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Down in the Holler, first published in 1953, is a classic study of Ozark folklore. The University of Oklahoma Press is especially pleased to introduce such an invaluable and delightfully written book to a new generation of researchers and Americans entranced by the Ozarks and the folkways of the past.



Until World War II the backwoodsmen living in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma were the most deliberately "unprogressive" people in the United States. The descendants of pioneers from the southern Appalachians, they changed their way of life very little during the whole span of the nineteenth century and were able to preserve their customs and traditions in an age of industrialism.



When the many attractions of the Ozarks were discovered by "outlanders," the tourists--and television--reached the hinterlands, and the old patterns of speech and life began to fade.



In this perceptive book, Vance Randolph, who first visited the Ozarks country in 1899, and his collaborator, George P. Wilson, recapture the speech of the people who lived "down in the holler." Randolph, closely identified with the region for many years, hunted possums with its people and shared their table at the House of Lords (a "kind of tavern" in Joplin). Through the years his hobby became a profession, and he spent years recording the various aspects of Ozark folk speech.

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Noted folklorist Vance Randolph was born in Pittsburg, Kansas. After attending college at Kansas State Teachers College, Clark University, and the University of Kansas, he worked as a staff writer for Appeal to Reason, as an assistant instructor in psychology at the University of Kansas, and as a scenario writer for MGM studios in California before devoting all of his time to freelance writing. Randolph is perhaps one of America's most prolific collectors of folk tales, and he is especially renowned for his study of the Ozarks and that region's ribald folk literature. Because of their bawdy nature, many collectors and compilers have passed over such tales from this region, but Randolph compiled many of them in a work entitled Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folk Tales (1976). His regional specialization has led to a number of other works, including The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society (1931), From an Ozark Mountain Holler: Stories of Ozark Mountain Folk (1933), Ozark Superstitions (1947), and Sticks in the Knapsack and Other Ozark Folk Tales (1958). Regarding his work on the Ozarks, critics have said that Randolph "gives a sensitive portrayal of a fast-vanishing breed of people . . . [and] insight to a way of life that is rapidly passing" (Choice). (Bowker Author Biography)