"Unprintable" Folklore?: The Vance Randolph Collection
by G. Legman
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 103, No. 409 (Jul. - Sep., 1990), pp. 259-300
"Unprintable" Folklore?
The Vance Randolph Collection
During most of his working life, Vance Randolph, the great Ozark folklorist and writer, failed to receive the recognition he deserved from the folklore establishment, and he was forced by publishing convention to suppress the substantial and important erotic stories and songs in his collection. The forthcoming publication by University of Arkansas Press of Randolph's heretofore "unprintable" songs and other lore provides an occasion for examining the character, causes, and costs of suppressing such materials.
VICTOR HUGO is said to have replied to all overnice criticism of his fabulous, chapter-long disquisition on the word "Merde!" in Les Miserables (1862)-the date at which the presumably recent New Freedom therefore really began with the observation that the subject in question is both natural and necessary, in fact indispensable, and has "all the innocence of a poor man's arse seen under his too-skimpy shirt." That puts the matter of so-called obscenity into proper human focus, rather than leaving it at the mercy of an unhealthy mock-prudish censorship on the one hand, or the rough guffawing humor of bawdry and scatology on the other.
In the same way, the final volumes of Vance Randolph's great collection of Ozark Folksongs and Folklore were never intended by him to be segregated in an only too evidently specialized supplement published decades later, owing to having been considered somehow "unprintable" in the decades when they were collected. Yet it is a matter of congratulation, now finally, that these remarkable supplementary volumes are to be published by the University of Arkansas Press under the appropriately matching titles of "ROLL ME IN YOUR ARMS" and "BLOW THE CANDLE OUT."
The notion that there is, or ever was, some special kind of folklore or folksong that is unprintably erotic or "bawdy" or "dirty" or "blue" is essentially an optical illusion. It is based on the skewing operation of the usual anti-sexual censorship that has falsified almost the entire published record of both literature and folklore, in English especially, for over three centuries (at least since 1720, the date of the last contemporary edition of Henry Playford & Thomas Durfey's monumentally unexpurgated Pills to Purge Melancholy,[1] which was followed before its decade was out by Alexander Pope's first bowdlerized edition of Shakespeare, a century before poor Dr. Bowdler who got the blame).
Erotic folklore is usually offered "in the field" by singers and reciters along with every other kind. It is seldom relegated to any backhouse or behind-the-barn secret sessions, unless the attitude of the outside world or of the collector- who comes from that world, and is always and inevitably an outsider tends or tries to put it there. This is most particularly true of the erotic folksongs, jokes, rhymes, and other lore of country people, children, soldiers, prisoners, students, and other isolated work groups and marginals. College students and not infrequently their professors are thus marginalized, although they are sometimes the same ones who demand the expurgation of the very same folk materials when some braver non-academic, like Vance Randolph, tries to get them into print.
The collectors' ostensible control over the folk materials they collect and publish-or refuse to collect and do not publish-naturally operates in both the positive and negative sense: Stop! and Go! When no one would admit, for example, to the existence of children's erotic folklore (or erotic life), none was to be seen. Now that a few bold collectors, mostly women, have been courageously willing to admit children's folk erotica to their formerly lily-pure pages, whole volumes significantly crammed with children's erotic jokes, rhymes, riddles, catches and pranks, and other such lore have been relatively easy to create, especially by means of artfully untended tape recorders. We are lucky these collections now at last exist in print, in particular Martha Wolfenstein's Children's Humor( 1954), for the general psychological understructure; Wendy Lowenstein's Shocking, Shocking, Shocking (1974) and Cinderella Dressed in Yella with Ian Turner and June Factor (1978), for the very rich Australian materials; and most importantly for English and American children's bawdy jokes and rhymes, Mary and Herbert Knapp's One Potato, Two Potato (1976), and especially Sandra McCosh's A Joke for Every Occasion (1979), with a rather wide-ranging introduction by the present writer, "The Secret Lore of Children, and the Attack on the Child."
Sometimes the collector's censorship works in the opposite direction too: nothing but erotic lore is visible when that is what the collector wants or the audience demands. When Shakespeare has Falstaff beg: "Come, sing me a bawdy song-Make me merry!" (Henry IV [Part I]:III.iii.1 5) it is both evident and the determining factor that this is not solely some "dirty-talking" stand-up comic or jovial singer who is offering a favorite item of his repertory. It is the audience, Falstaff, who is demanding this special type of song, this Pill to Purge his Melancholy, as is surely his right. But he is not a professional collector of folklore, and is certainly not consciously there for either a full or a random sampling. We are all Falstaffs, one way or another, when we go collecting. And I probably am the worst recent sinner in this direction, of all, as I have undertaken now for over fifty years to specialize in and to collect only the erotic folklore of our culture and century, admittedly with some digging, where possible, at its earlier and foreign roots. These were subjects of serious interest at that time to only a very few mavericks like Randolph in America and the intrepid Friedrich Krauss in his erotic folklore yearbooks, Kryptddia and Anthropophyteia, published abroad, since the turn of the 20th century.[2]
The sexual materials grow out of the ordinary life situation, and satisfy some of the most imperative and deep-seated fantasy and emotional needs of the performers. The more extraordinary or abnormal, therefore, the collecting or recording session is made, or is warped by the personality or sexual anxieties of the collector himself or herself, the less likely that the informants' sexual folk materials will appear. That is a principal reason why such materials have been so uncommon in the past, in English, or have seemed so uncommon, and have been collected only in expurgated or caricatural form. People who still sing today do not tend to discriminate very rigidly between their songs. They mix together the many things that interest them, the love songs and the songs of yearning with the work songs, because that is the way they live. They work-and yearn-all day, and make love at night, if they are that fortunate. It would seem to them absurd to separate the work songs from the love songs, except while they are actually working, and the relationship is even closer with the humorous drinking songs and ballads.
Work songs in particular are also erotized by means of humorous metaphors, in which the men's work is described in violent and aggressive images and terms, like the proud phallic ordnance metaphors of hammers and scythes, ploughshares, swords, guns, and cannons. Women's work, such as home- and baby-making and prostitution, is more likely to be symbolized less graphically in terms of buildings, ships, fertile landscapes, or fruits and other since-Eden edibles, whether in the songs of women or of men. The indiscriminate mixing together of these various types of song images and folklore is not connected in any special way with sex. It is well known that country singers will occasionally sandwich ancient Child Ballads in among current popular songs learned from phonograph records, the radio, and television, or at any rate they used to. Now they don't sing much of either. They listen. That is the new and hectically increasing passivity of these centuries: the 20th and 21st. .... Everyone is to listen, and watch. Few people sing, or act. Even fewer create.
Vance Randolph never intended originally to collect or create any special volumes of "unprintable" Ozark folklore. To the contrary, in the 40 principal years of his collecting, from about 1915 to 1955, in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri, he purposely and consciously avoided directing or choosing the materials his singers and informants gave him, or being in any other way a disturbing, falsifying element. In my own collecting, almost solely of erotic or otherwise taboo folksong and folklore, I never had that advantage, and was constrained to play the outsider, Falstaff, every time. Randolph, though not a born Ozarker, and in fact a college-educated professional writer and psychologist, presented himself for so many years and decades to his Ozark informants as a sort of local-yokel homespun journalist, gathering old songs and stories for his newspaper column and Haldeman- Julius nickel "Blue Books" that he eventually took on a good deal of the traditional crusty and suspicious conservative attitude of the Ozark highlanders toward all furriners essentially like himself. And especially toward me, and what he was frank to deplore as my "preoccupation" with the erotic materials, which I would be the last to deny.
Collecting at the same time as Randolph, but in rural England, and unusual in being one of the few old-style expurgatory collectors of folklore to admit to the hypocrisy of his method of operation, Alfred Williams tells artlessly in his Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames, how "more than once, on being told an indelicate song, I had great difficulty in persuading the rustic . . informant, that I could not show the piece, and therefore I should not write it. 'But why not?' I have been asked. 'There was nothing wrong with that.' Neither was there, really. ... The unsophisticated villagers feel hurt at the decision and often discover considerable embarrassment" (1923:16). As an object lesson in how not to collect folksong, I don't think that could be bettered.
Nevertheless, as Williams felt he could not "show" such songs-meaning print and publish them-he just did not bother to take them down. He does have the honesty to add that he felt like "something of a hypocrite" on such occasions, especially when he considered that even
where the songs were professedly bad, this much might be said of them-they were so honestly. That is to say, they were simple, open and natural. They were morally immoral, if I may say so, and not cunningly suggestive and damnably hypocritical, as are some of the modern music-hall pieces. [1923:16]
This is exactly the point Victor Hugo is making in his challenge to antinaturalistic criticism quoted at the opening of this article.
A much greater British collector than Williams, Cecil Sharp, observed the same prudish principles, but a bit more cannily. When either Sharp or his Doppelgdinger- secretary, Maud Karpeles, felt that anything their informants sang was morally reprehensible, in the sexual sense, or "outway rude" (British euphemism for obscene), Sharp would concern himself assiduously with noting down only the musical transcription, while Karpeles would silently omit to write out the offending stanzas, for their English Folk Songs from the Appalachians (1932), thus leaving them later with just enough of only the openings of such songs (also expurgated a bit further, if necessary) to print eventually under the transcription of the, to them, all-important and, more importantly, never-offending tunes. Again a perfect lesson in how not to collect folklore, unless of course one is really there for the main purpose of gathering up authentic folk materials on the cheap; then to publish them suitably toned down, in large profitable books that will advance one's academic or financial career. There has been little else in folksong publication in English, until very recently, except such books.
Aside from their expurgated texts, there must also have been those many erotic songs that Sharp and Karpeles, and their later imitators and continuators like John and Alan Lomax, and Peter Kennedy (Karpeles's nephew) never even had offered to them for their popular compilations. The "rustic . . . unsophisticated villagers" doubtless caught on soon enough as to what mock countrified city strangers collecting songs were really after, and were willing to accept. In the Appalachian collection, certainly, the mountain singers could hardly have felt able to sing the bawdy songs in their repertory to Sharp, who was accompanied always by young Maude Karpeles as amanuensis, the two of them having to be put up-as their backwoods hosts were on occasion made to understand-in separate rooms (Fox-Strangways 1933:172). This was certainly only proper, as between the sex-shy Australian music-teacher and the London rabbi's daughter, but erotic materials cannot be collected successfully under such straitened circumstances, however much the collectors may congratulate themselves on having put the singers at their ease with the usual inexpensive trinkets and tokens so reminiscent of Hendrijk Hudson's, of a packet of tobacco or a tin harmonica, or even of a small accordion: Sharp's choicest reward.
The result (or perhaps the punishment) of Sharp-Karpeles's activity was that after the books they put together in this high-handed fashion were published in further expurgated form, the original texts, even of much they had not refused to collect, lay unpublished for half a century, as unprintable, in Sharp's manuscript "Tunebooks," along with typewritten transcriptions of the more-or-less expurgated texts. These were to be issued, presumably-but only presumably- complete, 50 years later, in the 1970s, by the dying Karpeles, whose hypermoral puckering-strings had now relaxed a bit. But still with the omission of the few mildly off-color texts that had got through the original precaution of taking down only their first stanzas; and now under the pricelessly matching excuse for rejecting them at the last, that such texts were "fragmentary" (Sharp 1974: Preface).
Much still remains to be combed out of the Sharp manuscript for publication: other songs or disjecta membra also rejected, apparently on the same grounds, in the selection published as The Idiom of the People (1958), edited by James Reeves. Sharp's manuscript "Tunebooks" and their text transcriptions are preserved at Clare College Library, Cambridge, England; with copies at Cecil Sharp House (the English Folk Dance and Song Society), London; and at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and the University of California. As one example of what remains to be scouted out, there is the fine text of"The Crab-Fish" ballad (MS. 4873), collected by Sharp from a woman singer almost at the end of his career in 1921, first recorded in England as "The Sea Crab" in the Percy Folio MS. about 1640.
In attempting to address oneself to the problem of purposeful falsification in the historical record of folksong so as to omit the sexual parts-so similar to the activity of the 16th-century Pope who had Daniele da Volterra paint out or put pants on the offending genitals, which God was not ashamed to create, of the damned souls in Michelangelo's tremendous fresco of The Last Judgment-one notices at once that the whole thing is really a jolly fraud, and that the collectors are not a bit shocked themselves. As Alfred Williams artlessly admits, collectors just have a very practical sense of what they can get away with publishing without jeopardizing book sales or profitable academic sinecures (in Cecil Sharp's case, as musical director to the children of the British Royal household).
