book review

University of Georgia Press

Chapter Title: Mary Celestia Parler (1904–1981) Folklorist and Teacher Chapter Author(s): RACHEL REYNOLDS

Book Title: Arkansas Women Book Subtitle: Their Lives and Times Book Editor(s): Cherisse Jones-Branch, Gary T. Edwards Published by: University of Georgia Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vhtrh3.20

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Mary Celestia Parler (1904-1981)

Folklorist and Teacher

RACHEL REYNOLDS

Often, those who have made significant contributions receive only posthumous attention. Mary Celestia Parler, a University of Arkansas professor and avid col- lector and scholar of the oral traditions of the Ozarks, is one such example. While she was not unknown in her lifetime, Parler is someone whose contribu- tions were not fully appreciated until after her death. Indeed, the South Carolina native was a legendary presence on the University of Arkansas campus through- out the 19508 and 19608, even garnering brief exposure on the nationally tele- vised CBS series The Search, but her work as a folklore collector and scholar was often overshadowed by that of her more famous husband, Vance Randolph, and by such nationally renowned collectors as John and Ruby Lomax.1 Still, during her twenty-seven-year career at the University of Arkansas she and her students assembled the largest cultural collection of sound recordings, texts, photo- graphs, and ephemera from Arkansas and the Ozark Mountains. In addition, she participated actively in the formation of the Arkansas Folklore Society, serving as its secretary-treasurer at the outset and later as archivist.2 She and Randolph were both mentors to Max Hunter, whose own important collection of Ozark folk songs covered the same region and extended to Missouri and Oklahoma, but Parler's work included more than just songs and is much larger overall.3

Parler was a lifelong learner and a dedicated teacher to thousands of University of Arkansas students. In the years since her death in 1981, the importance of her work on all these fronts has become increasingly apparent to a great many more people than those who knew her as a scholar, teacher, folklorist, and friend.

Mary Celestia Parler was born on October 6, 1904, in a small village near Sumter, South Carolina, called Wedgefield.4 She was the daughter of Dr. Marvin

287

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288 R A C H E L R E Y N O L D S

Lamar Parler, a country physician and farmer, and the former Josie Platt, a local historian, writer, and teacher.5 The family owned three cotton farms but through a series of financial missteps during the Great Depression, Mary's father became distraught and—according to Mary Parler's cousin who lived with the family—it is believed that Marvin Parler committed suicide out of despair over their financial situation. Mary's mother was "forbidden as a child to hum folk songs because they were considered 'worldly.'"6 Josie Platt Parler's scholarly work, mainly locally published articles and books, centered on the local history of "the High Hills of the Santee," as the area was referred to, and on the lore of its Civil War heroes and the many historic buildings of the region.7

Mary grew up surrounded by the stories of rural life and in a place consumed by its identity as a Confederate or southern town. The fact that Parler's mother was a local historian, writer, and collector of stories strengthened Mary's con- cept of experiencing the culture of her place. Her knowledge of oral tradition was further influenced by Flora Smith, who worked for Mary's mother on the farm and was the young girl's friend and caregiver. Parler said, "Mother never sang the folk songs, but I used to love to listen to Ma'am Flora tell those tales and sing those songs."8 She learned many anecdotes and songs from Ma'am Flora, and is even recorded in the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection recounting some of them for her students.9 Her most requested tale was "The Forty-Mile Jumper," which she learned from Smith and first wrote down in 1924 when Ma'am Flora was well into her nineties. The story is the tale of a witch, her two daughters (whom she accidentally beheaded), and two traveling men who get the best of her and discover her hidden stash of treasure.10 This foundation in collecting stories steeped in local traditional culture undoubtedly supported what became her primary academic pursuit, folklore.

Frances Lott, who was raised as Parler's sister, recalled that Mary was an in- tensely intelligent child who was always reading: "She was so bright that she was out in the stars."11 Even in childhood, Mary garnered the reputation of being an interesting character. Robert Mallet of South Carolina, the younger brother of one of Mary's school friends, recalled that she was a trickster with a fiery sense of humor and, in a telling comparison of the day, "a real Tallulah Bankhead."12

He remembered instances of her, as a young adult, stripping down to take a swim and waving her big sun hat to the onlooking crowd. She gained her pri- mary and secondary education in Wedgefield where, by all accounts, she was an excellent student. When she was in the tenth grade, she decided to take an early placement exam for Winthrop College, a small but well-known women's teaching institution in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She was accepted and en- tered Winthrop in 1920.13 Upon the completion of her undergraduate degree

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in English literature in 1924, she continued her education at the University of Wisconsin, where she began a lifelong study of the works of Geoffrey Chau- cer and seemingly lost almost all connection to whatever folkloric roots she had gained through her childhood in South Carolina. In 1925, she completed a master's degree in English literature at the University of Wisconsin.14 Parler carried her graduate studies further through additional work at the University of South Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brown and Columbia Universities.15 She began working toward a Ph.D. in English litera- ture, but never finished the dissertation portion. While it is unclear why Parler shifted academic programs so often, one of her dear friends and colleagues at the University of Arkansas stated, "Mary Celestia Parler was eager for life, but she didn't know how to grasp it."16

