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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 (in Pineville, Missouri; Galena, Missouri; Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Fayetteville, Arkansas), he came to know the local color.
Randolph enjoyed respect among academics but also become a bit of an icon in the Ozarks among those seeking to maintain the cultural identity and unique spirit of the region. He was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1978, and he published many popular and scholarly works, including Ozark Magic and Folklore
His major work is collected in the four-volume Ozark Folksongs, an outstanding and insightful collection of folksongs published between1946 and 1950.
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.