What might be called the fuddy-duddy position on this matter, therefore, is in two phases or hypocritical stages: First, that "true" folk materials do not ever (or hardly ever) involve any obscenity. This is the straight ostrich-position, head in sand, doggedly taken by Sharp, which makes almost worthless, for example, the wholly sanitized collections of ostensible children's
folk rhymes edited in recent years by Peter and Iona Opie. An even more ludicrously stiff approach is expressed, as to the famously obscene folk-verse form, the limerick, in Langford Reed's purportedly Complete Limerick Book, in explaining what he means by "complete." Having been told flatly by Arnold Bennett, G. B. Shaw, and others that he is wasting his time, and that "All the best limericks are unprintable," Reed ploughs on regardless, with this elegant pirouette:
The author ventures to hope that the many scores of felicitous and ingenious examples of real literary merit he has been able to quote in the anthological sections of this aspiring work, including an admirable specimen by Mr. Arnold Bennett himself, will succeed in "deodorizing" the character of the limerick in the opinion of these distinguished detractors, and prove to them what
their own works have proved to the public, viz. -that literary waggishness, and obscenity, are not necessarily dependent on one another. [1924:13]
How Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett felt about being typified so politely as "literary wags" we will never know. At any rate, the anthologist's rules are clear: whatever wags on too far and approaches obscenity will simply be "deodorized" and/or omitted. That is the second stage. Obscenity content at either stage: Zero.
One would assume that a responsible folklorist would know a bit better than an English gentleman-collector of ladylike laundered limericks, and one would assume wrong. The nicest example I know of this sort of backing-&- filling, where the collector hunts for singers and their songs, and then teases off and refuses to record or report them when found, is given in Henry M. Belden's superlatively edited but wholly expurgated Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Fiolk-Lore Society(1940), concerning a collector, one Will J. Carrington of Jefferson City, Missouri, trying in 1904 to extract some repertory
from Ben Morrow, the Negro janitor in the state capitol building:
Nearly always he has a song which he mumbles to himself as he does his work, but when anyone is around he refuses flatly to sing. The other day ... he got pretty full (i.e. drunk), and that was my chance. He sang for nearly two hours, but unfortunately most of his efforts would not look well in print. [1940:292]
And so we end up with nothing. In expurgatory folksong collecting and scholarship, nothing is par for the course: Zero. A decade later, in editing the very large Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore the editors of the folksongs, Belden and Hudson, seemed to suspect nothing when this enormous collection of about 2,200 texts did not contain one single "indelicate" song (the proverb volume had already been totally sanitized by Archer Taylor, the finest folklore research scholar in America-who also ruthlessly expurgated Vance Randolph's proverb materials when offered for journal publication).
By comparison, Vance Randolph's complete Ozark collection shows, against a total of 2,300 texts, 510 bawdy texts (to the number of 244 songs)- or 22.5% bawdy-though he affirms that he did not ask or search for "lewd" songs in any special way, but that his "informants sang them anyhow." Where are the assumably equal and parallel 500 bawdy Appalachian texts of the
Brown Collection? Spurlos versenkt.
The prudery that prevented erotic folklore from being collected or published in the English-speaking world in the first place has left a certain residual fuzziness as to why it is worth collecting and studying now. The European collectors, especially those grouped around Friedrich Krauss's yearbooks of erotic folklore, Kryptddia and Anthropophyteian, ever for an instant made the
slightest pretense. Erotic folklore is to be collected for the same reason that it is proliferated: because it is about sex. That is what makes it interesting both to the "oral source" and to the collector-who is supposed to be a human being, too, with all the organs and impulses of a human being-and that is what makes it socially valuable and historically important.
Sex and its folklore are far more interesting, more valuable, and more important in every social and historical sense than, for instance, the balladry of murder, cruelty, torture, treachery, baby-killing, and so forth, which are the principal contents, to give only one familiar example, of the Child Ballads of which the almost total moral depravity, on all counts except that of sex, and
fantastic unfitness for retailing to impressionable minds, has seldom been observed, owing to these particular ballads' lily-white purity as to sex. See my The Horn Book (1964:346-352) for a few examples of Child's anorexic, but assuredly not bloodless cuisine-if you have a nice strong stomach.
It is only through the miracle of the recent and perhaps evanescent New Freedom that the same fate as that of the Sharp manuscript did not plough under Vance Randolph's also half-century-long "unprintable" collection of Ozark folksongs and folklore. He says:
I made no special effort to collect lewd songs, but my informants sang them anyhow, and I recorded bawdy pieces along with the other items. ... I have not suppressed a syllable that was pronounced by my informants. When a row of dots appears in one of these transcriptions, it means that the singer omitted a word or a line, not that I have attempted to expurgate his text.
It seems to me that there is no merit in replacing objectionable words by dashes or asterisks... a dismal example of such editing.
I do not believe that bawdy ballads are more common in the Ozarks than elsewhere, or that the hillfolk as a class are especially fond of them. "Many country people never even heard these songs," says Rufe Scott, of Galena, Mo., "but there is at least one fellow in every neighborhood who knows a lot of them." WhenJudge Scott lived near Hurley, Mo., about 1890, the boys used to gather in the barn on rainy days, to hear a man known as "High Pockets" sing obscene songs.
J. C. Edwards of Webster Groves, Mo., had quite a collection of such items, which he learned on an Ozark farm in the 1880's. "I got most of'em from one man," said he, "a farm hand named Jarvis Banes." And Carl Withers, of Wheatland, Mo., told me of an aged villager who said (about 1940): "Boy, I used to know enough of them blackguard songs to fill a shit house!" Some backwoods singers specialize in vulgar ditties, just as others prefer to sing hymns. [Randolph 1990:Sect. A, Preface]
There may even be a sort of temporal development involved here, between the vulgar ditties and the hymns, as the informants grow older. At the opening of his section on "Ribaldry at Ozark Dances," Randolph adds the observation from an unnamed informant:
The titles of fiddle tunes are many and varied, but some of them are pretty crude. . . . Near Day, Mo., in 1940, an old fiddler played a fine hoedown called "Fucking in the Goober Patch," but wouldn't allow me to make a recording of it. "We used to play lots of tunes like that," he said, "but the folks that knowed 'em has mostly died off now. Them that's left don't dance no more,
because they're all crippled with rheumatism, or else got religion." [Randolph 1990:Sect. D]
Note here that even the tune may be perceived as bawdy, the fiddle being the Devil's own instrument which sometimes "talks real dirty." More than one Ozarker told Randolph this. Randolph's methods have generally been misunderstood, or formerly disprized, as will be seen, as being essentially too amateur, or too broad-ranging, too literal, or too unexpurgated. The latter qualities are hardly faults in the armamentarium of any responsible folklorist, social scientist, or mass-observer of any kind. They are now apparently being newly appreciated at their just value, as they certainly were not at the time of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), and Randolph's The Ozarks (1931), written on Mead's inspiration.
These works were alone then in applying the broad methods of anthropology and the sympathetic study of any culture's subjective meaning to the people in it, instead of continuing just coldly and externally to collect their artifacts and lore. The reason for the apparent widening now-it is perhaps only apparent-of the folkloristic and ethnological net is not really any sudden awakening of true Humanism in academic folklorists, but simply the realization that raw collecting has become very difficult for them if not impossible. And they must now stylishly make at least some superficial or else overdetailed genuflection to studying the largely passive audience-now that many of the actual artists and authentic transmitters of the folksongs and other verbal and musical lore have died off. Everyone would like to deny this, as with classic jazz, but it is unfortunately true. Witness the many unreconstructible fragments Randolph was alone able to collect from over-age singers.
The worst problem Vance Randolph had to face, other than the prudery of the academic Establishment and publishers, was probably with the transcription of the tunes he collected. Here, he admitted frankly, he was indeed almost a musical amateur. And he deeply regretted that he had to make do with primitive and not always competent help with the musical transcriptions, as he described excruciatingly in a letter to the folksong collector Mrs. Sidney Robertson Cowell (Cochran 1985:178, 182). Randolph was able to use recording equipment for hardly a brief two years, when he was allowed through the kindness of Alan Lomax to borrow such equipment from the Library of Congress- who pestered him about it continually (Cochran 1985:174-178; see also Cohen 1982:ix-x)-and only on the understanding that the records he made would belong to that Library's Archive of Folksong, where they will now be found. Few of us have the marvelous facility of a Cecil Sharp, who could note down carefully the singers' tunes as rapidly as they could sing them, while simultaneously refusing to record the sometimes unexpurgated words they sang. Of such angelic musical purity is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Randolph's problems with the unexpurgated texts and the musical notations of his Ozark Folksongs never ended in his lifetime. Having given this collection for publication by the State Historical Society of Missouri, the then Secretary of that Society, Floyd Shoemaker, summarily rejected every bawdy text (about 50 pages' worth, in all) from Randolph's manuscript as it stood at that
time. Shoemaker or his Society also refused to allot funds to have Randolph's manuscript musical notations set in type in the usual way, on the grounds of economy-in a four-volume work! The result was that the only serious criticisms of the published Ozark Folksongs (1946-50), which wounded Randolph badly, were precisely in connection with the inadequate presentation and
printing of the music to the songs, especially in two reviews by the musicologist Charles Seeger, who came down perhaps justifiably hard:
It is a pity that [Randolph's] fine sensitiveness for the material could not have been extended to the publication of it. The notations are clear enough, but in barbarously ugly and amateurish hand-writings. It is not worth while to point out here the many small mistakes. .... These, as well as ranges of an octave above the normal voice, and signatures of five sharps or flats could have been eliminated by any good music editor. What is more disturbing is the impression that some of the notations may be very inaccurate. ... The whole process of collection, transcription, selection, and editing of the music was amateurish
from start to finish. In this our author, we must hasten to add, is not wholly to blame. [3]
Taking caution from this slashing reprimand, Norm Cohen, editor of the excellent abridged edition of Ozark Folksongs published in 1982 by the University of Illinois Press, and their very competent press editor, Judith McCulloh, arranged for a more professional presentation of the music in that edition.
Cohen notes:
The harsh judgment of America's leading ethno-musicologist must have indeed stung. The criticism of the calligraphy was valid, and for that reason the musical transcriptions have been reset for this edition. Some lines of music still break at the beginning of a new line of text, even though this may not coincide with a bar line. Obvious errors in bars, note values, and the like ... have been corrected silently. Ties and beams have been added to conform to standard current usage. .. . More than this, given the scope of the present work, has not been possible. [1982:xvi]
But it is surely enough. (For a discussion of the delicate problems of tunenotation, see McCulloh 1978.) Any further improvement here, as for example checking the tunes against later stanzas than the first-where the singer has not always yet hit his "stride," as Charles Seeger puts it-would involve confronting Randolph's texts with the actual recordings he made for the phonograph during the brief period of 1941-1943. Naturally, these do not necessarily nor altogether cover all the tunes used for the "unprintable" songs. In fact, bawdy song texts are quite infrequent on these recordings. They are repositoried in the Archive of Folk Song and Folk Culture, Library of Congress: acetate discs AFS-5236A through 5425B; and AFS-6897 through 6904. Randolph's own work-log on these recordings indicates a total of 876 songs and fiddle tunes preserved on 198 discs.
The immediate and principal result of the expurgation of his manuscript, of perhaps half a hundred "unprintable" songs, by Floyd Shoemaker-whose name Randolph also resented seeing placed on the title page with his own, since Shoemaker's contribution had been "mostly negative"-was that Randolph began almost at once, before the four volumes of Ozark Folksongs were all actually issued, to complete and perfect the "unprintable" bawdy songs section from his remaining manuscript materials of more than thirty years' collecting in the field. He believed at first, though he was soon to realize it was a
vain hope, that a supplementary "unprintable" volume could then be published, or at least issued privately in America, after the four main volumes would be out, under respectable auspices. Later it was hoped that I could publish this in France.
From the mere "long chapter (the equivalent of about fifty pages in print) of bawdy material" that Shoemaker had rejected, this now developed, since no editorial interference or rejection needed any longer to be feared, into the much larger eventual "Unprintable Songs" manuscript, and all the further materials in prose, soon to be published complete by the University of Arkansas Press. The principal song portion involves a total of 244 songs, in 510 texts, and 192 tunes for 180 different songs. This includes Addenda of 47 new texts (and 5 tunes) or significant variants, collected from 1952 to 1957 by Randolph; plus over 100 further songs from Ozark performers or learned in the Ozark area, collected by myself or others, along with numerous historical and parallel texts giving the full versions of songs of which Randolph was able to recover only fragments. These are not included in his totals.
"Taken altogether," says, or rather admits, his severely fair biographer, Robert Cochran, Randolph's song collections, "gathered for the most part without institutional aid and encouragement, contain more than 2,300 texts, about one hundred more than the Frank C. Brown collection from North Carolina, the largest collection in the U.S. to be published as a unit" (1985:181). And on Brown's collection, it might be added, six academic editors and over twenty other professional collectors and assistants worked, all of them with "institutional aid and encouragement," basically meaning money.
