The Missouri Folklore Society
Encyclopedia
The roots of MFS go back to a meeting held in the offices of the English Department at the University of Missouri
University of Missouri
The University of Missouri System is a state university system providing centralized administration for four universities, a health care system, an extension program, five research and technology parks, and a publishing press. More than 64,000 students are currently enrolled at its four campuses...
at the turn of the twentieth century. The "Writer’s Club" expressed interest in "folksongs and literary material to be found in Missouri," as reported in the M.S.U. Independent on March 6, 1903. The State Historical Society of Missouri had recently opened its library in what is now Jesse Hall, and the cultural moment had arrived for the development of a new academic field which would blend the materials and methods of many traditional disciplines – philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
, literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
and history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
-- as well as connecting to the newer fields of sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. In literature, the movement that would come to be known as “local color” and the political disposition known as populism
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
worked together to prosper an interest in what Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
had called for, long ago, in a genuinely American literary culture: rejecting “the courtly muses of Europe” in favor of “the near, the low, the common.”
The students of the English Club conceived of what would now be called a project in fieldwork and salvage ethnography
Salvage ethnography
Salvage ethnography is a term used by anthropologists beginning in the 1960s used as part of a critique of 19th century ethnography and early modern anthropology. The term was coined by Jacob Gruber, who identified its emergence with 19th century ethnographers documenting the languages of peoples...
; aware that sociological trends did not favor the preservation of materials of limited distribution and held in oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
, and probably feeling, as some Midwestern students perhaps continue to do, that their own culture hardly qualified as such in the eyes of more prestigious institutions on the Eastern seaboard, they proposed to gather the lore of Missouri into bound volumes, as an archive for future researchers. This collection project, with leadership from the English Club’s faculty sponsor, Henry Marvin Belden and its secretary-treasurer, Maude Williams, would form the basis for the Society’s single most-cited work, Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folklore Society, published in 1940 (second edition, 1955; reprinted 1966 and 1973).
Society board member Lyn Wolz has been named editor of a revised online edition to be sponsored by the Missouri Folklore Society and the University of Missouri Press.
The collection project was an item of discussion at the 1905 meeting of the Modern Language Society in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, where the fact that ancient ballads continued to be sung in rural areas was received as something of a revelation, though one to which the “popular antiquities” orientation of incipient folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
studies was favorably disposed. In addition to a very local sort of patriotism, the primary warrant for preserving a given text was that it could be traced to a prior tradition (especially one documentable in the British Isles, ideally in Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry or the English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) of Francis James Child
Francis James Child
Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry...
. Belden published results of his students’ researches in Modern Philology and the Journal of American Folklore, and the club had achieved sufficient stability as to establish itself officially on December 15, 1906.
The innovations here are numerous: the recognition of fieldwork as an academic enterprise, the development of collection and archiving protocols, and the participation of undergraduates in original research (a novelty which lies behind such projects as the Foxfire books, Bittersweet and The Chariton Collector). Early proceedings indicate keen awareness of the dual orientations of the society, both to literature and to anthropology. From an early date, there was recognition of the need to collect the lore of the state’s Black and Native American communities. The Missouri Folklore Society provided the impetus (and expertise) for other such organizations, notably the Texas Folklore Society. Belden became prominent in national folklore circles, serving as president of the American Folklore Society
American Folklore Society
The American Folklore Society is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world. It was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of a diverse group of university-based scholars, museum anthropologists, and men...
and working closely with such period luminaries as the anthropologist Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
and the literary scholar George Lyman Kittredge
George Lyman Kittredge
George Lyman Kittredge was a celebrated professor and scholar of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare' as well as his writings and lectures on Shakespeare and other literary figures made him one of the most influential American...
– again testifying to the new discipline's divided identity. Unfortunately, nothing came of the American Folklore Society’s plans, much discussed in 1917, to publish the Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
collection (which was substantially what it would be on its 1940 appearance).
The Society did not participate in the virtual explosion of amateur and academic activity, the formation of organizations and the implementation of collection projects, which extended through the 1920s and 30s. As a result of a combination of factors, including disappointment over the derailment of the organization’s signature project, but perhaps primarily because of a failure of continuity in leadership and philosophy, the Society "fell into a coma in 1920 from which it has not recovered." Belden became increasingly busy with administrative duties and other research projects, as was the case too with what then seemed a fine choice for Belden’s successor, Archer Taylor. Mary Alicia Owen
Mary Alicia Owen
Mary Alicia Owen was a folklore collector of Missouri who compiled several works of local legend and voodoo.She was born in a renowned family of Saint Joseph, Missouri and lived with her two sisters, Luella and Juliette, both of whom were noted authors...
, the most prominent of early Missouri collectors and for decades a leader in the Society, did not share Belden’s focused enthusiasm for folksong, preferring to cast the net much more broadly.
For these and other reasons, the Society as such effectively went silent until 1977, though Missouri folklorists certainly remained active, and Missouri folklore continued to be collected and studied by such as Ward Dorrance, Vance Randolph
Vance Randolph
Vance Randolph was a famous folklorist who studied the folklore of the Ozarks in particular. He wrote a number of books on topics including the Ozarks, Little Blue Books, and juvenile fiction....
, Joseph Carrière, R.P. Christeson, Rosemary Thomas and others. A group consisting mainly of University of Missouri faculty met on March 30, 1977 for the re-activation of the Society. The re-incarnation of MFS, led by Adolph and Rebecca Schroeder, Don Holliday and Cathy Barton (among others), was well-prepared with broad publicity and grass-roots participation from throughout the state. The basic frameworks for the annual Missouri Folklore Society Journal (long edited by Donald Lance) and the statewide meeting, to be held each year in a different part of the state, with such prominent keynote speakers as Roger Abrahams and Max Hunter, were established.
Perhaps most importantly for the continued existence and success of the Society, there was an explicit recognition of the need to participate in multiple networks of likeminded organizations (for example the Ozarks States Folklore Society), and above all to recognize the legitimate participation of a variety of constituencies and stakeholders in folklore: academic scholars, certainly, but also performers, tradition-bearers, informants -- "amateurs" in the truest and best sense of the word. Each annual meeting has had presentations and participation by such scholars of international standing as http://www.missouri.edu/~engwww/people/foley.htmlJohn Miles Foley
John Miles Foley
John Miles Foley Is a scholar of comparative oral tradition, medieval and Old English Literature , Ancient Greek and Serbian epic. He is the founder of the academic journal Oral Tradition and the at the University of Missouri, where he is Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English and...
], Elaine Lawless, Barry Bergey, Alain Jabbour and Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand is an American folklorist. A professor emeritus of the University of Utah, he best known for spreading the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore...
, as well as reports on collection-efforts by students and members of local historical societies, remembrance sessions, presentations on crafts, and music sessions.
The Society has, at the century mark, its largest membership in history, a well-trafficked website which includes a growing repository of studies and documents (Missouri Folklore Studies) and a journal now well past the quarter-century mark.