Ballad Hunting with Max Hunter: Stories of an Ozark Folksong Collector

For well over a century, the Ozark region has captured the interest of folklorists and folklore aficionados. A major area of research has focused on the collection and documentation of ballads—much of it completed by both professional and amateur researchers. Sarah Jane Nelson's new book is an engaging treatment of one of the major, but relatively overlooked, amateur collectors. Max Hunter was a traveling salesman from Springfield, Missouri, who compiled an impressive collection of recordings of ballad singers from the region. He also promoted ballads and folk musicians as director of music programs at Silver Dollar City, the Ozark Folk Festival, and numerous presentations in schools and libraries. Following his death in 1998, performers and researchers have extensively used the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection, now at Missouri State University's library. As Nelson demonstrates, Hunter's 1,600 recordings not only contribute to research and scholarship on Ozark folk song, but also fittingly supplement fieldwork collections from Vance Randolph, Mary Celestia Parler, John Quincy Wolf, and numerous other researchers.Nelson's Arkansas roots form an important basis for her interest in Hunter's field research. Nelson is an acclaimed singer, songwriter, and performer, and Ballad Hunting with Max Hunter: Stories of an Ozark Folksong Collector shows that she is also an excellent researcher and writer. She frames the book around Hunter's biography, which focuses primarily on his forays that involved collecting ballads from the late 1940s to well into the 1980s. Hunter was an unabashedly amateur collector; his preservationist ethos was central to his mission. He did, however, learn excellent fieldwork techniques from his friendships with Randolph, Parler, and other folklorists, and he left an important legacy of rich documentation and write-ups from his research. Nelson presents readers with well-chosen accounts of his visits with important balladeers, including Almeda Riddle, Aunt Ollie Gilbert, Fred Smith, and numerous other well-known singers within the region. Although Hunter had completed little field documentation by the late 1970s, he continued to influence folk music scenes in the Ozarks through his work as a music promoter and his own performances. One of the performers who clearly benefitted from his contributions is the book's author. She gives readers rich accounts of Hunter's many adventures, including his encounters with sometimes recalcitrant ballad singers and his admirable patience in working with musicians who sincerely valued his company. Hunter emerges as a friendly and likeable personage, and readers will gain a vibrant sense of connections between folklorists and folksingers who are integral to the region's musical history.Nelson (perhaps) identifies a bit with Hunter. She obviously loves the music, and she is an excellent singer and performer. Although she has written for numerous publications, she generally works outside academia. Her library research and her in-person contact with people who knew Hunter are both admirable. She also uses relevant aspects of the intellectual history of folklore to provide folklorists and ethnomusicologists with a solid grounding in scholarship. The book adds to our growing literature on the fieldworkers and folklorists who completed their work prior to the establishment of folklore programs in colleges and universities. Nelson provides numerous accounts that strongly contribute to a general interest in the stories-from-the-field literature that is highly valuable for understanding the history of field research.There are a few mistakes, however, that may precipitate some grievances. Nelson glosses over and muddles connections between the establishment of the American Folklife Center in 1976 and the earlier work of the Archive of American Folk Song. There also is a major problem when she mistakenly identifies the folklore program at Western Kentucky University as the University of Bowling Green. The book also could have included more discussion of the place of Hunter's work within the coalescence of public-sector folklore during Hunter's lifetime.Reading the book might spark some nostalgia, especially among the scarred old dogs of public folklore. Passages from Hunter's own writing evoke reflections on the changing nature of fieldwork. By the mid-1970s, Hunter was finding less and less to collect. He also writes about how projects that opened roads to Ozark communities changed the scale of social life, and he laments the loss of communities due to the construction of lakes that dammed waterways in the region. These are not simply the hazy reflections of a sentimentalist. They accurately represent the challenges of attempting to identify unrecorded ballads and folk songs in the region. It is significant that even folklorists themselves recognized these kinds of challenges. A telling passage by Parler realistically looks at the problems she faced when she had to change some of her classroom assignments. When she assigned students to collect folklore for her University of Arkansas classes, Parler recognized the dearth of undocumented ballads. She also questioned the value of additional documentation of well-preserved ballads, and recognized that it was not that valuable to have six more texts of “Barbara Allen” when there were already 600 in the university's collection.This same kind of attenuation of certain elements of traditional expressive culture is evident in other regions. Occasionally, new ballads are documented throughout the United States, and fieldworkers have found living elements of time-honored folk culture. But the changing times have changed—dare I say, even created—the loss of folk tradition. Hunter completed fieldwork because he valued the old songs, but he also enjoyed the experience of doing fieldwork. The kind of field documentation that he completed is largely a thing of the past in the Ozarks and other regions.Nelson deals with this sense of loss and longing for the older ballad tradition. She also gives readers some useful perspectives on these changes in folk culture. She writes how Hunter spent much of the last two decades of his life programming folk events rather than collecting folklore in the field. This aspect of Hunter's life history may serve as a microhistory of larger elements of public folklore. The renewed emphasis on folklore as an attribute of heritage is linked to the preservationist ethos—a concern worthy of celebration as well as contestation. In another sense, however, Nelson also deals more optimistically with the value of using new technology to support the vibrancy of traditional ballad singing, old-time string band music, and other legacy traditions. This aspect of revival is linked to the legacy of collectors such as Max Hunter, and Nelson's in-depth consideration of his work will contribute to our understanding of folklore's own history.