Toward the end of his life Vance Randolph informed me, in several shakily handwritten letters from the minimum-sized "rest home accommodation" in which he and his by-then blind wife were cooped up to die (and did), that he wanted to dedicate the "Unprintable Folklore" volume to Herbert Halpert, of Memorial University, Newfoundland, his truest friend-probably his "only
real friend," he maintained-in the American academic world. And that finally and seriously he wished to dedicate the "Unprintable Folksongs" volume to the redoubtable Rayna Green, of the Smithsonian Institution, who had found a publisher for, and illuminated with her fearless Introduction, his Pissing in the Snow (1976), comprising the "unprintable" parts of Randolph's
splendid Ozark folktale collections published in five differently entitled volumes, all expurgated by the publishers, of precisely these tales.
Earlier, however, Randolph crustily and surely jestingly wrote to me once to suggest that the songs volume really ought to be dedicated to no one else than Floyd Shoemaker, who was the person mainly responsible for their being relegated to a separate "outhouse" volume. I suggested an alternate dedication, perhaps on the style of "To the Onlie Begetter of These Insuing Sonnets," but Rayna Green surely deserves it more, if only for her courageously specialized interest in unexpurgated songs sung by women, of which the Randolph "unprintable" songs collection, "Roll Me in Your Arms, " offers incomparably the best sample anywhere available (Randolph 1990).
It should be mentioned that not all of the Ozark women singing such songs for Randolph were willing for their names to be connected with these songs, though many saw no objection. But in the end he required of me that all the informants' names-women and men alike-present in the manuscript versions of 1949 and 1954 should be replaced as published, edited by myself, with their initials and geographical location only, to avoid public embarrassment to any surviving singers and their families.
Women singers of bawdy songs are more commonly encountered than many folklorists realize-exactly as is the case among children-especially among country people everywhere, among the Scottish Gypsies or "travellers," also in the southern and southwestern United States, and in all states among the college-educated group, including nurses and servicewomen in wartime. Aside from the strong showing in the Randolph collection "Roll Me in Your Arms, " see the many examples presented without any editorial pussyfooting by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in their Travellers Songs (1977), collected mostly in Scotland, as were also the great Hamish Henderson manuscript collections, and the "Buchan Bawdry" collected by Kenneth Goldstein in roughly the same area by 1960, but as yet unpublished.
College women's frankly bawdy and semibawdy songs are very prominent in the various university student folksong archives, in particular D. K. Wilgus's Western Kentucky Folklore Archive (now at the University of California at Los Angeles), and the very large Indiana University Folklore Archive created by Richard Dorson at Michigan State College beginning in 1954-58 and later at Indiana, culminating in the outstanding and expertly edited field collection of mostly bawdy college songs by Richard Reuss.[4]
In the first and very courageously unexpurgated publication of real cowboy songs, "The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing" (1989), edited by Guy Logsdon from the repertory mainly of an old ex-cowboy, Riley Neal, another cowboy singer and composer, Dallas "Nevada Slim" Turner, is quoted at pages 20 and 340 as to his having learned many " 'plumb dirty cowboy ballads' from his mother, 'a real bronc-stompin' cowgirl' who collected bawdy songs and also wrote a few"; and that occasionally he
looked out the ranch house door when I was a little boy, and I have seen five or six cars pull up--an' then it was my job to take the guitar and second her as she would sing these bawdy songs for the cowboys and their wives. She didn't care about mixed company, and that's why everybody came to hear her sing.
When the responsibility for the editing and annotation, and the almost entire publication of his "unprintable" collection was ultimately turned over to me by Vance Randolph, one of the first things I realized I would have to concern myself with was getting his tune-transcriptionsi nto professionals hape. In this I had the very welcome help of the expert Anglo-American musician Herb Greer, originally of Denver, Colorado, who checked over and edited the whole two hundred tunes as supplied by Randolph, and corrected the ten or a dozen evidently wrongly transcribed or even unsingable. He also pointed out that not a single one of Randolph's transcriptions gave any usual metronomic time, or style indication, which was often essential for understanding or appreciating how, or at least how fast, the song was sung.
We therefore sent Randolph a minimum list of the usual style indications found in modern folksinging, and a summary list of his own first 180 song titles-those collected with tunes-against which I hoped he would be able to match some indication of the original singer's style, either from the field notes or logbook from which he had typed the manuscript, or from the actual field
recordings he had deposited in the Library of Congress. Some of them are not quite the standard Italian musicological adverbs, and may read, for example, "Exaggerated cowboy whine," or "Dirty" (which I take to mean in a rasping, aggressive, or "lowdown" jazz voice), "Shit-kicking style," etc. For the rest, we may just have to play them by ear.
Randolph expressed himself as amused by my insistence on this matter of musical style, and perhaps he was joshing me a bit in some of his argotesque indications, but I have reason to believe that both they and his astonishing memory can be trusted. All anyone could really object to in the end, I felt, was not that the songs were theoretically "unprintable"-pure hypocrisy, in any case, since most of us have secret sex lives tolerably close to those of the protagonists of even the most graphic of these songs-but it would hardly do for them to be "unsingable" as well.
That understood, the musical contribution of the Randolph Collection is not actually prejudiced by any awkwardness about the musical notations, all of which have been corrected as far as feasible without access to the field recordings. It does suffer, as do all relatively recent collections, from the worndown recollections of certain over-age singers, and from the relative decay of
authentic folksinging-even in parody form-as a personal activity in all areas of the United States, including the Ozarks, at and since the time Randolph was collecting there (about 1915 to 1955). That was the period when the main competing attack of audience-passivity, owing to the inroads of phonograph records and radio, arrived everywhere in the world, and has now almost completely changed and ravaged the field. Even so, quite a few gracious and lively old tunes will be found in "Roll Me in Your Arms," some of them uniquely; though of course nowhere near the quantity of the earlier Cecil Sharp and other British
field collections, and that more recent of Peter Kennedy's excellent Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (1975), based on tape recordings with the tunes professionally transcribed, though avoiding all graphically bawdy texts.
In the end, Randolph had the last word as to his musical notations, for better or for worse, in drawing to my attention an impromptu remark by Jan Schinhan, the tremendously competent and withal very human music editor of the great but ruthlessly expurgated Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, which had just appeared. Schinhan is commenting on "The Jolly Tinker" (Child-Bronson No. 278, as "The Farmer's Curst Wife"), of which the best study is still Ellen Stekert's master's thesis (1961). This version was recorded from the singing of Laura B. Timmons in 1940. Says Schinhan, sweeping away in three short frank sentences most of the finicking approximation that is all he or any other musicologist can put into mere tune notations: "Magnificently sung. Whata spirit! What can notes convey?" (Schinhan 1957:118).
In spite of Randolph's efforts to present the tunes to as many of the songs as possible, one can imagine his intense mortification when he found his efforts referred to cuttingly by Seeger as "amateurish from start to finish," and with the special and deserved contemptuous nod that, "The notations are clear enough, but in barbarously ugly and amateurish handwritings." Yet it remains an open question whether what such critics-specifically Bronson and Seeger-and the academic folklore Establishment generally, ever really wanted was the true texts or merely the traditional tunes of the erotic folksongs in English. Doubtless such songs were to be titivated up, quite acceptably to them, with newly refurbished texts of high moral nature, like those furnished on demand once by William Chappell, the Rev. Baring-Gould, Cecil Sharp, and more recently John A. Lomax and other less well camouflaged folksong fakers.
In any case, very little of either the true or the false is available publicly, even today, except in the Randolph Collection, in Guy Logsdon's volume of authentic cowboy songs (1989), and a few unexpurgated songs from Canada and Scotland published by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl (1977), and by Edith Fowke (1966).[5] For the rest, nothing is available-and certainly not with the music-except in the popular and usually rather amateurish student-&-soldier bawdy songbooks, mostly issued first during or nostalgically about twenty years after World War II in Britain, Australia, and Canada; and ultimately three or four such in the United States, by the folk-revival singers Oscar Brand, Ed Cray, and Jerry Silverman, almost all of them offering only the
same pitifully limited repertory of student-&-soldier songs. By far the best of the armed-service and similar collections are those by John Walsh (issued without his knowledge under another man's name); by Hamish Henderson in Scotland; and in the United States by Captain William J. Starr, and most recently and fully by Colonel C. William Getz.[6]
It is a curious fact, but a fact nonetheless, that no textual presentation has ever been made of any unexpurgated erotic ballad or song in any English or American folklore journal in the hundred years and more of their existence, except and until my own study of "Bawdy Recitations and Monologues," in Southern Folklore Quarterly( 1976); and Ronald L. Baker's article on the same
song, "Lady Lil and Pisspot Pete," published over a decade later in the Journal of American Folklore-its first-in 1987, under the unintimidated centennial editorship of Bruce Jackson.
Jackson's study of narrative Negro "toasts," Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (1974), also finally broke the sexual censorship barrier in American university press publishing, as to current modern erotic materials, and is a model of imperturbable frankness and incisive functional analysis in its presentation of these sometimes hair-raisingly obscene prison recitations and brags. This is not the only work on this subject; there are others by Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle (1964), by Fiddle (1972), and by Dennis Wepman, Ronald Newman, and Murray Binderman, The Life (1976), but Jackson's is by far the best and deepest. (See also the interesting and truculent exchange between Wepman and Jackson in JAF [1974-75], casting a most instructive light on the folk-mores of academic infighting.)
A special mention or gesture of appreciation should also certainly be made for the calm courage of the first ballad collection in modern times that broke the dike of repression, and in England at that, in 1957, The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry, XVth-XXth Century (edited by the eminent Rocastrian, Vivian de Sola Pinto, and Allan Rodway), which gives in an Appendix, pp. 377-435, all the ballads "excluded"-presumably by the publishers?-from the volume itself, and planned to be offered only in a separate leaflet, in the higher-priced edition. When reissued in America, by a publisher
of specialized audience, the erotic Appendix was democratically included in all copies, in spite of the frank final six pages of bawdy army songs, sociopolitical and satirical as well as amatory.
One assumes that de Sola Pinto's studies of the Earl of Rochester, the most forthrightly erotic of all English poets until the upthrust of the "underground" press in America in the 1950s and '60s-my own lay-psychiatric journal, Neurotica, being one of the first of these-had more or less mithridatized him to the presumed obscenity of modern armed forces' songs. In any case, seven years earlier, Princeton University Press in America had undertaken with extraordinary courage to issue an exact facsimile reprint of the notoriously bawdy "Antwerp" (London?) 1680 edition of the Poems on Several Occasions by Rochester, on paper watermarked, for some unfathomable press-run reason, "Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson." Perhaps this was intended as the Declaration of Independence of American university press publishing in 1950, almost half a century ago. In effect, that is what it was.
One is sorry to be forced to observe that the editor of this Rochester reprint, James Thorpe, displayed a courage somewhat more tempered, and almost succeeded in making ajoke of the whole enterprise in his notes, by "finding" that practically none of the poems and songs reprinted are, in fact, by Rochester. In which case the actual purpose of the reprint became almost inexplicable. Few of Rochester's editors have ever been able to avoid this logical paradox, with the exception of David Vieth, much more knowledgeable than most, in the erudite notes to his edition of Rochester (Yale University Press, 1968), which
is outstandingly the best.
The more usual now-you-see-it-now-you-don't academic playing of hide & seek with the essential bawdry of one's subject matter is evidently a sort of art-poetry pirouette or cadenza to the same tune as the folkloristic specialists' and collectors', who ride bravely through the rockiest cairns of Wales and the most inaccessible highlands of Appalachia and the Ozarks; then to return home and publish hardly more than the musical transcriptions of the songs found, if that, plus "analyzing" their tale-types and numbered-&-letter treadits, and the formulaic patterns and performancce on text of the anodyne words of their first stanza (only), all the rest having been either expurgated or plainly refused.
It is because of this maidenly recalcitrance in the past-and, if the truth be told, the present as well, in most formal folklore analysis, folk musicology, folkloristics, and other odd current folk-all-that the open publication of the erotic folksongs in English has mostly been left till now to the popular exploiters. Not only in the past centuries of the music-printer Henry Playford
and his prototypical pop-singer and strawman, Tom Durfey, in their Pills to Purge Melancholy from 1699 to 1720; but also just yesterday and today, on the lead of Pinto & Rodway's The Common Muse in 1957, which took a dozen or more years and a Supreme Court decision before it had any echo at the scholarly level in America.