Little is known about Parler's early teaching career. However, the Great De- pression and World War II created a fluid environment, and Mary moved around the South. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin and before going to Arkansas, she taught at Bethel College in McKenzie, Tennessee; Andrew Col- lege in Cuthbert, Georgia; Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee; and Anderson College, a women's college in South Carolina. At Anderson, she was the faculty instructor for the student newspaper, the Anderson Independent.17

It was while working at Anderson that Parler received and accepted an offer for the position of associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas.18

Mary Celestia Parler arrived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1948, starting work at the university while still writing her dissertation on southern dialects based on the works of the antebellum novelist and fellow South Carolinian William Gilmore Simms.19 At Arkansas, she began teaching classes in folklore and Chau- cer in the English department, where she became known to her students as "Miss Chaucer" due to her lively analysis of the material and her love for it, which carried over into her flamboyant teaching style.20 She was often seen in class or sauntering around campus in a beret with a cigarette firmly perched between her lips.21 Part of her University of Arkansas distinction would always be that of "campus character."22

A colleague in the English department described Mary Parler this way: "She was a special kind of female . . . independent, outspoken, able to tell the phony from the real.... She was a product of the old South. In spite of her bluntness, her emotional ups and downs, her almost scandalous behavior at times, she was a lady with a generous heart."23

Parler, coming from what was considered a privileged background for a woman of her time, was seen as somewhat of a lovable and admirable oddity by her students and informants. It was a rarity to see a highly educated woman

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living independently and working in the realm of academia in northwest Ar- kansas. Her sparkling personality and candor endeared her not only to the subjects of her work at the university but also to her fellow faculty It is likely however, that her boldness somewhat inhibited the longevity of her program at the University of Arkansas and the support that it received from the university's administration over time.

During the first year of Mary Celestia Parler's new life in Fayetteville, she was asked to become involved in the formation of the Ozark Folklore Society (later renamed the Arkansas Folklore Society) and to accept the position of secretary-treasurer. Later, she claimed that she had not really been that inter- ested in the folklore society, but found it hard to refuse such nice people.24 Per- haps her disinterest came from a distaste for formality or because she did not find a folklore society necessary or even found it burdensome at that juncture of her career, but nevertheless, this group of people proved instrumental in encouraging her in her endeavors to collect Arkansiana. According to Parler, when she came to Fayetteville she knew the names of only three Arkansans: the poet John Gould Fletcher, Senator William Fulbright, and folklorist Vance Randolph, who was then living in Eureka Springs and had published several articles on the Ozark dialect.25 The Arkansas Folklore Society brought her into contact with two of these men and intimately linked her to one of them for the rest of her life.

In the 19308, there had been a national enthusiasm created for folk culture through a series of regional folk festivals held across the country as qualify- ing events for the National Folk Festival in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1934. Vance Randolph had worked at organizing one such regional folk festival in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Randolph found Eureka Springs to be a perfect headquarters for himself as it had become home to a number of writers, artists, and com- posers who grounded their work in the culture of the place. Randolph's work, including the release of his books Ozark Mountain Folks (1932) and Ozark Folk- songs, volume i (1946), had attracted interested luminaries to the area, includ- ing the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Gould Fletcher.26 It was in the parlor of Randolph's Eureka Springs apartment that the Arkansas Folklore Society was born.27

In 1949, an enthusiastic group of amateurs and scholars formed the society as an opportunity to come together and share information regarding Arkansas's vernacular culture. The prime movers were Vance Randolph, the visiting pro- fessor and folklorist Herbert Halpert,28 Howard Carter (then chair of the En- glish department at the university), professor of English Robert Morris, Mary Celestia Parler, and a few "cotton choppin hoe hands," including Claude W.

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Faulkner and Leighton Rudolph (who is responsible for that description), both also members of the Department of English. John Gould Fletcher was elected the society's first president, mostly out of general admiration and in an attempt to exploit his notoriety in the search for funding for the fledgling society, ac- cording to Rudolph.29 Fletcher was Parler's neighbor in Fayetteville. She visited him and helped with his physical care during his year-long stay there in 1949.30

She served as the secretary-treasurer of the Arkansas Folklore Society from 1950 to 1960 and in subsequent years was the society's archivist and also served with Rudolph on the Council of Members.31 A substantial amount of folklore material was collected and reported by the group, and much of what became the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection was included in the folklore so- ciety's newsletters, which were created on Parler's recommendation.32

Also in 1949, Parler developed the university's first folklore course, became the director of the University of Arkansas Folklore Research Project, and began the compilation of archival materials with the help of her field assistant Merlin Mitchell.33 The university's folklore holdings amassed by Parler, her field assis- tants, and her students are an important documentation of the first fifteen years of analog magnetic tape technology, but more important, the collection of 3,640 folk songs (442 reels equaling 137,400 feet of audiotape with transcriptions for them all) is one of the largest collections of its kind. John Gould Fletcher, who had proved so important in launching the folklore society, also promoted the launch of Parler's Arkansas Folklore Archives project. Fletcher joined a group of faculty members, including Robert Morris and George Hastings, in express- ing the need to record the rich and varied folk culture of Arkansas to the uni- versity, and it agreed to fund a continuing folklore research project.34

