
texts and tunes. Another book, Ozark Mountain Folks (New York,
1932) contains the words and music of sixteen songs, mostly Child
ballads. More than half of the items listed above were collected in
Missouri, largely from McDonald and Barry counties. In 1941-1943
Randolph made phonographic recordings for the Archive of American
Folksong, Library of Congress, under the direction of Alan
Lomax. About 360 of these records were cut in Greene, Stone and
Taney counties. Randolph's four-volume Ozark Folksongs (Columbia,
Mo., State Historical Society, 1947-1950) contains 1188 texts and
540 tunes from southern Missouri.
Several Missouri newspaper columnists have published folksong
texts. The "Hillbilly Heartbeats" page, edited by May Kennedy Mc-
Cord, ran weekly in the Springfield Leader-News (1932-1938) and
thrice-weekly in the Springfield News (1938-1942). The McCord
column contained a great deal of miscellaneous folklore material,
with occasional snatches of old ballads and humorous songs. Lucile
Morris conducted a weekly feature entitled "The Old Songs" in the
Springfield News and Leader from August 26, 1934, to March 3,
1935. The files show 102 texts and about twenty scattered verses
and fragments; the material was contributed by readers of the column,
and published with their names and addresses. C. V. Wheat ran a
column called "Songs and Ballads of Yester-Years" in the Weekly
Advertiser of Aurora, in Lawrence county. It began December 19,
1934, and continued until April 30, 1942, shortly before Mr. Wheat's
death. The Advertiser file contairns a lot of valuable material, and is
more important than any of the other newspaper columns that we
have seen. Wheat printed 1651 texts altogether, but there was some
repetition and duplication.
Charles van Ravenswaay, director of the Missouri Historical
Society, collected the texts of some 200 folksongs in the Bonneville
and Fayette area of central Missouri, about 1935. This collection has
not been published, but the manuscript is filed in the Jefferson
Memorial Building at St. Louis.
Margaret Owen and Mrs. Hartley G. Banks, of Columbia,
Missouri, have a manuscript collection of twenty ballad texts from
their father, Walter E. Owen, who was born in 1861 and lived in
Henry county. He learned most of the songs from his father, B. L.
Vance Randolph & Ruth Ann Musick 27
Owen, who came from North Carolina and settled near Lexington,
Missouri, about 1820. The Owen manuscript is kept in Mrs. Banks'
home in Columbia.
Another local collection is that of Manerva Carolyn Shepherd,
who lives at Osceola, in St. Clair county. Mrs. Shepherd's father,
who came to Missouri from Tennessee in the 1860's, was a fiddler
and ballad-singer. Manerva Carolyn learned many of his songs. She
has manuscript copies of about fifty texts and knows all the tunes
by heart, but they have not been recorded phonographically.
Luther Parker, now of Santa Cruz, California, has written down
the words of twenty-five old songs which he learned from his mother,
Mary Ellen Rees Parker, about 1889. Mr. Parker was born in
Madison county, in 1872; his parents were both native Missourians,
and there were many ballad-singers in the family. Parker knows the
tunes of his twenty-five pieces, but when we last heard from him
(July 7, 1946) he had been unable to get the music transcribed satisfactorily.
Geraldine B. Parker of St. Louis, working with the CWS recreational
division and later as head of the WPA Writers' Project, in
1933-1937, did much to stimulate the collection of folksongs in Missouri.
Most of Mrs. Parker's people wrote down texts only, but Lloyd
Schupbach recorded some tunes in Christian county, mostly from
singers located by Ruth Day of Sparta. Another of Mrs. Parker's
assistants, Emma Galbraith of Springfield, collected 208 songs in
Greene county; she transcribed the tunes herself, with some help from
other local musicians. Miss Galbraith told us in 1946 that she had
a complete manuscript copy of this collection at her home in Springfield.
All folklore material collected by the CWS, FSA, WPA and
other government agencies was typed and deposited in the Library of
Congress. It was understood at the time that each state retained a
carbon of everything collected, but we have been unable to locate
such files in Missouri. The state guidebook Missouri, a Guide to the
"Show Me" State (New York, 1941) was compiled by the WPA and
copyrighted by the Missouri State Highway Department, but it contains
only partial texts of five songs and no tunes at all.