Thus we now have a slew of dubiously "folk" volumes and volumelets, one of which, by Ed Cray, pretentiously imitates even the archaizing "Muse" of the British title; and including Michael Green and Harry Morgan's Why Was He Born So Beautiful? and Other Rugby Songs and More Rugby Songs (1967-68), Alan Bold's punningly titled The Bawdy Beautiful and Making Love (1978; a title which, to Mr. Bold, even comprises the gruesome British sex-contest ballad, "Eskimo Nell"!), and numerous others, especially in Australia where the bawdy song still hangs on, since people there still sing while they drink, like Sir John Falstaff and his regiment of friends.[7]
Practically all these books are stuffed shamelessly with cooked, conflated, and composited texts, usually as long as possible therefore, but which no one has evera ctuallys ung in thatf orm, and no one probably ever will-all naturally without any serious concern as to the centuries-long development and origins of many of these songs, except for Bold and Cray, who do make a stab at it. Fortunately, most of these books are issued only in popular paperback pocketbook form, on self-destructing pulp paper, which may even prove to be a blessing-in-disguise to future annotators. The splendid and profound musical and historical scholarship of a beacon work like Claude Simpson's The British Broadsidaen dI ts Music( 1966), essentially the long-awaited centennialr evision of William Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855-59), has not yet ever been seen in connection with the outcast and "unprintable" bawdy songs.
The situation is even worse as to folk erotica in poetry and prose, mostly in the humorous vein, of which the Randolph Collection presents by far the most important contribution in English. The "Unprintable Songs" (Section A, comprising half the work) are followed by "Rhymes" (B); Children's vulgar folklore (C); Dance-calls and similar formulaic ribaldry (D); Erotic riddles (E); Folk-speech and erotic idioms (F); Epigraphs and Graffiti (G); and Folkbeliefs and erotic superstitions (H), including materials on Ozark diabolism. Almost nothing of serious nature exists on any of these subjects, as to their erotic areas, in publicly issued books or journal articles in English, except for a certain amount on children's unexpurgated jokes and rhymes; and on graffiti, though most of what has been published on the latter is journalistic twaddle.
Also, most of the examples offered are faked or tendentiously selected as published, in order to omit the homosexual invitations and assignations that represent the main body and largest proportion of toilet-room graffiti, apparently in all Western countries, including Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Greece. The Randolph Collection includes the only sample of graffiti yet proposed in English that does not funk, omit, or evade the overwhelming homosexual element in these.[8]
The almost total ostracism-to call things by their right name just once suffered by Vance Randolph at the ungenerous hands of the academic and folkloristic Establishment until the very end of his career and life, and even after in certain quarters, was specifically due to his unwillingness to play the elegant but dishonest expurgatory academic game, after having been told in 1915 by the then Head Poo-Bah of that Establishment, the great German anthropologist Franz Boas, that his study of the Ozark culture and collection of its folklore could not be considered worthy of, or properly submissible for, the degree of Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia University. In a fascinating but still unpublished interview on 26 October 1963, with Archie Green and Judith McCulloh, Randolph says it plain and simple:
I went to call on Boas; I wanted a Ph.D. in anthropology. But they were all interested in Indians and Eskimos. I wasn't interested in Indians or Eskimos, or archeology either, although I am onesixteenth Cherokee, just as a lot of people along the Oklahoma border are part Indian. Boas told me I'd have to start all over. When Boas closed the door I just went back to writing; otherwise I would've become an anthropologist. But Boas was a great man.
One understands, when Randolph says "they were all interested in Indians and Eskimos," that he means "all they were interested in .. ." though that is not quite true. When, years ago, I used to do literary work on his daughter Franziska Boas's dance publications, Boas's son-in-law Michelson explained to me that the "old man," just recently dead, had confided that his famous study of the self-destructive Kwakiutl Indians and their yearly ultimate "conspicuous consumption" orgies or potlatchesw, here they destroy a large part of their wealth in valuable furs, home-made blankets, copper platters and other
artifacts, was intrinsically a valid way for a "foreigner" to criticize the maddog capitalism just preceding and creating World War I. But from a more oblique and unassailable position than the debunkers, such as Upton Sinclair in his ghastly expose of the hog-butchering factories of Chicago, in The Jungle (1906), or the elegant travesty of academic pomposity, combined with trenchant criticism of established social institutions in Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), itself a masterpiece of ironic obliquity.
Everyone knows today who Boas's autochthonous, self-destructive Kwakiutl Indians really are, just as we know who are Jonathan Swift's Big-Endians and Yahoos. Nevertheless, the door was shut on Randolph, just as he says, even though,
in fact, he already held a graduate degree in psychology from Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Randolph's teacher and thesis supervisor, the great educator G. Stanley Hall, had also launched Sigmund Freud in America. Not to mention Boas himself, who later befriended and trained practically everyone in the serious folklore field at that date except Randolph, who may have been too tall and broadly built for Boas, who was more of the small but peppery German field-sergeant type. Randolph spent the rest of his life locked out of the high-earning parts of academia for lack of a Ph.D. degree, and made his precarious living for the next sixty years as a folklorist, ghostwriter, and hack, plus a few other shifts & pretexts not very admirable, but which it would be better not to judge unless one has tried to survive as a Luftmenschin the same situation oneself. I have.
Meanwhile, Randolph continued to collect, and to write and publish when and how he could, a magnificent summum of the folksong and folklore of the still quite primitive Ozark mountain uplift region of Arkansas, Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma, though himself born a flatlander in the mining area of Kansas nearby. Actually, he retired to the Arkansas hill country by 1919, when not yet thirty, and spent the next sixty years grinding out a living there, entirely without university faculty sinecures or research grants, and did his work. Academia's loss has certainly been folklore's gain.
Consequent to his academic rejection, and his rejoinder in passing as an honorary or would-be uncultivated Ozarker for the rest of his life, Vance Randolph suffered throughout his career from notions of inferiority on the scholarly level to the few serious academics in the folksong and folklore field, to most of whom he applied frankly for research footnotes to his own work. In particular he sought out Louise Pound, and the students of the tremendously erudite Francis J. Child, whose "Child Ballads" still represent the most important top collection in the field to some. (But see Legman 1964:344-350.)
Randolph modestly applied for help with his research footnotes, for example, to Child's almost equally erudite assistant, the great George Lyman Kittredge, and his own further students and continuators, Phillips Barry, Hyder Rollins, Archer Taylor, Wayland Hand, Stith Thompson, Francis Utley, and Henry M. Belden, to name only the most outstanding.
Unfortunately, Randolph understood "scholarship" only as it was once understood at a rather naive and futilitarian academic level: as the mere marshalling of more and more page references to parallel texts or recordings of a given folksong or folk-prose item-what Archer Taylor has called contemptuously "the threshing of old straw." And the farther back and further afield
and foreignly one can seek them, presumably the better, and the "bigger" a scholar one is, even though without any study of anything beyond the text itself, and some consideration of what it means and expresses to the people who create and transmit it, and the part it plays in their lives. In other terms, the old struggle between pharisaical Textualism and Humanism, in which the opening gun on the Humanists' side was the hilarious satire on such sterile and squalid mock-scholarship, in the foppishly overstuffed headnotes and purposeful irrelevancy and top-heaviness of Hyacinthe Cordonnier's Le Chefd'Oeuvre d'un Inconnu, under the elevated pseudonym of "Dr. Chrisosteme Mathanasius," in 1714.
Here, the little 40-line folksong on the night visit of Colin to his beloved, which is the total subject of the book, is surrounded by 150 pages of introduction and 800 pages of notes-in its final edition-with poetic ejaculations in dog-Latin, mock-Greek, and fake-cabbalistic Hebrew, in praise of both the unknown folk-poet and his annotator; with further approbations, permissions,
lists, irrelevant folding illustrations, blurbs, etc., which take up a large part of the volume. I have soberly detailed this in The Horn Book (1964:339- 342), along with mention (my own historico-bibliographical annotation, to be sure) of some of Mathanasius's more illustrious forerunners, from Johann B. Mencken's De Charlatanerier auditorum, and Sebastian Brant and Erasmus in their Ship of Fools and Praise of Folly, to Swift's most seminal Battle ofthe Books and Tale of a Tub, and his description of the futile sages of the so-significantly named Island of Lapfita in Gulliver's Travels. Some might also point, though
the humor here was perhaps unconscious, to the article on Noah's Ark in the first edition of the Scottish Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1768, which gives, on Biblical authority, the exact dimensions and population of that vessel.
For the best, or worst part of the joke is that exactly this sterile and overbloated proto-Biblical massing of citations-to recondite sources the reader is supposed to be ritually impressed by, but is not really ever expected to look up and consult-then became and has remained for two centuries, and is still, the self-admiring cynosure and norm of a certain kind of empty academic
scholarship, especially in what concerns the two tormented subjects offolklore and Shakespeare.
Vance Randolph's wonted astuteness somehow failed him here, and he remained throughout his professional life an avowed true-believer in more and more massive citations of relevant texts and their page-numbered positions in other collectors' books as a properly supportive form of annotation, though it is evidently much closer, at best, to what should frankly be termed bibliography and indexing. It certainly cannot ever take the place of actual annotation, even merely textual, and surely not of the kind of humanistic interpretation that alone has the right to be called the folklore scholarship Randolph so much
admired.
Only once, that I know of, was Randolph's sturdy faith in such citational overkill shivered or even shaken, and that was as to N. Howard ("Jack") Thorp's first printed collection of 24 expurgated American cowboy songs, first issued in New Mexico, 1908, at the author's expense, as Songs of the Cowboys.
This modest 50-page booklet having been ultimately reprinted in facsimile, in its annotated variorum edition by Austin and Alta Fife (1966), surrounded by, and one might say embalmed in, 300 further and much larger pages of furthert exts and complex Mischtextsa nd hypothetical composites of the same songs; with headnotes, lexicon, bibliographies, musical notations (not connected with Thorp's book, nor collected by him), and immense citational lists for each & every song, of other published and recorded texts and renditions, averaging two pages of bibliographical notation for each song, and in the case of "The Cowboy's Lament" (alias "The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime," by syphilis), eight full pages, 182-190, in Child Ballad style, citing
no less than 400 printed, manuscript, or recorded versions of this one song-all perfectly authentic.
That is to say, these references are perfectly authentic if one considers that 399 of these carefully collated and reconstituted versions of this rough-tough cowboy's song are visibly and entirely expurgated, faked, reworked, recast, rewritten, and at best "modified"-by the original singers and/or collectors, all 400 of 'em; not by the Fifes, be it said. The one exceptional lapse into authentic cowboy bawdry was four orphaned dogies or "vulgar" stanzas, wrested from their context in an embarrassed footnote, page 124, on the famously double-entendre cowboy song, "The Bucking Bronco," which in this case rises pretty damn close to single-entendre. (The complete bawdy version in the Fife Archive I-837 is printed only by Logsdon, to end his preface.)
That is really giving the Chef-d'Oeuvre d'un Inconnu in 1714 a run for the money. Meanwhile, though pretentious futilitarianism like this, and Bertrand Bronson's Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959-72, in four enormous volumes) even more so, can apparently always find publishers, both commercial and at university presses-apparently for that very reason-some of the greatest folksong collections ever made are still going begging today, obscurely ungathered from serial publication in learned journals, or altogether unpublished (for example, the mass of articles on Canadian folksongs, edited by M. Barbeau, and the splendid early 132-page collection by E. C. Perrow, "Songs and Rhymes of the South," mouldering unremembered in scattered back numbers of the Journal of American Folklore [1912-15] though issued at a time when nothing else of serious nature had ever been published on the folksongs of the U.S. south-except as to Child Ballads, to be sure. And the magistral "Ballads
and Songs" research sheaf, by none less than George Lyman Kittredge, also forgotten today in an early JAF [1917]).
Much more pressing too are the wholly unpublished enormous collections made by Robert Winslow Gordon: thousands of American folksong texts from the 1920s still in manuscript, and divided then in angry panic between the Library of Congress Folksong Archive and that of the University of Oregon, when Gordon found himself suddenly being eased out of his Library of
Congress position for the Lomax powerhouse, father and son. See further Debora Kodish's fascinating recent biography of Gordon, Good Friends and Bad Enemies.
And why even mention the tremendous collections made by Gavin Greig of folksongs of Scotland at the turn of the 20th century, now deposited in 93 volumes in Aberdeen University Library, practically untouched since 1922; and those thousands more recent (and wholly uncensored) by Hamish Henderson, on deposit in the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh, none of which look as though they are ever going to be published? Patrick Shuldham-Shaw has prepared an index to the Greig Collection, and I believe a microfilm has been made for the School of Scottish Studies. Of course that is not the same thing
as digging up a lousy couple of hundred thousand pounds of North Atlantic oil money from some new Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and publishing by offset or computer scanning process these folklore monuments created with infinite pains and love by Greig and Henderson; but it is perhaps a start. And what about the still-remaining songs in the Cecil Sharp manuscripts, at least one of which, "Eyes like Sloes" or "Black as Sloes," is a masterpiece of musical beauty, though the words of the text the singer gave (her own?) are perilously close to incoherent nonsense, much like recent pop songs.