Parler's recordings in the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection repre- sent a signature contribution to the field. They include several "event" ballads native to Arkansas, a choir of Cherokees singing Baptist hymns, songs collected from immigrants, numerous ballads of the type classified by scholar George Malcolm Laws as "Native American ballads,"35 fiddle tunes, jokes, and tales. The Ozarkers' versions of the Child ballads, the English and Scottish ballads compiled by Francis James Child, were the focus of Parler's acquisitions.36 Par- ler's collection includes a rich tradition of British balladry, the written forms of which can be traced as far back as the thirteenth century. As a folklorist, Parler understood the cyclical nature of folk traditions, that there is a cultural process of waxing and waning, but she also subscribed to the notion that traditional cultures were threatened by the rapid expansion of towns and cities and by the growing technologies of radio and television. This belief fueled her obses- sion with collecting. Along with other collectors in the early twentieth century,

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292 R A C H E L R E Y N O L D S

Parler believed that the United States was on the verge of a cultural apocalypse and that she and her assistants were recording the last days of a disappearing way of life. They worked to document speech patterns, sayings, songs, and tunes that, they believed, would soon vanish from the cultural landscape. Parler was unusual in having the foresight to look beyond the strictly traditional forms and to preserve for posterity original songs written by those she interviewed and recorded, their interpretations of early popular music forms that had been regionalized, and their renditions of folk songs learned from the recordings of performers such as the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, or Woody Guthrie. While she obviously did not hold this material in as high esteem as she did the discovery of a regional version of an ancient ballad, she did keep these record- ings in her collection, which was not a widely accepted practice (although, here again, Vance Randolph was her great model). Indeed Max Hunter did not agree with this practice and in fact went to great lengths to keep such material out of his collection.37

Parler collected and directed her students to collect widely and thoroughly, including not just the oldest ballads of the British Isles but also songs of more recent vintage and native to North America. While Parler did not create a num- bering system for her collection nor cross-reference the recordings and written materials with previous collections, she did use the systems of Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, G. Malcolm Laws's Native American Balladry, and Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs to classify the mate- rials from the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection used in her courses in Arkansas folklore.38

By 1949, then, when Parler set out collecting, the changes and additions in the world of folklore scholarship, concerning folk song tradition in particular, had opened the door of inclusion much wider. Not only is the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection, overseen and collected by Parler, one of the larg- est, but also it is notable for its inclusion of all of the known traditions. It con- tains songs from English and Scottish balladry, Native American balladry, and African American and European American traditions, including songs from the traditions of Austrian, Italian, and Polish immigrants to Arkansas as well as tales, jokes, and a variety of instrumental music or tunes.

When Parler first started collecting, others said that her task would be ardu- ous. Some even suggested that she would come back empty-handed. Perhaps their doubts were based in the fact that Parler was a woman, and it was not com- mon for women, especially educated women who were not from the Ozarks or from Arkansas, to take to the back roads alone. This was an unexpected sight to most residents of the area. Culturally speaking, it was uncommon for anyone,

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Mary Celestia Purler 293

male or female, to address a stranger with a request for information such as Par- ler was seeking. It is a testament to Parler's determination and skill that her field recording was so successful. Consistent with her general character, she laughed at the suggestion of failure, and on her first field trip came back with eighteen songs recorded from Virgil Lance of Mountain Home, Arkansas.39

One of the distinguishing aspects of the field recordings in the folk song collection is Parler's ability to establish rapport with her informants and conse- quently obtain large amounts of contextual information, including biographi- cal and other details. Raised in the Deep South as she was, Parler, with her "honey-voiced, bespectacled" nature, vast knowledge, patience, and genuine interest, could draw information from the subjects of her inquiry that initially they might have held guarded.40 Her interviews remain fascinating. She draws information the way a water girl draws from a well, sometimes accessing the memories of people five generations removed from those who only fifteen min- utes before could remember nothing. These skills are most evident in her inter- views with people who had experienced oppression. Parler proved able at mak- ing people with very different backgrounds from her own comfortable in her presence. For instance, when interviewing Charlotte Stephens, Arkansas's first African American public school teacher, she was able to draw from her songs and stories about her enslaved childhood in Arkansas, a history that was obvi- ously difficult for Stephens to discuss and far removed from the life that she had built for herself and her family over the years. Similarly, there is a great deal of textual information that Parler gathered, dealing with sensitive issues regarding women's bodies, health, and the use of herbal remedies to end pregnancies, cast spells on wanted lovers, and more. The breadth and depth of Parler's collection is greatly strengthened by her ability to build and maintain human relationships and her willingness to listen as much (or more) than she talked. Some of her informants remained friends of hers for years.

