Obituary: Vance Randolph (1892-1980) by Herbert Halpert
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 94, No. 373 (Jul. - Sep., 1981), pp. 345-350
OBITUARY Vance Randolph (1892-1980)
With the death of Vance Randolph at the age of eighty-eight on November 1, 1980, America lost the third of her remarkable trio of self-trained folklorists. The other two, George Korson and Harry Middleton Hyatt, had died before him. The folklore books published by these master workers were based on imaginative and extensive fieldwork. But it is by their different approaches to folklore that they were largely instrumental in changing American folklore studies from its basically historical emphasis on selective text collecting in a few genres to the modern interest in the study of folklore in its contemporary social and individual contexts and in all aspects of folklife.
Vance Randolph was born February 23, 1892, in Pittsburg, Kansas, in the southeastern corner of the state not too far from the Missouri Ozarks. A two-week fishing trip with his family to Noel, Missouri, in 1899 began his lifelong devotion to the Ozarks. He went to school and college in Pittsburg and graduated in 1914. In 1915, he earned his M.A. in Psychology at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Years later he dedicated his Ozark Superstitions to the memory of his thesis supervisor, G. Stanley Hall. After graduation he went to New York City, where he lived in Greenwich Village and earned his living as an editor and ghostwriter. He taught biology in Pittsburg High School in 1916, then worked for a year on a Socialist weekly newspaper before being drafted into the United States Army. His year in the Army was spent entirely in Kansas and ended with a medical discharge. He then moved to the Ozarks. Except for three years of graduate study in psychology at the University of Kansas, which he left without completing his Ph.D., a year working in California as a writer and technical adviser for the movies, and one or two other interruptions, he spent the rest of his life in various parts of the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks.
Randolph probably came as close to becoming accepted as a native Ozarker as any "furriner," that is, a person not born there, ever could. He liked the Ozarkers for their pride, independence, and dignity. Like them he was a "loner"; like them he also enjoyed sociability and leisurely talk, as well as camping, hunting, fishing, riding, gambling, drinking, and dancing. But in addition he was intensely interested in learning about all aspects of the Ozark folk culture and could convince people of the genuineness of his interest. A magnificent observer, gifted with a good ear and a fine memory, he was the perfect participant-observer collector.
Randolph's earliest publications in scholarly journals began with an Ozark word list in Dialect Notes in 1926, and one on Ozark folk beliefs in theJournal of American Folklore in 1927. But he demonstrated the wide range of his interests and knowledge about the Ozarks in his first two books: The Ozarks (1931) and Ozark Mountain Folks (1932). These two books presented a great many aspects of Ozark folklife and folklore, from the settlement of the area and the role of women to descriptions of a singing-school and a farm sale, along with chapters on dialect, folksongs and singers, folk beliefs, witchcraft etc., frequently in the words of the informants. It is not the first folklife description of a North American region, but certainly one of the richest. In his holistic approach Randolph was too far ahead of his time in North America for these books to receive proper appreciation from the few American folklorists of that day, for their folklore interests were far more limited than his.
For the next few years, Randolph continued to collect folklore extensively; however, apart from a few scholarly articles and reviews, his writings were aimed at making himself a living. He wrote for outdoor magazines; published a volume of short stories, a serious novel, and a book for boys; edited an anthology of Ozarkw ritings; and collaborated on a volume of outdoor stories and on a mystery novel. Many of these works draw on his Ozark experience. Under his own name he printed some interesting Ozark narrative collections in Haldeman- Julius publications; but he also churned out for that firm many other works, under a wild variety of pseudonyms. The extraordinary range of his hackwork can be seen in the excellent annotated list of all of Randolph's publications by Cochran and Luster, a book which also has a useful chronology of Randolph's life.'
