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Vance Randolph was born February, 1892 in Pittsburg, Kansas, and he moved to southern Missouri in 1919. He spent the rest of his life in the Ozark Mountain region and became one of America’s most important folklorists and folk collectors.

He worked for over forty years with great intensity gathering lore of the Ozarks.  Because he lived in the Ozarks for most of his life, successively in Pineville, Missouri, Galena Missouri, Eureka Springs Arkansas, and Fayetteville Arkansas, he came to personally know the people and was therefore able to obtain and learn much more from them than could an outside folklore collector who only passed through the region briefly.

Randolph enjoyed enormous academic respect but he also become a bit of an icon in the Ozarks among those seeking to maintain the cultural identity and the unique spirit of the Ozark region.  He was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1978, and published many popular and scholarly works, including Ozark Magic and Folklore, a work of fiction, We Always Lie to Strangers, Ozark ghost stories ;: Gruesome and humorous tales of the supernatural in the backwoods of the South, many Little Blue Books and some juvenile fiction.

His major work is collected in the four-volume Ozark Folksongs, an outstanding and insightful collection of folksongs he published between1946 and 1950. All the work over the first twenty years involved Randolph writing out the texts with a variety of ‘musically literate’ associates noting the melodies.

In 1941, the Archive of Folk Culture, headed by Alan Lomax, commissioned Vance Randolph to undertake a recording expedition in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas.  He recorded many of the songs – in some cases performed by the same singers – that he had already collected from in the late 1920s and 1930s.  The result was approximately two hundred aluminum discs that have been copied on tape and are accompanied by field notes and correspondence.  Several Library of Congress recordings include selections from the collection.

Randolph limited his work to southern Missouri and northern Arkansas.  He insisted on the importance of collecting tales, dance tunes, songs, jokes, folk speech, superstitions, oral history, games and expressions as they were originally told.

Randolph and his wife, Mary Celestia Parler, never left the Ozarks. He died November 1, 1980 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.