Being a professor of folklore at the University of Arkansas gave Parler a unique advantage over many of her collecting colleagues and offered opportu- nities that substantially enhanced the breadth of her collection. Semester after semester, a parade of eager students filed into her classroom, more often than not with relatives in the area, many of whom sang or played or knew someone who did.41 She had some of the most popular courses on campus. There was often a waiting list to join. For their term projects, Parler sent her students into the field to record their relatives, friends, and neighbors. They returned with recordings, biographical information, transcriptions, and sometimes photo- graphs of those interviewed. Part of the final grade for the course required that all students, regardless of musical prowess, learn a song from an informant of

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2 9 4 R A C H E L R E Y N O L D S

their choosing and then at the end of the semester perform the song in front

of their classmates as she recorded the concert. This served a trifold purpose. The threat of public performance warded off those who might consider her

class a "fluff" course,42 provided Parler with contact information on informants, and significantly diversified the amount of material in the folk song collection. According to friend and colleague Ernie Deane, "Emphasis in each student's collecting effort was on person-to-person interviewing. Necessarily, parents,

grandparents, kinfolks, friends, old family servants, elderly neighbors and other individuals became participants in the quest for folklore materials."43 Students

recorded sayings, stories, and songs from their grandparents and the old-timers in town and the surrounding areas. They also left their mark on the folklore col- lection and in the indexes. Parler cited each student project or report as if it had

been collected by a field assistant or other collaborator.44 Parler's collaborative understanding of field recording, that it was a partnership of information min-

ing, was evident not only in her interview style but also in the egalitarian way

in which she represented her students' contributions. She seemingly felt that her role as scholar came in the interpretation and analysis of the material. She spent

countless hours compiling permutations of the material generated for the col- lection, including subcategory lists, and crafting bibliographies to accompany

the collection. She nurtured this idea in her students and in the young folk song collectors and performers who crossed her path. Deane continued:

Mrs. Randolph recalls that virtually the entire village of Bellefonte, near Harrison, became involved in a student's summer project several years ago. People would call in items even after bedtime. In another Ozarks community, 40 elderly women each

pieced a simple quilt square for a student whose project was old patchwork designs and their names. Older people when first contacted by students were amazed and then pleased to realize there is a genuine understanding and appreciation of the

traditional lore they learned when they were growing up, and that seems to be squelched by the younger generation.45

The folk songs were only one part of the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection gathered under Parler's supervision. Stored in Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Mullins Library is a mostly unprocessed collection

of some sixty thousand handwritten note cards of "Ozark-isms" that were col- lected by Parler, her assistants, and her students.46 They include citations that were organized into eighteen volumes of unpublished typescript: eleven volumes

of folk beliefs and superstitions, four volumes of proverbs separated into max- ims and adjectival comparisons, two of riddles, and one of ballads and songs in

the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection.47 "Mary Parler did this exten-

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Mary Celestia Parler 295

sive project herself in addition to all her other duties, including teaching. She contributed this and other materials, to the University without any additional compensation—and, for that matter, with very little resulting recognition."48

It is difficult to say why, exactly, Parler never got much recognition. Perhaps the study of common or vernacular culture itself was underappreciated in the university system. Perhaps a change in leadership in the English department in the course of her tenure at the university made support for her work more diffi- cult. A darker hypothesis is that her work has been underappreciated because she was a woman doing what, at the time, was deemed unwomanly work and that she lived in what was considered an unladylike way.49 Certainly, she was appreciated by her students, and several of them went on to display a folkloric influence in their work or became part of the closely knit realm of Ozark folk- lore enthusiasts.

While her passion and persistence were largely ignored by the university, others recognized the value of her work. Parler earned recognition for her efforts in 1954 when CBS made her the focus of an episode of the television pro- gram The Search, a series that highlighted interesting people doing interesting work around the nation. This was the first time that Parler received national attention for collecting Arkansas folklore, and she relished the opportunity to share the work that she and her students had been doing. Parler arranged much of the logistics of the taping and lined up the performers who appeared in the television show, all of whom had been recorded by Parler for the University of Arkansas Folklore Collection. The show offers a glimpse into how charming Mary Parler was both as an individual and as a collector working with hill folks in northwest Arkansas. At the end of the program, Parler is sitting beneath a spinning Alexander Calder mobile at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Building and offers this argument for the importance of her work:

At the University of Arkansas we are collecting folklore to preserve some of the

elements of a passing culture. It's of value to literary scholars, to social historians,

to linguists, to anthropologists, and a source of inspiration to writers, artists, and

musicians. But we folklore collectors are impressed by the way these people make

their own music. We ask ourselves, "What should music mean to people anyway?"

Are we not, as a nation, becoming listeners and watchers of our own culture? Can

we learn from these folksingers and folk musicians the joy and vitality of participat-

ing in a live kind of music?50

The Search had followed Parler as she traipsed through "the wilds" of the Ozarks, heading down dirt and gravel roads in search of "the great-great- great-grandchild" of an Elizabethan ballad, "The Two Sisters." Along with CBS

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reporter Charles Romine, Parler scoured the hills, going from informant to in- formant, searching for someone who knew the song. Along the way, she and Romine heard songs, tunes, and tales until, finally, the sought-after song was

overheard from a most unlikely source, a young girl named Mary Jo Davis at a play party, which had been staged for the television crew Mary Jo and her family ended up becoming one of the greatest finds of Parler's collecting career.