The bulk of his major folklore and folk speech books came from 1946 to 1958: Ozark Folksongs (4 vols.; 1946-1950); Ozark Superstitions (1947); We Always Lie to Strangers; Tall Tales from the Ozarks (1951); Who Blowed Up the Church House? and Other Ozark Folk Tales (1952); Down in the Holler; A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech, with George P. Wilson (1953); then three other folktale volumes: The Devil's Pretty Daughter... (1955); The Talking Turtle... (1957); and Sticks in the Knapsack...( 1958), each with the subtitle and Other Ozark Folk Tales. The folksong volumes were published by the State Historical Society of Missouri; Down in the Holler, by the University of Oklahoma Press; all the others by Columbia University Press in NewYork City. There were three later books: Hot Springs and Hell, and Other Folk Jests and Anecdotes from the Ozarks (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1965); Ozark Folklore: A Bibliography (Indiana University Folklore Institute Monograph Series, Vol. 24; Bloomington, Ind., 1972); and Pissing in the Snow, and Other Ozark Folktales (Urbana I, II: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
In my foreword to the Cochran and Luster bibliography I have made a detailed evaluation of Randolph's contributions. Here let me say more briefly that throughouth is very large folksong collection he presents the total repertoire that informants sang for him. His excellent annotations show he was completely aware that some of the songs had commercial music origins. What he felt he should give was the full range of the Ozark song tradition. Today this is the accepted approach of modern folklorists. Similarly, in his folk-narrative collections we are given every kind of story that informants tell, whether tales old in tradition or reports of personal experiences. Once again modern folklorists follow Randolph in his view that folk narrative collecting should not be limited to the tales included in the Type and Motif Indexes.
Randolph as collector-observer had the good sense a ter the story was told to keep quiet but continue to look interested so that storytellers felt obliged to say something more. As a result nearly all of the tales end with comments by the storytellers, postscripts of a kind, in which they explain how they feel about the story, or make someo ther revealing observation. Such contextual and functional details are invaluable. It is perhaps Randolph's greatest contribution to folklore that in so many of his works we get such rich social and contextual detail that we can see how folklore functions in its setting. This is truef or the tall talesi n WeA lways Lie to Strangers; for the superb chapter on proverbial "Sayings a nd W isecracks" in Down in the Holler, along with many other quoted illuminating details scattered throughout the book; and especially in Ozark Superstitiowns, here we often can observe how folk beliefs operate in specific situations from the words and actions of individuals.
Randolph obviously also knew the published materials of folksong quite thoroughly and annotated his collection fully to the date when he had completedt he manuscript. These n otes were supplemented fo r later years by his editor. In some areas, such as childrens' lore, games, quilt names, riddles and so on, where he had not done as much collecting a son topics that interested him more, he often collaborated with others. I n five books of folktales where he felt his scholarly knowledge was too limited he allowed officially trained folklorists to supplement his own, frequently quite extensive, notes. I had the privilege of adding annotationt so three of his folktale books; Ernest W . Baughman did a fourth; and Frank A . Hoffman, the last book. From Randolph I learned the art of making annotations readable so that the notes become an integral part of the book instead of a mere appendix.
It was in connection with quite another book, however, that I got a view of Randolph's working methods that is worth describing. When I was a visitingp rofessora t the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1960-1961, I saw Vance frequently. At the time he was partially crippled with arthritis and got around with difficulty. He was engrossed in annotating his Ozark jestbook, the one book he had determinedt o annotate entirely by himself. A couple of times a week I would carry over to his apartment a large armful of my own books, or volumes of journals from the University of Arkansas Library. He went through these systematically and was usually ready for the next batch when I returned with another load. He was making notes on nearly 500 brief stories. Each story was typed on a separate page and kept in a series of spring clip binders lined up in a cardboard carton; the typed notes were in the same order in another group of binders. Even for his working drafts he used substantial bond paper and a good, dark typewriter ribbon. He never put moret hana bouta medium-sized paragraph on a page. If he ever went over this length, he would cross out the extra lines after retyping them on a separate page. In this way, as he pointed out, he could shift paragraphs around or make additions to any of them without having to retypea full page. It is an efficient working system which I have adopted and have tried to teach to my students. How successful was he in annotating his jestbook by himself? The breadth of his reading is amazing. Elsewhere I have said that the comprehensive notes in his edition of Hot Springs and Hell make it a scholarly achievement that "ranks with the European jestbook editions of Johannes Bolte and Albert Wesselski."'
The bibliographies in several of Randolph's books show how well he knew what had been published on those subjects from the Ozarks, and several of his review articles, along with the chapter on "The Dialect in Fiction" in Down in the Holler, demonstrate both his wide reading and his power of incisive critical evaluation. In one sense the culmination of his vast knowledge of the Ozarks is demonstrated most forcefully in Ozark Folklore: A Bibliography. He seems to have read not only all the books, articles, and theses, but almost every scrap written about Ozark folklife.