At the more local level, why not at least a Randolph memorial volume presenting the modern collections of Arkansas ballads and songs, made in part under the inspiration of Mary Celestia Parler, his wife, and offered for her course at the university as master's theses, by Merlin Mitchell (1950), Irene Jones Carlisle (1952), Theodore Garrison (1944), and Diane Dugaw (1973: at
Boulder, Colorado). And add the numerous other Arkansas collections recorded on tape and disc, and now filed & forgotten in the Library of Congress (Vance Randolph's own thousand recordings); in the Springfield, Missouri, Public Library (Max Hunter Collection of Ozark Folksongs); and the University of Arkansas Library until 1965, of which only the brief checklist index of
the 1,062 texts recorded before 1955 has yet been published, in Arkansas Folklore (1954-57).
The discographies of all this recorded folksong material, both in the Library of Congress and in the unpublished manuscript folklore archives of many American universities (UCLA, Indiana, University of Pennsylvania, New York State Historical Society at Cooperstown, and numerous others not yet inventoried) are now as large or larger than the bibliographies in the published
books. But no move whatsoever is being made even to transcribe, let alone publish, this material, except in the very occasional form of a few commercial recordings for folksong enthusiasts among the public. One has heard since Roman times of the mountain laboring and giving birth to a mouse; but here the academic mountain has labored heavily for exactly a century, at least as to phonographic folksong recordings, and has given birth to virtually nothing but the Brown North Carolina Collection.
In any case, the current fancies and fashionable shibboleths of academic research and publication in the folksong and folklore field rather turn up their collective (but noncollecting) noses at "mere" field collection. Apparently this is now too hard to do, except among captive students, even with recording apparatuses o f the latest automatic type, where you just touch the button and then sleep in the back of the station-wagon or "folk-van," while the folk performer sings her or his heart out. After all, hardly a handful of texts are necessary, when the folklorist's contribution to knowledge will then consist of only the dry tabular "trait-study" of the tales or music, the dreary "formulaic analysis" of the sentence particles and vocabulary (but never the subject!) of the texts, perhaps even the "gestural study" of the performers' narrative style, and the audience's response or "performance context." That is not the type of folkloristic analysis the world either wants or needs, though it can easily be
touted up into producing profitable careers for gerund-grinding nonentities.
Yet it was from the currently unassailable antihuman heights of such cold formalism and boondoggling that Vance Randolph found himself snubbed and snooted for decades as a mere "folklore collector," particularly by the late and well-hated Richard Dorson, passing as the Great White Chief or Head Panjandrum of the folklore study he spent decades forcing upward into respectability and high salaries, as the purposely newly entitled discipline of "Folkloristics." As Randolph's first biographer, E. Joan Wilson Miller, ends by saying:
It is remarkable that he persisted without academic recognition. He has made a significant contribution to the study of folklore, even though his aim of preservation for its own sake may have become outmoded by the penchants of contemporary indexers and analysts. [Miller 1975:68; see also Schroeder 1980]
Analysts, yes, and penchants for sure; but what kind of analysis? The truest explanation of Vance Randolph's unparalleled one-man achievement in American regional folklore, which is comparable only to the great similar collections made in Scandinavia by Grundtvig, in Russia by Afanasyev, in Italy by Pitre, in the South Slavic culture by Krauss, and in Scotland and England by Greig, Henderson, Sharp, and a meagre handful of othersmost of these now a century ago, and more-will neatly be found in a brief anecdote he himself reports, in the section of his once "unprintable" manuscript, "Bawdy Elements in the Ozark Speech":
In central Arkansas a farmer had built a very fine road. An engineer asked how he had made such a perfect curve without any surveying instruments. "Well, sir," said the farmer, "I done it by the squat of my ass and the squint of my eye."
I guess that says everything.
The final and most destructive misconception at large in the folklore and folksong field today is the dangerous idea that now that raw collecting has arrived at the point of diminishing or no returns, the mental strain of any necessary study and interpretation can best be taken care of automatically by the Big Brother of the transistor circuit and computer hardware, while the folklorist or folkloristics "specialist" lallygags gracefully with his or her more attractive students out in the hall. If there is one thing that is not wanted and not needed today it is to set Ph.D. candidates, and other half-paid slaves, to counting syllables, feminine rhymes, and the melodic intervals of 141 musical settings of a single and identical ballad (Lady Isabel being murdered 141 more times, that is); or tabulating 14 "traits" and an equal number of "motifs" per folksong or tale, each one of which takes up 15 pages in a learned journal (in very small type). All of which is then to be juggled marvelously and mindlessly together by computer, so as to produce pseudoscientific "findings" phrased to fit some briefly fashionable mock-scholarly shibboleth or plain eccentricity, ending in "-istics" or "-otics"; and on university money if such is to be had, or a government grant if guaranteed harmless to the existing order.
In an extraordinary review by Jeannie Vasteele of an in-group anthology of folklorists' humor, Metafolkloristic(a1 989), printed by some Moebius-strip or Klein-bottle technology in the very book it is reviewing, Vasteele rips off the uncomfortably-sitting mask of grad student humor, and makes the following powerful statement and warning for the future, pressing forward the rights of that enormous, nonacademic human group or universal majority for whom "Folklore is the voice of those who have no other voice, and would not be listened to if they did":
The folklorist, representative of the academy and the ruling class, monitors the poor and the powerless. He or she trivializes their arts, and simplifies what gives meaning to their lives. ... In this new century of folklore, the professionals may be able to hide behind a hundred years of tradition. Or they may hide behind myopic research methods born of arcane theories. The
real stuff of folklore, the possession of the folk, is powerful. Yet when things get hot, the folklorists duck. The heat of interchange between the have's and the have-not's can get steamy. Yet, too often, the folklorist only collects the data, then archives it (or in common parlance, steals it and hides it away). Documentation has become an end in itself. Tape, film, and keystrokes are cheap. After all, no one knows what use future generations of politicians and their historians will have for these collections-blackmail, graft, counter-revolutionary proselytizing, or other forms of exploitation. After all, public domain is the domain of folklorists. . . . The academic, political, and commercial applications of folklore are unlimited. Folklore can be a salve for modern civilization's cancers. It can fool urban-technological man into believing he is still in touch with the land, the sky, and his mythological past. [1989:60] [9]
The curse of folklore and folksong study, as everyone realizes by now, has been the endless doodling with the unimportant paraphernalia and nonsignificant integument of form-once the textual form, now the musical or even the mere verbal form or the performance background, glorifying the absorptive audience since active performers have become hard to find-without any
matching concentration on essential subject, meaning, and function. There has been no study, until barely yesterday, of what the material means to the people who transmit it (and not to the outsiders who collect it), and what it tells us about their inner aspirations and their response to the lives they must live, often meanly and unwillingly.
As far as sexual folksong is concerned, which is at least as old as the Phallophoroi if ancient Greek comedy, this complete overlooking of the essential, and concentration solely on the form, is tantamount to spending the entire wedding night examining the bride's trousseau-never her torso. When does the interpretation start? When does the curtain go up on the meaning of the endless texts that have already been collected, not to mention those texts mutely waiting, recorded on discs and tapes but still untranscribed and unpublished by the thousands, in the folklore archives of the world?
One presumes these priceless and irreplaceable evidences of Western folklore will one day be published and made available to researchers, to be analyzed- and used-as they deserve, having now been only too long preserved and treasured upon purpose, as Milton puts it in the Areopagiticat,o that "Life beyond Life." But one is beginning to wonder. . . . In some cases it is already
too late. In one American university archive repositorying for decades now the Randolph "unprintable" manuscript complete-certainly, with the unexpurgated Gordon manuscript, the most valuable and extraordinary of the tillnow unpublished folksong and folklore collections in America-some disloyal or overloyal hand has torn out one leaf, or perhaps cut out and reglued the
frame of the microfilm, evidently on the basis of anti-Negro prejudice.
The similar but much shorter "Bawdy" dossier in John A. Lomax's manuscript collection of cowboy songs, preserved in the Texas Historical Society Center, University of Texas at Austin, is now reported as having entirely "disappeared." Antisexual prudery or oversexual lubricity? We will never know. Other archived collections of erotic material have also been sacked and vandalized in the same way. Librarians are not even surprised any longer by such incidents, and write them off as part of the "standard risk" in library service, whether at the hands of the public or secretly by the library staffs themselves! This is made quite clear in various contributions to Martha Cornog's forthcoming and eye-opening nationwide symposium, The Libraries, Erotica and Pornography, and in particular in my own introductory article, "The Lure of the Forbidden."[10]
By a strange and very fortunate accident, most of the former contents of the Lomax "Bawdy" file had earlier been copied off for my work by D. K. Wilgus of UCLA, and were later dictated on audiotape by Austin Fife, who could take off rapidly in that way materials he was unable to write out by hand owing to his tragic Parkinsonism. They have been transcribed since, and now form part of the Fife Cowboy and Western U.S. Folklore Archive, preserved at Utah State University, Logan; all the Lomax materials being entered and branded identifiably under "JL" numbers. I also received a copy, in case those too should disappear. There are likewise certain other Lomax manuscript materials and extensive folksong recordings in the Library of Congress Folksong Archive.
In the same way, but without the fortunate accident of preservation elsewhere, a large portion of the unique file of ephemeral pictorial erotic folklore of the now-burgeoning kind called office photocopy "xeroxlore," once preserved in the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research archives at Indiana University, has similarly "disappeared." But this loss occurred only after having been catalogued completely by a student assistant, and examined by myself with the permission and in the presence of Cornelia Christenson of the original Kinsey board of trustees. That file is now largely depleted, again by dishonest and irresponsible users, either inside or out.
Large independent collections of similar "xeroxlore" materials are in the private files of Mac E. Barrick of Pennsylvania, Alan Dundes of California, Lydia Fish of Buffalo-very importantly-Cathy and Michael Preston of Boulder, Colorado (who have published two xerographic volumes of these), Frank Hoffmann of Buffalo, and also myself, as well as other important collections
in England and in Germany. Sometimes humorous xeroxlore materials like these are preserved where one would not, normally, have expected them, as for example in the secret files of various government spy services in England and America, no doubt not only for private staff delectation but as what old John Selden called in his Table- Talk, "Signs of the temper of the
Times," like political jokes from Russia, Greece, Poland, and most recently Romania. That, they surely are. But what is this strange new relationship between folklore, political spying, and "de-stabilizing"? And, more importantly, what will disappear next?
The question of the human analysis of collected folklore touches a rather sore point for me personally, as there was evidently no space available in editing the very large Randolph "unprintable" collection for almost anything but the presentation of the texts & tunes, and no space at all for just such analysis as I am calling for here, and have been calling for since The Horn Book in 1964, with mighty scarce response. Actually, I know of only three or four folksong or folksay collections published since then in which the human dimension of the songs or recitations is taken seriously into account, or even approached: Edith Fowke's Traditional Singers and Songs from Ontario (1965), in which one notes the direction of emphasis even in the title; A. L. Lloyd's Folksong in England (1966); Stan Hugill's volume (1961), as an ex-shantyman himself, on sea shanties and their singers; especially the splendid study and presentation by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger of Scottish "Traveller" (Gypsy) folksong in English; and Bruce Jackson's outstandingly trenchant and wholly unexpurgated collection of Negro "toasts," already mentioned, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (1974), in which the New Freedom, so long awaited-surely since the French Revolution and Victor Hugo-arrived completely, even for American university presses, beginning at the top.
It should perhaps be mentioned here that "the last of the shantymen, " Stan Hugill's unexpurgated sea-shanty texts, were all excluded from his books, as they have been from every other sea-shanty book openly published in English since the 1880s. They are now therefore at their very last chance ever to be recorded and preserved, as entrusted to me by Hugill in the late 1950s in manuscript, as "Sailing Ship Shanties," just as were Vance Randolph's equally "unprintable"O zark materials.
The intention, and specific request of both men to me, was that I should undertake to publish at least a sampling of their unique materials (if separate full publication could not be achieved) in my own very large historical collection, "The Ballad: Unexpurgated Folksongs, American & British, of the Twentieth Century." This is still forthcoming, after exactly a half-century of
collection and study, but I have considered myself duty-bound and in fact honored now to give Randolph's posthumous collection precedence. My collection being very much larger than Randolph's, it is again dubious whether I will be allowed the space for just the kind of human analysis I believe in and would want to see done.
Vance Randolph often expressed himself, in our correspondence over 25
years, as extremely anxious that, in any publication of his "unprintable" materials,
I should add some furthera pparatucsr iticusa nd the usual scholarly paraphernalia
and impedimenta of page references to both earlier and later published
texts; and complete texts from whatever historical or other sourcepreferably
Ozark, if possible-for versions he had been able to collect only in
fragmentary form from his older informants. For this purpose both he and his
wife supplied me for several years, after the closing dates of his manuscripts,
with further and often fuller texts mostly from college sources, as was also the
case with those few I was able to add.