They recorded 135 songs for Parler, and the family's youngest daughter was per- haps the greatest inspiration to Parler. She saw Mary Jo both as hope for a dying

cultural future and an artifact to be presented to the folklore crowd.

Parler eagerly recorded the members of the Davis family and added their extensive store of Ozark balladry to her collection, and she took on Mary Jo as a

sort of side project. She recorded several of Mary Jo's songs and began booking

singing engagements for her at area folk festivals and college campuses. Parler also brought her along on excursions to folklore society events and introduced her to other local musicians. As Davis recalled, "That was something really very

special to me. Mary Parler got acquainted with Mother first. Of course, I was going through my teenage thing that you do, when I first became aware that

Mother was singing these songs for Ms. Parler. But one day Ms. Parler and Mrs. Jack Carter . . . came to our house, and I sang a version, or part of a version of 'Barbara Allen.' And I remember them saying cOh, we'd like to get Mary Jo to

do some singing here or there.'"51 Parler also took Mary Jo with her on collect-

ing trips:

I went to Russellville with Ms. Parler. I was making an appearance there at the college and she learned about some old gentleman that lived up in the mountains

that knew some old-time fiddle tunes. She would get so excited anytime she heard anything like that. It was on the trail; it was the hunt. I would get caught up because I was with her. So she packed up her gear, and I think we had to rent a car. We took

off in the mountains, followed directions, and drove as far as we could until we came to a creek we couldn't drive over. So we walked the rest of the way up the hill, and there was this little house nestled in the woods. They didn't have any electricity.

The old man was willing to play; he was willing to accommodate her, but he didn't have any electricity. He said his son had electricity and we'd go down there.... We just walked in on these people . . . and they didn't care, so it was fine.52

Parler developed ongoing professional relationships with several of the people she recorded over the years, including Doney Hammontree, Booth Campbell,

Fred High, and Mary Briscoe, and presented them at festivals and gatherings of folklorists. There are also several nationally notable people recorded in her

collection, including Charlotte Stephens, who was enslaved before becoming

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Mary Celestia Parler 297

Arkansas's first black public school teacher (her life was explored in a brief bi- ography written by the sister of John Gould Fletcher, Adolphine Fletcher Terry). The recordings serve as a wonderful document of Stephens's recollections both as a child and as a young adult.

Two other recordings in the collection highlight people who later became famous for their singing and songwriting. Huntsville native Ronnie Hawkins was a student of Mary Parler at the University of Arkansas and was recorded for the collection shortly before he launched his band, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, which played around Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. In the late 19508, the group began touring Canada; eventually, Hawkins's musicians toured and recorded with Bob Dylan and then on their own as the Band. Simi- larly, Jimmy Morris was recorded by Parler in the 19508 before he made it big in 1959 with the hit record "The Battle of New Orleans" under the performing name of Jimmy Driftwood.53 Morris was a native of Stone County, Arkansas, a teacher, and an aspiring songwriter when Parler met him. As Jimmy Driftwood, he wrote more than six thousand songs, most of them in a traditional style, and he had a brief but successful recording career with RCA Victor.54

Within a few years of their initial meeting, Mary Parler found that Vance Randolph was a kindred spirit, and they naturally complemented each other's professional strengths. The first published collaboration between the two came in 1953 and was called Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech, a book about Ozark dialect. In the foreword Vance credited his future wife, Mary, stating that without her help the book would not have been possible.55 Although she was not credited as an author, she had read the entire manuscript, edited out obscurities, and tidied up the book before publication. This was the begin- ning of a long collaboration that proved to be mutually beneficial. Randolph saw folklore as a fragile part of culture that he worked feverishly to preserve.56

He had spent years in the hills of the Ozarks recording the people of the region, driven in large part by his fear that their traditions would all soon be lost. Parler shared Randolph's love for prolific collection, but knew the cyclical nature of folklore and its endurance. The two souls combined a boundless love for and knowledge of Ozarks culture.57 The working relationship developed further in The Talking Turtle, another publication by Randolph, this one a collection of tales.58 That book is dedicated to Parler, and she is also cited for nine jokes or sayings in his Hot Springs and Hell.59

At the same time that the professional relationship was being forged, so too was the romantic relationship between Randolph and Parler. Mary acknowl- edged that after the first or second meeting of the Arkansas Folklore Society, she "took a shine" to Vance.60 In interviews conducted in 1980, shortly before her

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298 R A C H E L R E Y N O L D S

death, and included in Robert Cochraris biography of Vance Randolph, she re- called, "Every woman he met fell in love with him. And he was a good-looking

old man. I bought a car so I could drive to Eureka Springs [to visit Randolph]

when I felt like it—a little second-hand Chevrolet."61 Randolph appeared taken with Parler as well. The folklorist who was known for his cantankerous behav- ior found himself flirting with the university's new arrival and being not only

cordial but even gallant. He recalled: "She was the best thing that ever happened to me. Here I was, almost sixty years old, walking on the grass holding hands! It took her 'til 1962 to break down and let me marry her, but she did."62