The National Folk Festival Association, founded and directed by
Sarah Gertrude Knott, is associated in the public mind with large
cities, because its annual Festivals are held in Chicago, Dallas, Cleveland,
Washington and Philadelphia. But Miss Knott started the
whole thing in the Ozarks (Reader's Digest, May, 1939, 40) and
staged preliminary festivals in Aurora, West Plains, Rolla, Joplin, and
Springfield during March and April, 1934. Miss Knott tells us that
28 Midwest Folklore
the Missouri festivals were produced in collaboration with Geraldine
B. Parker, who was assisted by May Kennedy McCord and other
local enthusiasts. Missouri was well represented at the First National
Folk Festival, held in St. Louis, April 30-May 5, 1934. Miss Knott
told reporters that she had arranged to have the best songs and fiddletunes
recorded phonographically. But whether this was done, or what
became of the recordings, we have been unable to learn.
After Miss Knott's national organization had shown the way,
the whole region was quite enthusiastic about folk festivals for awhile.
Geraldine B. Parker directed a four-day "Ozark Festival" at Rolla,
in June, 1937. There were many smaller folklore gatherings, with
good singers and fiddlers and banjo-pickers at every one of them.
But so far as we can learn, nobody made any attempt to record the
music, or even to write down the words of the songs.
In December, 1936, Sidney Robertson came to Missouri, recording
folk music for the Special Skills Division of the Farm Security
Administration. It has been said that Mrs. Robertson was the first
person to use a phonographic recording machine in the collection of
Missouri folksongs. She made splendid recordings of about 125
pieces, mostly in St. Louis and Springfield and Willow Springs. The
Gold Rush Song Book compiled by Leanora Black and Sidney Robertson
(San Francisco, Cal., 1940, 22) features a "Joe Bowers" tune
which Mrs. Robertson obtained from Ben Strong near Cassville, in
Barry county. In May, 1937, at the Fourth National Folk Festival
in Chicago, she made many more records from the singing of Missourians
who appeared at the Festival. Chief among these was
Cinderella Kinnaird, who lived near Willow Springs in Howell county.
According to the Library of Congress Check-List (Washington, D.C.,
1942) Charles Seeger and Sidney Robertson recorded several more
items, sung by a Missourian who visited Washington in 1937. All of
Mrs. Robertson's recordings are now filed in the Library of Congress.
Paul Holland, head of a printing company in Springfield, knew
many old songs, some of which he consistently refused to have recorded
by the folksong hunters. In carefully chosen company, back in 1934,
Mr. Holland sang a highly prized "family ballad" (Child 250) which
he called "Andrew Bardeen" and believed to be virtually unknown
outside the Holland clan. He would not allow collectors to write
down either the words or the tune of this piece. Mr. Holland said in
1939 that he was preparing a large collection of folksongs for publication,
but we failed to find anybody who has ever seen his manuscript.
Vance Randolph & Ruth Ann Musick 29
Another famous Greene county singer was Ben Rice, who ran a
little grocery store in Springfield for many years, and had a large
repertory of old songs. His son David at one time considered publishing
a book of these ballads. Both Ben and David Rice attended several
of the National Folk Festivals, and allowed Sidney Robertson to
record some of their best pieces for the Library of Congress. It is said
that David Rice, in 1936 or 1937, had a sizeable manuscript collection,
with tunes written out by himself and pasted into the text. But we
have not seen the Rice manuscript, and have been unable to get any
definite information about it.
The only important paper about Missouri songs to be published
in 1936 was Francis M. Barbour's "Some Fusions in Missouri Ballads"
(JAFL XLIX, 1936, 207-214).
Lynn E. Hummel, a teacher of music in the public schools of
Monett, Missouri, wrote a master's thesis on Ozark Folksongs for the
music department of the University of Missouri in 1936. He gives
the words and music of 116 songs. Hummel's interest was in tunes
rather than texts. This thesis has not been printed, but there is a
typescript in the University library at Columbia.
Neither John A. Lomax nor Alan Lomax ever did any collecting
in Missouri, so far as we know. But it appears (Library of Congress
Check-List, Washington, D.C., 1942) that Alan Lomax recorded a
few pieces from a Kansas City singer who came to New York in 1938.
Edwin Ford Piper, of the University of Iowa, had a large file of
Missouri folksongs in manuscript, collected over a term of years.
Many phonographic recordings, including some Missouri items, were
made by Piper and his students. It is said that Mrs. Piper destroyed
part of the collection after the Professor's death in May, 1939, and
that the rest of it was turned over to the University library in Iowa
City. A careful search of the University archives in 1950 failed to
turn up any of Piper's material, however. It may be that some of
the Piper items were lost when East Hall burned in 1946. Dr. Ernest
Horn, who worked with Piper for some years, has ninety-six texts
and tunes from Piper's collection, but only nine of them were collected
in Missouri. Dr. Horn is a Missourian, and his own collection
contains many Missouri pieces, but it is not ready for publication.