As to the updated and past-dated historical references, he believed firmly these would help to respectabilize his hitherto unpublishable work. And he noted, in frankly materialistic admiration, how Child and Kittredge, and over the years Barry, Belden, Halpert, Hand, Taylor, Thompson, Utley, and especially Richard Dorson, had succeeded in similarly respectabilizing folklore study-once just the "unwanted bastard baby of ethnology or even anthropology"- into a well-paying university discipline. In a hilarious colloquy in the still-unpublished interview with Randolph on 26 October 1963 (and possibly one reason why it has never been published), the interlocutor, Archie Green, innocently asks Randolph:
"When were you first conscious of folklore as a discipline?"-
VR: "I'm not sure I'm conscious of it now."
"I'm doing my own footnotes this time," he wrote to me, concerning his Hot Springs and Hell, the first American annotated jestbook ever published. "It's great fun, now that Halpert brings me the books by the armful. You stick to the sexology." This was not meant as slightingly as it may sound. Randolph already knew all about my own annotated "jestbook," Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) and No Laughing Matter (1975), begun over a dozen years before, in which the exceedingly human analysis admittedly all but swamps the joketexts.
This had been accepted for publication by the medical publisher Henry Schuman, Inc., in New York, on the basis of the final chapter on castration jokes prepublished in my own magazine Neuroticain 1951, of which I had of course sent Randolph a copy before it would probably be banned, as indeed it was. It was in fact because of the U.S. Post Office harassment of Neurotica
which forced it to close down, and Schuman's resultant withdrawal from the planned publication of my book, that I finally left the United States for France, and began to publish my own "unprintable" materials abroad, beginning with The Limerick, and planned to do the same for Randolph's.
Even Hot Springs and Hell had troubles too, behind the scenes. This was published in 1965 by Kenneth Goldstein's only too short-lived Folklore Associates firm near Philadelphia, which however never ventured to publish Randolph's far better Pissing in the Snow, over which Goldstein had exerted himself greatly to snag the publication rights that were never used. Randolph was extremely hurt by this, as he called it, "reneguing," since he considered that Roger Abrahams's Deep Down in the Jungle, already published by Folklore Associates, was at least equally graphic verbally, or more so. He was also surprised by the rejection of Hot Springs and Hell by the Columbia University Press, which had formerly published five volumes of his Ozark tale collections, admittedly all expurgated to the hilt. But then, so was Hot Springs and Hell.
"Maybe it was too scholarly for them .. ." Randolph joked, in the usual disabused dark-humor style of his letters. As published, the book carried a dedication to his closest friend, Herbert Halpert, who had supplied the folktale annotations to some of Randolph's earlier collections. To him he wrote privately concerning this dedication, which Randolph specified was to be repeated in the "unprintable" folklore volume, "I want to say simply 'To Herbert Halpert' . . . I do not wish to say anything
about what a great man you are, or about how many miles you walked barefoot through the snow to bring rare books to my pad on Leverett Street" (Letter of 29 January 1964). Not everyone understood why Randolph would expend such effort on the documentation of a difficult book of what most oldline folklorists would identify as "mere" jokes: Schwanke, not Mdrchen or "true" folktales, and would fervently "hope to get the son-of-a-bitch printed before I am called to my heavenly home on high."
The reviewer for the Journal of American Folklore, Leonard Roberts (1967:304), felt the book could at last redeem Randolph from the inferior status of having been called prissily throughout his career a lowly folklore collector, especially by his special or signifying Nemesis, Richard Dorson, rather than one of the elect: a folklorist, or, as currently magniloquently known, a practitioner of the Discipline of Folkloristics (see Ben-Amos 1985; Jackson 1985, 1986; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1985; and Legman 1986), a terminological perquisite to which Randolph had never until then been able successfully to aspire.
But now Roberts announced that Randolph had at last made it up the
academic glass mountain to the upper snow-crust, and how: "By annotating
these jests and showing familiarity with some two hundred volumes of bibliography,
he is now nominated to the latter title," of folklorist. As Humpty-
Dumpty says, "There's glory for you!" No wonder he wanted everyone to
supply him with the status-bearing reference notes for almost all his books
until then: Louise Pound and George Lyman Kittredge in the 1930s, H. M.
Belden and Herbert Halpert in the 1940s and '50s, and finally myself. Perhaps
others too.
But not everyone was so impressed, even with the 200 volumes "of bibliography,"
which Robert Cochran says really count 312, along with 113 pages
of notes to illuminate 460 jests and anecdotes. This works out to exactly onequarter
of a page of notes per jest. Is it enough?-That Is the Question. The
reviewer for WesternF olklore( 1967), one Jesse L. Harris, apparently did not
think so, and observed haughtily concerning Randolph's so-sweated-over annotations:
"From the notes, we learn the names of the informants and the fact
that 'This tale is printed by Fred Watkins Vaughan (Before Christ Came to Hot
Springs, 1910, p. 38)'."
The implication here is certainly as Randolph suspected: if he could or
would have given not just one raw reference in clumsy parentheses for this
tale, but let's say over eight solid pages full, with close to four hundred bibliographical
and discographic sigla, bristling like a Tibetan prayer-wheel with
page and matrix numbers proofread twice, to support twenty texts and hypothetical
composites (plus music and translations extra), as do the Fifes for
"The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime" in their proto-Shakespeareanv ariorum
edition of Jack Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys; then presumably even
Jesse L. Harris, reviewer to the Western Folkloristic elite, might agree that
Randolph too should be promoted to the title of "folklorist."
But alas, what if-just what if--the tale is a real discovery, and four hundred
other university-perked folklorists haven't found and printed it already, for
Randolph to refer to? What then? Or what if they have found it, but their books
aren't the multivolume regional monuments to be found and consulted in
every local library? To stick with Shakespeare-Ay, there's the rub! As in
"Hey! Rub-a-dub-dub! Three (hundred) men in a tub"-long after Dean Swift.
"And if the tub had been stronger, My tale would be longer." Bibliographically,
that is. Naturally, there can be other kinds of annotations than mere
286 Journalo f AmericanF olklore (103, 1990
reduplicative page references, but one wonders sincerely if that's what this reviewer
was really complaining about.
Randolph still felt the hidden sting of this footnote-counting nonsense a full
decade later, as will be seen. He was only lucky never to have spent one hour
as an elite insider in the university world of department conferences, as did I
at La Jolla, California, where he might have been surprised to see postulants
for faculty positions judged by their peers by having their printed books-by
means of which they have Published And Not Perished, at least not till thenpiled
upon one another on the examining committee's desk, to be compared
with those of other competing candidates, for their total vertical value. Why
bother to look inside?
Just after the second volume of my own "annotated jestbook" was published as No Laughing M atter i n 1975, with Randolph's long-awaited Pissing in the Snow also appearing about then (this time with the annotations by the hardworking Frank Hoffmann), Randolph wrote me bitterly, thinking perhaps of himself too: Some latter-day J wish Prophet gave your book six pages of hate in Western Folklore. He says it's not only the worst book ever written, but your next book will be even worse! I suppose he's sore about you getting that Chicago Folklore Prize. I had one of those west coast reviews once myself... but the reviewer didn't have a crystal ball. Archer Taylor told me he couldn't ever teach anything to anybody out there, without a folklore department, except Wayland Hand. He had to die without any heir, but not like a mule-Plenty of pride o f ancestry, but n hope of progeny.
Nothing daunted, Randolph continued to have great fun thereafter as a folklore annotator, being much perked up by the popular, if not monetary, success of Pissing in the Snow. He went on doing even better and more human footnotes
to his last book, Ozark Folklore:A n AnnotatedB ibliography(1 972-1987) in two remarkable volumes, excellently edited by his continuator, Gordon McCann, from Randolph's supplementary notes on which he worked happily in the poorhouse until his death. I have not been inspired to try to follow his lead in either direction. I was the original bibliographer on sexology for the
Kinsey Institute Library, and always drew a prejudiced line even there at amassing page references on any one item so extensive as to become a ritual of misplaced indexing. Or so impressive as to reduce any reader to the extremity of taking it all on trust- perhaps the real intention of the ritual- and never to bother to look up any of the unquoted or unassessed references at all. Will these jobs we so energetically entrust to future readers and researchers ever really be done?
I am not ready soon to forget my stupefaction, and almost suffocation, again on the publication of No Laughing Matter-a book of two thousand pages in all, offering hundreds ofjokes and folktales supported by several thousand references to tale-types, parallels, congeners, etc., in "All the Numberous Languages of All Times & Climes," as the circus-sideshow barkers used to cry when a tourist arriving in France soon after, and the first nonrelative who actually spoke chasteningly to me about it viva voce, expressed some honest doubt or puzzlement about the, er, authenticity of my thousands of laboriously found and proofread page references, of which in that blinding instant I suddenly learned the true worth under the eyes of Eternity. "Listen," he said
to me artlessly, "I wanna ask ya, confidentially.-Are all those numbers FOR REAL?!" In any case, no one could do better than the admirably full but temperate headnotes and discographies added by Norm Cohen to his brilliant abridged edition of Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs. As cautioned and intended, therefore, in my own notes to the "unprintable" folksongs, which are
allfor real and not for show-I have mostly stuck to the sexology. In effect, I was the ghost-folklorist annotating the collected songs. Little or nothing written by Randolph appears in "Roll Me in Your Arms."
It will not be out of place to say a concluding word here about Vance Randolph
as a traditional American writer and humorist, very much in the style
ofJoel Chandler Harris, author of the deathless Uncle Remus stories carefully
cast in the Negro dialect. Randolph certainly was a National Treasure too, like
Harris or Mark Twain, but no one noticed this until just a few years before his
death at 88, owing to the care with which he wore his tight upland Arkansas
disguise. Randolph's writings in the Ozark dialect are usually deeply appreciated,
but seldom recognized for what they were, since this is the one aspect
of his work that he was most reluctant to discuss frankly, and tried hardest to
disguise and minimize. This is perhaps a perfect example of that false modesty
St. Matthew warns against (V. 15), "Neither do men light a candle, and put it
under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the
house."
Randolph was not just a folklore collector, as he pretended, though he collected enormously, and-as he put it with mock disdain- "not a folklorist at all." He was a true artist as a raconteur or teller-of-tales, always hiding his taletelling art, as many of the best raconteurs do, under the transparent pretense of merely reporting, or admittedly retelling, other people's stories. Don't you believe it! What Randolph did was assuredly a terrible sin against the somewhat fluid rules of folkloristic ethics, as recently understood, in that he did sinfully claim or pretend that the seven superb volumes of Ozark folktales he published were simply recorded by him, or at most "reconstituted" within a few hours (or days), just the way he had heard the authentic Ozarkers tell them. Well, maybe that was true, but though the hands are the hands of Esau, the voice is assuredly Jacob's. We are just not expected to discern him, because his hands are as hairy as his brother's.
The very best discussion of oral and literary styles in retelling folktales is William Hugh Jansen's brief but profound "A Folktale-On Paper?" published in the special Vance Randolph issue of Mid-South Folklore (1975), though hardly mentioning Randolph at all, which begins with the acute question: "Lives there a folklorist ... who has not at some time, in print or before a class, or both, expressed doubts about the authenticity of a published collection because not a single solecism graced its pages?"
Only at the very beginning of his career, in Ozark Mountain Folks (1932), issued by a Socialist publishing house for its populist appeal. did Randolph present his colorful Ozark characters-Windy Bill Hatfield of Poot Holler, and the others-in frankly fictionalized form, dialogue and all, along with a
famous description of how ballads are really collected, "in the field." After
that, in all the volumelets of first-person narratives he wrote for E. Haldeman-
Julius's widely popular folk-education series, the Little Blue Books at 50
apiece, published in Girard, Kansas, beginning with Wild Stories from the
Ozarksa nd Funny Storiesfr om Arkansas,a lso and especially Tall Talesf rom the
Ozarks (1943-44, Little Blue Books Nos. 1848, 1897, and 1882), and mostly
reprinted or enlarged-note well-in his formal hardback volumes of folktales
published later, the tales are almost invariably told, and the yarns spun, in the
first person, presumably as taken down by Randolph, more or less from the
tellers' mouths. And this is certainly true, yet there is a certain suggestiofa lsi
left behind, as is the case with all tale-tellers, as in Bret Harte's "Plain Language
from Truthful James, " a tale-in-verse if ever there was one, that one is "going
it strong, Though I state but the facts. . . ."