The two corresponded through letters frequently during their courtship. While Randolph was still living in Eureka Springs, he wrote an account of a near accident when he was almost struck by a vehicle while attempting to write

"Vance + Mary" on the sidewalk.63 During this same period, Parler remembered getting a note from Vance that read, "Dear Mary Celestia, A woman's place is in the f ing home. As ever, Vance," and another, a picture postcard, showing

Vance in a mule-pulled wagon with the caption "Dear Mary Celestia, that's me on the left."64 For her part, Parler remembered having "begged" Vance to marry her. Although they disagreed about who was courting whom first, the flirtation

that began at the Arkansas Folklore Society meetings in 1950 eventually led to the marriage of Vance Randolph, age seventy, and Mary Celestia Parler, age fifty- seven, in the spring of i96i.65 Margaret Rule, a colleague of Mary, recalled:

She used to talk to me about her father, a doctor in one of the Carolinas. She loved him. He was so perfect a man to her that she had never been seriously interested in marrying, though men had been seriously interested in her. Her decision not

to marry made her, in my estimation, a person of unusual honesty. Most women

eventually will settle for a marriage, whether the man is what they wanted or not. Mary C would have none of that. There was one man she respected, actually was

drawn to, but she showed an unaccustomed modesty about it, saying that he was too dignified to be interested in h e r . . . . That man was Vance Randolph.66

Rule continued, "She was happy to be his handmaiden. She certainly had no interest in being anyone else's, professional or personal; and she could say so clearly. In fact, she was a raspy person much of the time. She had no use for toadying, panting ambition, eager agreeing, or jockeying for place . . . all signs of wanting, beyond honor, to rise in the profession."67

Randolph had made the move from Eureka Springs to Fayetteville in 1960

during his and Parler's courtship. He had a small house on Leverett Street, and after they married they remained there for several years, moving to a nursing

home together in 1975.68 Mary, who had always suffered from poor eyesight, had

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Mary Celestia Purler 299

grown nearly blind, and the once vibrant Vance was now bedridden. The two passed the time by intellectually sparring and entertaining visitors who came to talk with Vance about his work and their work together.69

In 1963, Mary Celestia Parler Randolph published her only book, An Arkan- sas Ballet Book, a compilation of the transcriptions of Ozark ballads that she had collected over the years.70 The book resembled a large mimeographed poetry chapbook in appearance. There was no contextual information provided for the book's contents. Still, it offers an important point of reference in the folk song collecting of Arkansas and is an interesting artifact of Parler's work with the Arkansas Folklore Archives, a piece of her larger collection of Arkansas folklore materials, which were bound into volumes yet never published.71

In 1972, she was granted emeritus status, and she retired from the University of Arkansas in 1975/2 She and Randolph shared a joyful, though never finan- cially prosperous life in Fayetteville, moving from their quiet life in town into the nursing home together in the year she retired. Randolph died in 1980 and is buried in the national cemetery in Fayetteville thanks to his brief career as a largely bedridden soldier during World War I.73 Parler returned to South Caro- lina shortly after his death to live with her sister, Frances Lott, and died less than a year later.74 She is buried four miles from where she was born, at the Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg, South Carolina, next to her mother and father. Her gravestone reads, "Gladley Wolde She Lerne and Gladley Teche," an homage to her beloved Chaucer and to a life well lived.75

Mary Celestia Parler Randolph's legacy is the collection and archives at the University of Arkansas. Through her tireless work and that of her assistants and students, the lives, memories, songs, stories, and sayings of hundreds of Ozark people were documented. She dedicated her life to recording the lives, music, and culture of the Arkansas people and encouraged a host of musicians, scholars, and students associated with her projects.

As Randolph's biographer and American studies professor Robert Cochran opined, "The only shortcoming [about Randolph and Parler] is that Vance de- served all the attention he got, but he cast a big shadow. Mary never got quite the attention she deserved."76 In 1983, a fellowship was established in honor of Mary Celestia Parler and her husband in the English department at the University of Arkansas. The fellowship supports graduate students with special interests in the English language, literature, or folklore. According to one of the couple's dear friends, Ernie Deane, who was an Ozarks scholar in his own right and a profes- sor of journalism at the University of Arkansas, the fellowship was established by friends and family in the expectation of "further research and study that can add substantially to public knowledge of regional and national culture."77 In 2005, the

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3 0 0 R A C H E L R E Y N O L D S

University of Arkansas Libraries hosted a two-day conference, "A Collector in Her Own Right: Reassessing Mary Celestia Parler's Contribution to Ozark Folklore," which reinforced the importance of Parler's contributions to Arkansas cultural history Parler's life and work continue to be an inspiration for those who stumble upon her or—like a long-lost ballad—hear about her accomplishments from family, musicians, or scholars. In 2014, the University of Arkansas's Special Col- lections Department, which has housed Parler's materials for decades, launched an inclusive website offering her collection of Arkansas's cultural treasures to a worldwide audience. That same year, Parler's life and work were the focus of a large multimedia exhibit at the Fayetteville Public Library as part of the Fayette- ville Roots Festival in partnership with the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies and Art of the Rural; there are plans to take the exhibit, in traveling form, on the road and back to the communities where Parler found her inspiration.

