Down in the Holler

"A fitting climax to many years of fruitful labor by a man who probably knows more about the Ozarkians than anybody else. . . . [Randolph] has perceived and admirably expressed the close connection between a people and the language they speak." American Speech 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. First published in 1953, Down in the Holler is a classic study of Ozark folklore. Vance Randolph (1892-1980) was the author and coauthor of several books, including Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales. George P. Wilson was Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and for many years was editor of the Publication of the American Dialect Society.