A Visit with Vance Randolph

Abstract

On 19 June 1953, spoke on Negro storytelling to the Arkansas Folklore Society on the campus of the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville. Apart from my natural interest in meeting this active and enthusiastic group, looked forward keenly to making the acquaintance of Vance Randolph. But Randolph was not at Fayetteville; ill health prevented his traveling the relatively short distance from his home at Eureka Springs. After the two-day Arkansas Folk Festival, drove to Eureka Springs, a scenic resort town balanced precariously among the Ozark hills, and called on him. Tall, well-built, ruggedly good-looking, Randolph scarcely seemed the invalid, but heart trouble confined him closely to home, and permitted him only a couple of fresh working hours in the morning. At present he is working on a bibliography of Ozark folklore in print, since he cannot collect. All my work is with the Ozark country and people, he explains; I don't attempt to do anything with outside folklore. I've lived and collected here most of my life, but could have collected a lot more, if could have gotten any help. Just a dollar a day would have kept me going, in the Ozarks. But the foundations turned me down twenty-eight years in a row. Mencken, Frank Dobie, Louise Pound, wrote letters for me, but didn't have a Ph.D. [Randolph has a Master's degree in psychology from Clark University.] So I've had to make what money could writing. What the magazines won't take, send to the folklore journals. Now there's a funny thing; the folklore journals get what the paying magazines reject. once told my friend Ernest Otto Rayburn [author of Ozark Folkways, and present president of the Arkansas Folklore Society] to write an article for the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE. He's written a great deal about Ozark folklore, in different newspapers and magazines, that the folklorists never see. Well, he asked me how much they paid, and when told him nothing, he took the paper out of his typewriter and tossed it in the wastebasket. Everyone met in northern Arkansas who knew Randolph-folksingers, fellow collectors, faculty people-spoke of him with great regard. One soon understands why, after meeting him, and left this perceptive and dedicated collector and skillful writer with a sad heart, thinking that he had never been able to afford a recording machine, and that a life of honorable achievement had left him with illness, worry, and the constant problem of paying rent and food bills. The outstanding collector of our time, who perhaps alone knows how to avoid commercial shoddiness and scholarly dullness, without sacrificing readability or integrity, deserves the best tribute American folklorists can tender.