NOTES

1. Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, 4 vols. (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1946-1950). Randolph was an avid collector of Ozark oral traditions. His works on the area are numerous and highly regarded. His field recordings reside at the Library of Congress; see John Lomax and Ruby Lomax, "1939 Southern Recording Trip Field Notes," 1939, Library of Congress. In 1939 John Lomax, honorary consultant and curator of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress), and Ruby Lomax, his wife, took a three-month, 6,502-mile trip through the southern states collecting songs from the region.

2. Jim Clark, News Service announcement, University of Arkansas, July 25, 1975, Mary Celes- tia Parler Randolph vertical file, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville (hereafter Parler Randolph vertical file); Arkansas Folklore Society and University of Arkansas Folklore Research Project, Ozark Folklore 1-4 (1950-1958).

3. Max Hunter, The Max Hunter Collection of Ozark Folk Songs, 40 vols. (Springfield, Mo.: Springfield-Green County Library District and Missouri State University, 2000). Hunter's audio collection includes many joint ventures between his and Parler's collection. See the special issue dedicated to Vance Randolph: Missouri Folklore Society Journal 4 (1982).

4. Frances Lott to Norma Ortiz, July 24,1986, Parler Randolph vertical file. 5. Yates Snowden, ed., History of South Carolina (New York: Lewis, 1920), 5:49-50. There are

short biographies of Dr. Marvin Lamar Parler and Josie Platt Parler in this history and reference to Josie Parler's writings. The only mention of Mary Celestia Parler that Snowden included is a poem written by her from the perspective of a child in the Aycock store in Wedgefield, South Carolina, at Christmas time (387-88). See also "Christmas in Aycock's Store," Parler Randolph vertical file.

6. Frances Lott, interview, Folklore Collection, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville (hereafter Folklore Collection); L. Hardy Wright, draft article written for Southern Accent, n.d., Mary Celestia Parler Randolph vertical file, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

7. Josie Platt Parler, "The High Hills of the Santee," State (Columbia, S.C.), May n, 1930, in Parler Randolph vertical file; and Josie Platt Parler, The Past Blows By (Sumter, S.C.: Knight Bros., 1939).

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Mary Celestia Purler 301

8. Wright, draft article. 9. Mary Celestia Parler, "The Forty-Mile Jumper," November 24, 1950, reel 78, Folklore Col-

lection. 10. Journal of American Folklore Society 64, no. 254 (October-December 1951): 422-23. 11. Robert Mallet, interview by Rachel Reynolds, August 14, 2002. Frances Lott was a first cousin

to Mary Parler on her mother's side of the family. After the death of Lott's mother during her in- fancy, she was raised by the Parlers. Mary and Frances considered themselves sisters; Lott, interview.

12. Mallet, interview. Tallulah Bankhead was a legendary screen actress in the 19305 and 19405 known more for her temperament and wit than for her performances. This perception of Parler's character followed her throughout her life.

13. Frances Lott to Norma Ortiz, letter. 14. Wright, draft article; Frances Lott to Norma Ortiz, letter. 15. Wright, draft article. 16. This quote comes from handwritten notes made by Margaret Rule, an English professor and

friend of Parler. Rule wrote an article called "Mary C" about Parler that was published shortly after her death in the Grapevine, a local trade paper (exact date unknown). The notes were provided to me by Rule's granddaughter Sarah K. Moore in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

17. Wright, draft article. 18. Mary Celestia Parler Randolph scrapbook, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Li-

braries, Fayetteville. The scrapbook contains some articles and announcements by or surround- ing Mary Celestia Parler. The majority of the contents are articles or book reviews written by her mother, Josie Platt Parler (signed J. P. or J. P. P.)

19. Leighton Rudolph, interview by Rachel Reynolds, April 26, 2002. Rudolph was a colleague of Parler at the University of Arkansas and one of the founding members, along with Parler, of the Arkansas Folklore Society.

20. Rudolph, interview. 21. Ibid.; Rule, "Mary C." 22. Rudolph, interview. 23. Rule, "Mary C," i. 24. Wright, draft article. 25. Ibid. 26. Fletcher was married to Charlie May Simon, the daughter of Wayman Hogue. She published

a book in 1945 called Straw in the Sun about homesteading in the Ozarks in the 19305. Her father had written Back Yonder: An Ozark Chronicle (1932). Randolph said that Fletcher had a long interest in folklore and staged the first folk festival on the University of Arkansas campus in 1949.