He gives the number of pages in books and pamphlets (too many bibliographers forget how necessary this is), gives the essence of the contents, uses excellent quotes,and frequently evaluates an item with wit and irony. The book is immensely readable and is a model for regional folklife bibliographies. To equal it, however, would require a lifetime devotion to an area, like Randolph's. No bibliography, of course, is ever complete. Not only does new material get published, but previously unknown work turns up. Almost up to the last week of his life, Randolphw as working with Gordon McCannon Supplement One. McCann and W . K. McNeil hope to have the Supplement ready for submission to a publisher sometime this year.
Randolph's paternal ancestors were originally from Virginia, a branch of the famous Randolphs of Virginia. H e was probably the only descendant of that clan who ever acquired a knowledge of Yiddish. In 1960 he told me that at one time in his New York City days he could work through the news stories in New York's most famous Yiddish daily newspaper. When I visited Vance in the spring of 1980, he could only read with difficulty out of one eye. Nonetheless he had been working systematically at relearning Yiddish, but had problems because his dictionary was an obsolete one. Thanks to Sheldon Posen, a folklore graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who had once visited Vance, I was able to send him a good Yiddish dictionary. By then Vance's doctor had forbidden h im to write letters, so I can only hope the dictionary helped h im to pass the time.
Occasionally he told hilarious stories of his New York days. Here is one I recall. One day when he was wearing a Russian-style furcap, a friend of his introduced Vance to a group as his greenhorn non-English-speakicnogu sin j ust over from the old country. The group's conversation was in English. At appropriate points after some lively exchange, the friend would carefully translate into Yiddish what had been said for the greenhorn cousin's benefit. Vance would nod his head vigorously to show he understood the point of the discussion. Earlier I mentioned that Randolph enjoyed outdoor life and that some of his professional writing was for magazines for outdoorsmen. But Vance the outdoorsman was also Vance the scholarly observer and investigator, and the range of his interests was wide. To get the feel of what travel was like in pioneer days, in 1932 he and a friend drove a covered wagon from Pineville, Missouri, to Little Rock, Arkansas. (Pictures of him driving the wagon are in Ozark Mountain Folks and in the Cochran and Luster bibliography.) As Robert Cochran points out, Vance was also an authority on butterflies and published articles on them in entomological journals, while his paper on the prehistory of Crawford County, Kansas, appeared in the American Anthropologist. Even some of his articles on fishing and shootings how his bent for research. The one on "Jumpers, Giggers and Noodlers," reprinted as a chapter in The Ozarks, describes some unorthodox ways of catching fish that were traditional in the Ozarks. "Shooting for Beef," another chapter in the same book, is a detailed, scholarly discussion on the history ,manufacture, and method of using the traditional muzzle-loading rifles that were still preferred for target shooting in the Ozarks because of their accuracy.
In the Ozarksm enm ightb e expert rifles hots, but few were expert with the revolvers most of them carried for self-defense. Vance, who was interested in all kinds of firearms, usually carried a revolver (a two-patent Colt which he presented to me), and prided himself on his skill and accuracy with a handgun. One story a bout his accuracy that he liked to tell on himself was of a remarkable shot he made, not with his normal weapon, the Colt revolver, but with a derringer- a short-barreled pocket weapon meant for close combat but not notablef or its accuracy. On a camping trip a deer suddenly sprang up, and Vance, in a spirit of bravado, pulled out his derringer and fired at it. To the amazement of his friends and of Vance himself he killed the deer. Unfortunately it was not the deer-hunting season and if a game warden came along there could be a heavy fine. So some of the neighbors were called on to divide up the carcass and remove the evidence, and Vance was the butt of much quiet mockery.
Most of the stories I heard Vance tell were at the informal parties his friends, Dean Nicholls and his wife, Dorothy, had at their big, sociable hilltop house in Fayetteville. Others came out on weekends in the fall and spring when the Nicholls went "back-roading" in their big car. They usually took along Vance; the local folklorist, Mary Celestia Parler, who later became Vance's wife; and the three Halperts, including our ten-year-old son. Sometimes there were more people and two cars. We covered a great deal of beautiful country, often passing through small isolated communities that Vance had known years before in his horseback-riding days. He would occasionally recall some of the interesting old-timers he had known there and tell us about his experiences.