Of course, the tellers themselves, unless they are those rare birds who "invent"
folklore, and whom no one has ever seen hide nor hair of, are also
generally telling other people's stories in their own words, and that is what
Randolph is doing too. Except that he rightfully claims the words used are, in
fact, the original tellers' words (or, at least, their authentic dialect), artfully
restrung by himself as close as he can get to the way he heard them told. For
that matter, most raconteurs specializing in tall tales and windies, whoppers,
shaggy-dogs, and authentic ghost stories almost invariably consider it essential
to pretend, with details that positively clench the matter, that all of it personally
happened to them, "a couple of years back." Or if their whopper is a
shade too incredible, or the farce too monstrous, it happened "two Christmases
ago to a feller I once knew out by the Oklahoma border, about the time
Looney Joe and 01' Rex Johnson took a buckboard into the Indian Territory
and found oil there. Had a red nose from drinking you could see four hundred
yards away, on a windy day." And the story continues.
That is the way all rustic American tale-tellers who want to be believed, at least at first, tell their tales: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Zora Neale Hurston, Joel Chandler Harris, "Sut Lovingood," and "Artemus Ward"; and so too all the way back to the Arabian Nights, "Homer," and the stories in the Bible. And that is the way Vance Randolph told his Ozark stories, exactly as when Moses
boldly closes his Levantine tale by reporting God's last words and blessing to him (in Hebrew), adding: "So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land ofMoab . . . but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."
That is
Vance Randolph's reportorial method too, and generally with almost as big a
moralistic wink to the listener or reader at the very end.
Randolph felt himself constrained to the same folktelling techniques, and
conforms to the same discipline linguistically, in all his folktale books. If one
reads carefully his extremely succinct prefaces, and tries to nugget out what
he is actually saying and admitting about his methods of collecting and then
reconstituting the dialectical monologues he prints, one stumbles upon the
truth of the matter very quickly. To wit, that Vance Randolph was himself the
speaking tongue or sum total of all the great Ozark raconteurs he is pretending
to quote, while quietly explaining ahead that he is of course not quoting them
verbatim.
To give him his due on that account, he was unquestionably basing himself
on materials noted down rapidly from his Ozark informants' mouths, injournalistic
reporter style, and probably often a good deal more carefully than that.
However, that is only a matter of the raw materials gathered, and the dialect
assumed. Although, in the folksongs he collected, Randolph was a real stickler
for getting down the singer's exact words and tunes in classic field-collecting
style, when it came to the folktales he retold he was "not a folklorist at all,"
as he grimly insisted (the life-game of "You Can't Fire Me, I Quit!" or
YCFMIQ), but a folk-artist, and a great one.
What I am saying here I say with some trepidation, as I know there have
been certain Devil's Advocates in this matter, such as Richard Dorson, who
have come as close as the traffic will bear to implying that Vance Randolph
was some kind of folklore-faker for recreating and retelling the folktales he
collected, something no one would ever dream of saying about Mark Twain
or "Sut Lovingood." There simply have to be other folkloristically acceptable
ways of retelling folktales than recording them phonographically or on tape,
and then transcribing the tape mechanically. If not, what are we to say about
all the folktales of the world, gathered before the phonograph was invented in
the late 19th century by Charles Cros and Edison?
Are the Arabian Nights a fake? The Ocean of Story? Boccaccio? Apuleius? Were the Greek diacevastes, who collected and rewrote their heroic legends into the form we call "Homer" in the 5th century B.c., at the command of the tyrant Pisistratus, folk-fakers too? I think the most temperate statement here is that of a complete outsider to folklore, the brilliant literary and social critic, Kingsley Widmer, lost in the acidly penetrating back-of-the-book notes to his The Literary Rebel (1965:230-237) concerning the folk-poet and folksinger, "Joe Hill":
We must ignore the folklorists' tiresome pedantry of non-qualitative definitions about the folkish. When it is found out that a self-conscious intelligence has improved a slopped-up popular version ofa piece probably done by an exceptional individual in the first place, they reject the piece-an anti-intellectuala nd anti-individualistb ias which pervadess uch discussions. [Widmer
1965:237]
The difference between Randolph's "free discourse" method in collecting and then recreating folktales he heard, and his attempt always at literal transcription in the case of songs and rhymes, rises from one standard and observable feature: that for most people, songs and rhymes are attempted to be memorized and t o be r epeated literally. This is an attempt that often fails unconsciously, leading to endless variation, sometimes out of all recognition, except as to the congealed rhyming words. Whereas a sort of loose control over the vocabulary and the strings of the narrative is all that most tale-tellers andjokesters ever try for, and seldom repeat a story twice exactly the same.
Randolph's own art is that he has quietly shown himself to be one of the
finest dialect tale-tellers the American South and Southwest have any record
of, except Mark Twain and perhaps "Sut Lovingood" and Joel Chandler Harris.
The corpus of Randolph's protoliterary output in this form includes the
following seven folktale collections (the first five published by the Columbia
University Press): WeA lwaysL ie to StrangersT: all Talesf romt heO zarks( 1951),
WhoB lowedU p theC hurchH ouse,a ndO therO zarkF olk Tales( 1952), The Devil's
Pretty Daughter (1955), The Talking Turtle (1957), Sticks in the Knapsack
(1958);H ot Springsa ndH ell (1965;n ot strictly folktales), and Pissingi n theS now
(University of Illinois Press, 1976), which last is the bawdy "supplement" to
all the other volumes, being the stories that were rejected or refused space in
them as "unprintable," either at the editorial stage or by the eventual publishers.
Most people consider it to be the best and most amusing volume of all.
A good deal more can be learned about all these volumes in For Love and For
Money:t he Writingos f VanceR andolpha, more-than-complete bibliography by
Robert Cochran and Michael Luster (1979), and could be learned a good deal
more easily if this otherwise excellent, chronologically arranged volume did
not totally lack a title index. Perhaps someone could have unveiled to the publisher
the apparently arcane secret of the printing art, that book paper necessarily
has to be folded in multiples of 16 or 32 pages, and that if the Rockefeller
Foundation was forethoughtful enough to fund the publication of such a book
to the tune of 120 pages, private enterprise could have easily raised the pitifully
few extra dollars necessary to add the few more pages needed for an index of
titles, which might even have cost practically nothing at all, since 128 (pages)
is divisible by both 16 and 32. Only a detail perhaps, but a heartbreaker.
Richard Dorson, of Michigan State College and later Indiana University, set himself up for years as Vance Randolph's hardest critic and secret worst enemy. Dorson was a very good hater, and was well hated in return by many, as can for example be discerned rather easily in the pathetic story of his attempt to ruin the academic career of Ellen Stekert, who was forced to leave Indiana and take her degree down the road at Pennsylvania to evade Dorson's extraordinary- and perfectly useless-harassment. (See her cri-du-coeur, "Autobiography of a Woman Folklorist," in the centenary "Folklore and Feminism" issue
of Journal of American Folklore [1987], which tells the whole story with perfect candor, minus one or two details perhaps not as obvious as they seem, but which are not up to me to unveil.) The same is true of the outrageous vendetta Dorson carried on for decades against the more inspiring and broadly influential teacher Ben Botkin, which I think can be fairly stated to have been based on little more than rank jealousy of the enormous publishing success of Botkin's marvelously chockful and overflowing regional "Treasuries" of American folklore, in volume after volume since the 1940s.
As I had the opportunity once of asking Dorson face to face what the hell was the big idea-in those terms-of his pogrom against Randolph, whom he tried for years to persecute or even crucify by snidely calling him a "folklore collector" or "regional collector" at every turn, instead of the ostensibly more kudos-bearing "folklorist," he did me the honor of answering me in kind. I have not forgotten what he said, since I was there at Indiana to ask him for a job. "Scholar-trampsl ike you and Randolph," he began quasi-politely. "You mean bums! like us," I interjected even more politely, trying to help along in
what I sensed was a difficult interview for him. "Yes," Dorson agreed, dropping
his usual intense and aggressive tone to something that might pass for a
grin; "bumsli ke you [observe that he omits Randolpht his time] arejust too far
out in left field ever to have a place in the academic discipline of folklore." We
shook hands on that. I don't think I would have enjoyed his folkloristic discipline.
Randolph didn't care for it at all. Besides, we might have ended up
taking away one or two of those cushy faculty jobs, with perks, generous "retirement
plan," and all, from some well-disciplined Ph.D. in Folkloristics who
needed it more.
Despite a few mollifying gestures of equivocal nature, such as a one-page "visit" with Randolph (1954:260), and some politely approbatory remarks about his very last book (since it was a bibliography, not an attempted field contribution), Dorson never stopped playing the Signifying Nemesis, to Randolph as Job, for the rest of their lives. His references to Randolph are all listed
in Robert Cochran's astonishingly unsympathetic Vance R andolph: An Ozark Life (1985:232). Dick Dorson would have loved it.
In his own summing-up volume, American F olklore a nd t he H istorian, Dorson again attempts to plough under what is precisely Vance Randolph's greatest claim to fame-that of being a marvelous writer, one of the best, of traditional American dialect humor (1971:163).
This is a career to be assessed entirely
apart from Randolph's lifelong effort to show America the Ozarks, for the first
time, as the fascinating region they are and have been. It offers an image quite
the opposite of what Americans persisted in thinking about the Ozarks until
Randolph came along: as a sort of Paddy-and-the-pig hillbilly hinterland, on
the style of Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" comic strip in the 1940s, with the pipesmoking,
matriarchal Mammy Yokum; the drunken, incestuous, henpecked
Pappy; the nymphomaniacal daughter Daisy Mae (whose underpants are
made of an old flour-bag marked XXX over the rump: i.e. "Kiss Here!"), terribly
sexy indeed, until she too will turn into a matriarch; and similar caricatural
fauna, all cavorting repellently over the hills of Dogpatch, their imaginary
"southern" habitat, with the lunkheaded, bigfooted (read: "All balls and
no brains") titular antihero. That was the American myth of the Ozarks before
Randolph's sympathetic rehabilitations.
Here, per contra, is Dorson's summing-up for the prosecution against Randolph, after having snobbishly typified him as a mere "collector-retoucher," a gibe with which his biographer, Robert Cochran, hastens to say it "is easy to sympathize":
The four valuable folktale volumes of Vance Randolph contain a variety of narratives, some recognizable Mirchen, some floating jokes, some migratory and local legends, but all processedb y the master collector-author in the same way, to emerge as fluent, idiomatic yarns, ascribed to named individuals who sound alike. [Dorson 1971:163; emphasis added]
He might also have said something about the Aesopian "morality" added at the end of most of the tales, obviously Randolph's own contribution after the punch line, since almost never so-collected in the field. Some say Dorson's assessments add up to an unwilling tribute-in-disguise, but I wonder. The beauty of this sterling example of poison-pen biography, or object lesson in
how to crowd the inconveniently gifted maverick out of the corral and into the killing-pen, is that every word of it is true. . . . But only if you take the basically anti-folk position that "master collector-authors" (or "collector-retouchers," if you wish), who can take the crude jokes, tales, and legends that are "floating" around them, migratory and local, and by some strange, impertinent magic desperately unavailable to most of us, can make them "emerge as fluent, idiomatic yarns," just have no damn business trying to pass themselves off as "folklorists." They are merely "folklore-collector-retouchers" (also sometimes known shortly as "folks"), and have no place whatsoever trying to land a university job or snag a lucrative Foundation grant in the academic upper reaches of the Discipline of Folkloristics.
That is certainly true, absolutely true, and you can bet your bottom dollar on it, just as Randolph did-and lost. He tried for a Foundation grant 32 years in a row and never got one, and bitterly recommended to me never to bother to try. Yet it is precisely those backwoods collectors of floating tales and jokes, who, by the personal magic of all good tale-tellers, can "retouch" them into fluent, idiomatic, unexpurgated yarns that other people will listen to, who are those mysterious bhods none of us ever seem to be able to put our ink-stained academic fingers on, or tune our tin ears to, who are transmittinfgo lklore, as
remarked upon by Kingsley Widmer, above.
In the end, Randolph's real sin was not that he was somehow a folklorefaker or "fakelorist," which is what Dorson was slavering to call him but didn't dare-precisely Pope's Addison: "Damning with faint praise . . . and teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike." Randolph's real sin was that he knew how to retell the stories he heard, and told them well and with pleasure, on paper, in the Ozark dialect on which he spent decades making himself expert. Then, horror of horrors, as certain Professors of Folkloristics see things, Randolph signed his name to the books of stories he retold-- perhaps immortally. This is a pretentious sin a true folklore "source" or mere tale-teller never never commits (except vis-a-vis all the people who have to listen to him for a lifetime), and must certainly always refrain from committing.
As it happens, Randolph also signed the names, on their stories, of all the people he learned the stories from. But that hardly counts, because they were only folk "sources," and he was sinfully an author-in-disguise!