27. Robert Morris, "The First Arkansas Folklore Society," Grapevine 8, no. 17 (December 9,1981). 28. Halpert and his family became lifelong friends of and advocates for both Mary Parler and

Vance Randolph. 29. Rudolph, interview. 30. Ibid. 31. Vance Randolph, Manuscripts and Correspondence, University Libraries, Special Collec-

tions, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. 32. "Articles from Ozark Folklore," Mid-America Folklore 17 (Spring 1989): 26. 33. Mary Celestia Parler Papers, 1950-1980, University of Arkansas Special Collections, finding

aid, https://libraries.uark.edu/specialcollections/findingaids/parlerpapers.html. 34. Mary Celestia Parler, "Research in Folklore," Arkansas Alumnus (November 1958): 4.

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3 0 2 R A C H E L R E Y N O L D S

35. George Malcolm Laws, Native American Balladry: A Descriptive Study and a Bibliographical Syllabus (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1950).

36. A preference for modern versions of ballads that had been cataloged by Francis James Child was shared by many folk song collectors of the early twentieth century, including Texan Dorothy Scarborough and Parler's protege, Max Hunter of Springfield, Missouri.

37. Hunter, Max Hunter Collection, vol. i. Hunter's preference, if already becoming out of vogue, was tied to the philosophy of the nation s great pioneering folk song collections, especially that of Francis James Child. Child, a Harvard professor, completed the first modern assemblage of ancient balladry in the final decades of the nineteenth century: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898; repr., New York: Dover, 2003).

38. See Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vance Randolph's compendium was pub- lished as the four volumes ofOzark Folksongs; the material was collected between 1909 and 1946. He offered his own numbering system for the Ozark versions and cross-referenced the ballads found in his collection with Child's numbering system. At the same time that Randolph was collecting, John Avery Lomax was scouring the southern states for folk song materials for the Library of Congress. Lomax published the first collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910). Drawing from the western pioneer experience, Lomax attempted to "throw light on the conditions of pioneer life" and capture the information in the songs concerning that "unique and romantic figure in modern civilization, the American cowboy" (xvii). This, along with Randolph's collection of western balladry, offered yet another approach to the study of American balladry and had a direct influence on Parler's methodology. In Native American Balladry, Laws did for American song tradition what Child had done for Scottish and English ballads. Pulling materials from the collections of Randolph, Lomax, and other collectors of the 19208 through the late 19408, Laws presented a collection of 185 songs that fit into all aspects of his definition of bal- lads native to America and provided a categorical scheme to match Child's, identifying war bal- lads, ballads of cowboys and pioneers, murder ballads, ballads of tragedies and disasters, among others.

39. Parler Papers, finding aid. 40. Wright, draft article; reels 1-442, Folklore Collection. 41. Lott, interview. There are numerous reels of such material in the collection. 42. Ibid. 43. Ernie Deane, "Ozarks Country," Springdale News, April 10, 1984, n.p., in Parler Randolph

vertical file. 44. Parler Papers, finding aid. 45. Deane, "Ozarks Country," n.p. 46. Unprocessed material, Folklore Collection. 47. Non-song material, Folklore Collection. 48. Ernie Deane, "The Folklore Collection of'Mary C.,'" Ozarks Mountaineer (May-June 1984):

30-31, in Parler Randolph vertical file. 49. Parler was known for her smoking and drinking, sometimes on campus, sometimes in class.

She was often said to have a disheveled appearance. 50. Henwar Rodakiewicz, dir., The Search, Information Productions, CBS, November 4, 1954.

There is no known online copy of the show, but this link has a snippet: https://vimeo.com/io45i3648. 51. Alan L. Spurgeon and David Gadberry "Mary Jo Davis Henderson: Her Life and Contribu-

tions to Ozark Regional Folk Music," Mid-America Folklore 29, nos. 1-2 (Summer 2002): 9. 52. Ibid.

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Mary Celestia Purler 303

53. Zac Cothren, "Jimmy Driftwood (1907-1998)," in Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Cul-

ture, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2i87 (ac-

cessed September 17, 2013).

54. Ibid.

55. Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery ofOzark Folk Speech

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), vii-viii.

56. Robert Cochran, Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois

Press, 1985), 86-87.

57. Vance Randolph vertical file, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayette-

ville.

58. Vance Randolph, The Talking Turtle and Other Ozark Folk Tales (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 1957).

59. Vance Randolph, Hot Springs and Hell and Other Folk Jests and Anecdotes from the Ozarks

(Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1965), vii.

60. Cochran, Vance Randolph, 206.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Private collection, Gordon McCann.

65. Randolph, Manuscripts and Correspondence.

66. Rule, "Mary C," 2.

67. Ibid.

68. Cochran, Vance Randolph, 218.

69. Ibid.

70. Mary Celestia Parler, An Arkansas Ballet Book (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1963).

71. Dr. Leo Van Scyoc, interview by Rachel Reynolds, April 20, 2002.

72. Clark, News Service announcement.

73. Cochran, Vance Randolph, 217-25.

74. Lott, interview.

75. The quote comes from "The Clerk of Oxford's Tale" in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

76. Quoted in Spurgeon and Gadberry "Mary Jo Davis Henderson," 9.

77. Norma Conner, University of Arkansas News Service article, October 12,1983, box 3, folder

30, University of Arkansas News Service Materials, 19608-2000, Special Collections, University of

Arkansas Libraries.

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