At least twice that year, and probably more often, I urged Vance to write down his collecting experiences. I even suggested it might take the form of an autobiography. I told him his recollections would be an invaluable supplement to his great collecting and give us many insights. I can recall the gist of his answers, but not the exact words. Once he said that to capture the feeling of his collecting experiences was nearly impossible, and he illustrated the point. "It's nighttime after a day's hunting and you're all in a cabin with a fire burning in the
fireplace. You're pleasantly tired and you're lying back on your elbows on a bed. There's the hard feeling of the pistol in your back pocket-or a bottle. There's the smell of sweat and the smell of the wood in the fire. You can hear bird songs and cries and other night sounds outside.
Inside there's the crackling of the fire and voices talking. How do you include all of that?" He surprised me by saying that twice he had started to write his autobiography. "But both times when I read it over I found it was all about how sorry I was for myself. Everybody had been mean to me. No one appreciated me. Hell! that's nonsense. I've had a good life. So I quit." I remember I made some comment that there was a lot of truth in what he had said about not being appreciated, but he simply brushed aside my remark. (I'll return to the point later.) Robert Cochran, I'm happy to say, is preparing a life of Randolph, based on interviews with him and with many of his friends as well as on Randolph's extensive correspondence. Randolph was always willing to help any writer who had a genuine interest in the Ozarks. The authors of at least a dozen books-some of them not very good-thank him in their introductions for his assistance in correcting their use of dialect.
He was very fair-minded. He might smile at my occasional vitriolic comments on some of our folklore colleagues, but would then quietly point out some important contributions they had made to folklore studies. He reserved his gently barbed comments for the Chamber of Commerce mentality-he had had at least one bad experience when he gave a talk to one such group-and for people he regarded as pompous or pretentious. He resented praise that he felt was patronizing.
In 1958 he accepted an invitation to attend the Summer Institute of Folklore in Indiana. He was glad to meet, usually for the first time, many of the older folklorists whose work he respected, and he enjoyed talking to the younger folklorists. But his wry comment on the reason for having him attend was: "They wanted me there to look at-like Geronimo at the county fairs."
Randolph was a private scholar. Lacking the financial security of an academic position or a government post, he paid for the privilege of living in his beloved Ozarks by his work as a professional writer. Had he not lived there and become thoroughly involved in Ozark life and in recording that way of life, he could never have given us so rich a picture of Ozark culture. But because he was an outsider in the academic world, his work was late in getting proper recognition by folklore scholars. He also paid in other ways. It is an unhappy indictment of the academic bias of the review process of several of our great foundations that despite Randolph's proven list of excellent, scholarly folklore books and articles, no foundation ever saw fit to award even one of his many applications for assistance by granting him a fellowship. Somehow he managed to produce major books without what would have been most welcome help. Academic recognition continued to be slow in coming. Randolph was never elected to an office in the American Folklore Society, although some of us tried to have him nominated. After the fourth volume of his Ozark Folksongs was published, the University of Arkansas showed its appreciation of the importance of the collection by giving him an honorary doctorate in 1951.
It was not till years later that the Society of Fellows decided to appoint Randolph an honorary member of the American Folklore Society, and I cannot recall in what year this was done. For some reason this unique appointment never received proper publicity within the society; I can't even be certain that it was reported in theJournal. At any rate Randolph was not alone in failing to realize that only two or three other American folklorists had ever received this distinction, usually reserved for a limited number of distinguished overseas scholars. It is not reported in the brief chronology of Randolph's life in the Cochran and Luster bibliography, nor, so far as I know, has it been mentioned in any of the eulogies published since Randolph's death.
The one honor that Randolph did appreciate was his unanimous election as a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1978. This recognition was a long time in coming, but Vance felt that at last he and his work had been accepted by professional folklorists. For summation, let me just paraphrase Hamlet: "He was a man, take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again."
Memorial University of Newfoundland
HERBERTH ALPERT
St. John's
FOOTNOTE
1 Robert Cochran and Michael Luster, compilers, For Love and for Money. The Writings of Vance Randolph: An Annotated Bibliography. Arkansas College Folklore Monograph Series No. 2 (Batesville, Ark.: Arkansas College Folklore Archive Publications, 1979). I am indebted to this volume and to Gordon McCann for much information. My colleague, David Buchan, read two drafts of this essay with helpful critical attention.