Because, let it be said clearly once & for all: the individuals who sign their
names to books of folklore, and hope to make royalty money and academic
advancement (which also means money) out of them, must not ever be the
folklore "sources" who spoke or sang or danced or built or whittled or
dreamed whatever goes into the said folklore books. The money and advancement
to be made out of folklore do not, and must not ever belong to, the preferably
anonymous folk. If they try that, they're just amateur authors, or
even-perish the mark-folklorists like us. Their proper share is strictly: folkall.
Mark my words, you "folklore sources" out there! Folklore is the stuff that you folks may be doing or singing, but it belongst o us Ph.D.-anointed, namesigning nonfolks. And not and never to you mere "sources," you cowboy "performers" and mountain-dew "informants"-whose names we may print by courtesy in the small-type validating acknowledgments of date & place of
collecting. But who will never, ever, not-by-a-damn-sight, share in either the small-change cash book royalties, or the occasional media hit, million-dollar, platinum-recorded, pop revision, jukebox, boy-oh-boy, movie-&-television $ucce$$. Yes, and you also better call us "Doctor." So just keep on bloody well singing and dancing and whistling and dreaming and reciting, you folks with authentic cowdung on your heels and straw in your hair. Us Folkloristics experts will $ee to all the re$t. And as for Randolph's having been born in
Pittsburg, Kansas, instead of authentically in Arkansas-if that was his ultimate
crime in transmitting Ozark folklore-I forgive him. Don't you? After
all, he never shared, and no danger that he'll share now, in our proposed wellpadded
places on the warm, rich teat of university-paid and Foundationfunded
folkloristic "research."
Randolph always stressed two points in our correspondence (we never met in the flesh): Archer Taylor, the proverb specialist, had assured him I was the best man in the erotic folklore field since the disappearance of my great uncle, Friedrich Krauss, in Vienna, during the Nazi annexation of Austria ("Addressee Unknown"), so Randolph was therefore anxious for me to write additional erotological and folkloristic notes of my own, to incorporate into headnotes on his "unprintable" materials. He also insisted that nothing should ever be expurgated or omitted of these m aterials on any pretext, since they were composed
almost entirely of the items suppressed or rejected already, in every single one
of his books on folklore, and by every commercial or university publisher he
ever had until four years before his death at the age of 88. In one of his very
last letters to me (18 March 1980), in a shaky but still uphill handwriting, he
wrote: "I trust you not to expurgate this stuff, and never to let any of those
sons-of-bitches cut it up either. If you fail me on this, I'll ha'nt you after I'm
dead, all the way to France."
I believe I have not failed him, and Vance Randolph's intransigent spirit can rest easy in the pauper's grave they doled out to him in the Veterans' National Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas, not far from the University serving the Ozark region he lived in and studied for years, but where he never taught, and that never published any of his books in his lifetime. There he was buried, after living "meanly" for the last 20 years of his life, mostly on small offerings and advances of cash and the whiskey he then wanted, from friends and well-wishers like myself. He spent the last five years of it, with his huge frame shrunken
into a wheelchair and with his nearly blind wife at his side, in a dreary 9-by- 12-foot institutional cell in the "nursing home" (read: poorhouse), on her small social security old-age payments and his own infinitesimal government pension from World War I."
As many academics tend to lose themselves-I'm one of the worst sinners in this line-in the serendipitous delights of library research, usually about sixto- one against the bit of Sunday field-research we may do (if any), it might be well to remember what another great dialect artist had to say about the matter, and consider how this worked out for Vance Randolph, a field-folklorist without a library if ever there was one. This is Finley Peter Dunne, on "The Carnegie Libraries," i n Dissertations by Mr. Dooley:
Libr'ries nivver encouraged lithrachoor anny more thin tombstones encourage livin'. No wan ivver wrote annythin' because he was tol' that a hundhred years fr'm now his books might be taken down fr'm a shelf in a granite sepulcher an' some wan wud write "Good" or "This man is crazy" in th' margin. What lithrachoor needs is fillin' food. [1906]
Yes, for all the pretentious adulation now shovelled out on him by naive Ozark boosters, and well-paid academics who did nothing but lock Randolph out-when push came to shove-for the centrally productive 40 years of his unparalleled career in folklore, until he was in fact on his deathbed, Vance Randolph died in the poorhouse. The poorhouse, despite the Zoroastrian twaddle Thoreau ends his Walden with, is not a place where one will "perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours." No, not even reminiscing over an old man's glass of whiskey with plump and prosperous college professors like my friend John Clellon Holmes, one of the few who cared to visit him then, in so "depressing" a background; and others who would later strain to write him up as a "poormouth" parasite, a "valetudinarian "malingerer, f olk-faker, and "panhandler," and practically a gigolo battening on romantic old ladies.
This one because, as Randolph's last wife recollected fondly, "Every woman he ever met fell in love with him," which is certainly the grandest charismatic trump any broad-minded folklore collector could ever hold. But, I think, the two final volumes of his immense lifework, sent out only now when he is safely dead and buried, will demonstrate that Vance Randolph-like Major
John Murray Corse, the Civil War hero who held the fort in its bloodiest battle, at Allatoona Pass-may have died "short a cheek-bone and an ear, but ... able to whip all Hell yet."[12]
Notes
1. The original title of certain o f the volumes is Wit a nd M irth, o r Pills to Purge Melancholy (L ondon, 1719- 1720), final edition in 6 volumes, giving the singer-composer Thomas Durfey's name as editor, though the work was actually edited in all editions, over fifty years, by the publisher, Henry Playford. Modern reprints: London: Pearson? ca. 1872, and New York, ca. 1958.
2 Kryptddia: Re cueid l e Documents pour servira l' tuded es traditions po pulaires (H eilbronn& Paris, 1883-1911), 12 volumes; reprinted (Darmstadt, 1970) with Introduction by Will Peuckert. On the editors of the original edition Friedrich Salomon Krauss and others, see Legman (1964:477-479). Anthropophyteia:Jahrbuchfiirfolkloristiche Erhebungen und Forschungen (Leipzig: F . S. Krauss, 1904-1913), 10 volumes, with 9 supplementary volumes of regional "Beiwerke" covering the erotic folklore of other countries (1904-1931), including Japan, Italy, and Spanish-speaking Argentina. Note that the first published scholarly c ollection of French erotic folksongs is given as "Le Gai Chansonnier Franqais," in Kryptddia (1886) III, pp. 1-146, and (1898) V, pp. 274-
400, as "Folklore de la France," both edited anonymously by Gaston Paris and Eugene Rolland. The largest and best such collection of modern German erotic folksongs is Das Minneliedd es DeutschenL and-u nd Stadtvolkes, e dited by F. S. Kraussa nd Alfred Webinger, and publisheda s AnthropophyteiBa:e iwerke, V olume IX (Leipzig, 1929).
3. Charles Seeger, review of Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, in Modern L anguage A ssociation: Notes, 2nd Series (June 1947) IV, pp. 331-332; and (June 1950) VII, pp. 469-470; both quoted by Norm Cohen 1982: xv-xvi.
4. Reuss 1965. This was limited to twenty (?) copies reproduced from typewriting, originally submitted as an Indiana University master's thesis. The outstanding and only unexpurgated collection of the real folksongs of college students, both men and women, this very much deserves publication in book form.
5. Logsdon's book (1989) is the very first unexpurgated collection of authentic cowboy songs (largely from the repertory of one ex-cowboy, Riley Neal), and makes wastepaper of all the others. MacColl and Seeger (1977) include unexpurgated Gypsy songs in English, for the first time. Fowke (1963, 1966) supplements Fowke (1965).
6. John Walsh, editor, Songs of Roving and Raking (Champaign, Illinois: The Back Room Press/Illini Folk Arts Society, 1961). Reproduced from typewriting, with the tunes; the best showing of the combined college and armed-services repertory rising from wartime service and R.O.T.C. training of college men in peacetime, especially fraternity members. Essentially the same work, slightly enlarged, was published as Roll Me Over, edited by Harry Babad (New York: Oak Publications, 1972), most of the additions being of expurgated texts credited t o the entertainer O scar Brand.H amish Henderson, Ballads o f WorldW ar II (issuedb y the Lili Marleen Club of Glasgow, to Members Only, 1947): the first expurgated collection of soliders' songs printed after the war; includes Henderson's own "King Farouk," which became a favorite of the British North Africa troops and a folksong since. CaptainW illiamJ . Starr, The F ighter P ilots H ymn Book (Cannon, New Mexico: Cannon Air Force Base, 1958), hektographed,w ith an almost illegible SmegmafaxA ddenda(1 959), pp. 122-152, not present in most of the 100 copies issued: by far the best and most extensive Air Force bawdy song collection at its date, and one of the few giving the compiler's name. Colonel Charles William Getz, The Wild Blue YonderS: ongso f theA ir Force( Redwood Press, Box 412, Burlingame, California,1 981-1986), 2 volumes, the unexpurgated contingent being gathered in volume 2, as the "Stag Bar Edition."
7. Australian bawdy song collections include: Snatches& Lays, "Edited by SebastianH ogbotel & Simon ffuckes" (pseudonyms of Kenneth D. Gott and Stephen Murray-Smith; Melbourne, 1962) mimeographed; reprinted Melbourne: Sun Books, 1973;a nd, enlarged,H ong Kong: Boozy Co., Box 20561, Causeway Bay, 1975. Argus Tuft's (pseudonym) Compendiumof Verse( Perth: SCIIA Engineering Society, 1970), mimeographed; first issued without title page, captioned Be Pure! (Perth, 1963). Donald C. Laycock, The Best Bawdry (Melbourne: Angus & Robertson, 1982), circulated earlier in photocopies of the manuscript, as Obiter Dicta (Canberra, 1961). The preceding are all student and "rugby"-song soldier collections. The more general and more interesting Australian materials are given in: Ron Edwards, Australian Bawdy Ballads (Holloway Beach, Australia: Rams Skull Press, 1973), a mimeographed supplement to his Australian Folk Songs (1972); and Brad Tate, The Bastard from the Bush: Obscene Songs and Ballads of Australian Origin (Kuranda, Queensland: Rams Skull Press, 1982). What is agreed to be the best such bawdy song collection, made by John Meredith, as a supplement to his Folk Songs of Australia (with Hugh Anderson, 1967), has never been published and is on deposit in tape-recording form in the National Library, Canberra, Australia. See Meredith 1958. Some of Meredith's erotic materials are listed, by title only in Kennedy (1975, note 183) without the texts.
8. The only other actually unexpurgated modern graffiti collections in English are: Allen Walker Read, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy(1 934), also an unpublished c ollection made by Pelham-Box in London, about 1935, preserved only on sheets and index cards paenes G. Legman Archive; and an unpublished American collection, made by John Del Torto and G. Legman, including the in situ graffiti drawings, preserved in the library of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Bloomington, Indiana, catalogued under the title "Th. Painter Collection.'
9. Jeannie Vasteele, "Book Review" in Workers' Progress Daily (October 1989), re- or preprinted in Metafolkloristica: An Informal Anthology o f Folklorists' Humor( Box 58,183, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1989), p. 60, "edited by Franz Kinder and Boaz the Clown," Vasteele identifying "Kinder" as "the advance-man for one Jan Harold Brunvand." This only rather tepidly humorous anthology contains a fascinating light-hearted parergon or memorate, from the autobiography-in-progress of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett," The Making of a Folklorist," pp. 17-19; and a software Folkloristics program by G. Legman, "Folklore Article Reconstitution Kit (F.A.R.K.)," pp. 53-54, noted as having been printed by accident "over the initials of the editor," in
Journalo fAmericanF olklore( 1977).
10. Cornog, 1990. The Introduction, "The Lure of the Forbidden," is enlarged and revised from its earlier appearancein a limited edition (Legman 1981). "Now at 70, I feel I must leave this for others. I consider that I will be very lucky if I can get my two large volumes of texts and tunes into print with or without notes, even if only privately, through the neo-cottage industry of samizdat tabletop publication by computer scannersa nd printout. Having no money for such machines myself, or perquisites that might pay for such work to be done, this too I may have to leave to others. I am satisfied that at least I have not failed Vance Randolph's faith in me, and may even be able to come through for Stan Hugill as well. On Randolph's last bitter straits, see Holmes (1988).
12. Major John M urray C orse, Dispatch to L. M. Dayton, aide-de-camp to General S herman, from the battlefield at Allatoona, Georgia, 6 October 1864: "I am short a cheek-bone and an ear, but am able to whip all Hell yet." Answering Sherman's dispatch asking if he were able to "hold the fort" against General Hood's overwhelming attacking force. Corse survived the action though severely wounded, and repulsed Hood's army victoriously. The singing evangelist Philip Bliss wrote the popular hymn, "Hold the Fort for We Are Coming," commemorating Corse's heroic stand, though in fact no reinforcements ever came from Sherman in Atlanta, and Corse and his men-half of whom were killed in the action-held the fort and won their victory
alone.
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1. G. Legman, La Cledes Champs, Valbonne (A .M. 06560), France