Scope and Content
The Vance Randolph collection had its beginnings in the early 1940s with fieldwork conducted by the well-known amateur Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph. In February 1941, Alan Lomax, then head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, wrote to Vance Randolph, asking if he would consider making field recordings in the Ozarks. Randolph accepted the request and began to conduct fieldwork with recording equipment and film supplied by the Archive. By the end of 1942, he had collected more than 870 selections on 198 discs (either aluminum or glass-based and lacquer) for the Library of Congress and photographs of people he recorded. Randolph used much of the material he collected in his book Ozark Folksongs, while the Archive included selections from these field recordings on the following releases: L-12, Anglo-American Songs and Ballads; L-14, Anglo-American Songs and Ballads; L-20, Anglo-American Songs and Ballads; L-30, Songs of the Mormons and Songs of the West(this release includes Randolph himself singing "Starving to Death on a Government Claim"); L-61, Railroad Songs and Ballads; and L-62, American Fiddle Tunes.
In addition to the field recordings mentioned above, the Vance Randolph collection contains the author's personal papers, which he donated to the Library of Congress in 1972. The papers consist of newspaper clippings, bibliographic notes, field notes, research notes, photographic prints, manuscripts, maps, typescripts, telegrams and correspondence, dating from the first decade of the twentieth century to the 1960s.