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A different sort of book than any other folktale collection I've encountered! It's a book entirely consisting of explicit material - mostly sexual and some scatological in nature. The book starts with a lengthy introduction explaining why this has reasonable academic value, which is kind of funny, but also I do get why they feel the need to defend the publishing of this!
As the introduction refers to, many folktale collections are thoroughly bowdlerized, at one of several stages. Sometimes an informer feels uncomfortable sharing certain stories with an outsider, sometimes a collector tells an informer that they don't want to hear certain types of material the informer has in their repertoire, sometimes the collector collects it but does nothing with it, sometimes the collector wants to publish the full range of what they have but nobody wants to publish it. And this is very true and something I'm aware of in the other books I read, the levels of biases in what material is or is not considered worth attention.
Vance Randolph, the collector of these stories, apparently collected vast ranges of material from the Ozarks, but was unable to include these particular stories in his previous publications because it wasn't considered appropriate. And the book makes the point that reading these stories just with each other in one fairly sex-focused collection gives the reader a skewed perspective of the Ozarks, and that it would be better to be able to situate these stories amongst all the rest of the stories told in the region. But here we are.
Although the book is a really interesting artifact, it wasn't actually super great as a book to read straight through. The stories are pretty much all short joke stories, where the point is the shocking humour, which got tedious for me to read. And the material, as you might expect as a result, contains a LOT of very bad consent practices which got uncomfortable to just keep plowing through. I think Randolph might be right that these stories would be better understood when contextualized along the other sorts of stories also told in the region -- though as I haven't read any other Ozark folktale collections I can't say for sure how I would read them differently in that context!
As the introduction refers to, many folktale collections are thoroughly bowdlerized, at one of several stages. Sometimes an informer feels uncomfortable sharing certain stories with an outsider, sometimes a collector tells an informer that they don't want to hear certain types of material the informer has in their repertoire, sometimes the collector collects it but does nothing with it, sometimes the collector wants to publish the full range of what they have but nobody wants to publish it. And this is very true and something I'm aware of in the other books I read, the levels of biases in what material is or is not considered worth attention.
Vance Randolph, the collector of these stories, apparently collected vast ranges of material from the Ozarks, but was unable to include these particular stories in his previous publications because it wasn't considered appropriate. And the book makes the point that reading these stories just with each other in one fairly sex-focused collection gives the reader a skewed perspective of the Ozarks, and that it would be better to be able to situate these stories amongst all the rest of the stories told in the region. But here we are.
Although the book is a really interesting artifact, it wasn't actually super great as a book to read straight through. The stories are pretty much all short joke stories, where the point is the shocking humour, which got tedious for me to read. And the material, as you might expect as a result, contains a LOT of very bad consent practices which got uncomfortable to just keep plowing through. I think Randolph might be right that these stories would be better understood when contextualized along the other sorts of stories also told in the region -- though as I haven't read any other Ozark folktale collections I can't say for sure how I would read them differently in that context!