Grant McDonald submitted a master's thesis entitled A Study of
Selected Folk-Songs of Southern Missouri to the music department
of the University of Iowa in August, 1939. This has not been published,
but a 100-page typescript is filed in the University library at
Iowa City. It comprises thirty-eight texts and thirty-seven tunes,
collected in Greene, Christian, Stone, and Taney counties. McDonald
30 Midwest Folklore
did not use a recording machine but set down the tunes directly.
The name and address of the singer is attached to each item, but
the dates of collection are not given. It seems clear, however, that
McDonald's work began in the spring of 1937 and continued through
1938, while he was a teacher of music in the high school at Spokane,
in Christian county.
William A. Owens came to Greene county in the summer of
1939, and May Kennedy McCord sang fifteen old ballads into his
recorder. There is a reference to this in Mrs. McCord's column in
the Springfield News (June 8, 1939). It is said that he collected other
folksongs in Webster and Wright counties. Professor Owens' doctoral
dissertation, accepted by the University of Iowa in 1941, was entitled
Texas Folk Songs, but we do not know what became of the recordings
he made in Missouri.
Ira W. Ford's Traditional Music of America (New York, 1940)
is primarily a collection of fiddle-tunes, with few genuine folksongs.
The book lacks any sort of documentation, and it is hard to tell when
or where the items were collected. But we know that Ford lived in
Missouri for some years, and he wrote us from Los Angeles (May 1,
1946) that eleven of his tunes "are indigenous of the Missouri Ozark
region." We believe that most of the Missouri pieces in Traditional
Music came from Grundy and Taney counties.
Ruth Ann Musick, in 1939, made phonographic recordings of
thirty Missouri songs for Professor Piper at the University of Iowa.
These were later transcribed but have never been published. Dr.
Musick. has a manuscript collection of 354 texts and 117 tunes
gathered in various parts of Missouri. Three of these texts appeared
in her paper "Three Folksongs from Missouri" (Hoosier Folklore, V,
March, 1946, 29-34). Since June, 1948, Dr. Musick has conducted a
weekly column "The Old Folks Say" in the Times-West Virginian,
Fairmount, West Virginia, in which the texts of seventeen Missouri
songs have appeared.
Dr. Leah Rachel Clara Yoffie, instructor in English at Washington
University, published a paper "Three Generations of Children's
Singing Games in St. Louis" (JAFL LX, 1947, 1-51), with the texts
of 47 game-songs collected in 1900, 31 collected in 1914, and 48 collected
in 1944. This paper considers 71 different singing games, but
no tunes. Dr. Yoffie has also a manuscript collection of English ballads
and folksongs gathered in St. Louis, which she is now preparing
for publication.
Paul G. Brewster, who was teaching English at the University
of Missouri in 1938-1941, is another specialist in games and gameVance
Randolph & Ruth Ann Musick 31
songs. Mr. Brewster writes us (Nov. 12, 1949) that he is preparing
for publication a large collection of games from the Middle West,
including many items collected from his students in Missouri.
A few years ago many progressive Missourians, particularly
in the southern part of the state, seemed rather ashamed of the old
songs. Some of these citizens thought that ballad-hunters and other
folklorists were "glorifying the backwoods" in such a manner as to
minimize the advantages of modern industry and agriculture. As
recently as April, 1934, the Springfield Chamber of Commerce raised
a great outcry over Sarah Gertrude Knott's preparations for her
National Folk Festival. Many newspapers in the smaller cities reflected
this point of view. But recently there seems to be a more
enlightened public opinion. Books on folklore are reviewed without
heat in Missouri newspapers, and the conservative State Historical
Society now looks with favor upon folksong collectors; see Dr. Philip
D. Jordan's paper "History and Folklore" in the Missouri Historical
Review (XLIV, January, 1950, 119-129). Professor H. M. Belden,
who initiated the study of folksong in Missouri, has retired from
active duty. But even without Dr. Belden's leadership, it is to be
hoped that the Missouri Folklore Society which he founded nearly
fifty years ago, will sometime be re-established at the University of
Missouri.
Eureka Springs, Arkansas
Fairmount State College Fairmount, West Virginia