The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Queen of the Hillbillies: The Writings of May Kennedy McCord, edited by Patti McCord and Kristene Sutliff.
May Kennedy McCord, lovingly called “First Lady of the Ozarks” and “Queen of the Hillbillies,” grew up in the hills, reared on Ozarks traditions, ballads, superstitions, beliefs, dialect, and character. She spent fifty years working to preserve the unwritten history, songs, and stories of her people. Beginning in the 1920s, she was recognized as one of America’s foremost folklorists as she shared her knowledge through lectures, newspaper columns, magazine stories, radio programs, and music festivals. She was an entertainer who became as much of a tourist attraction as her beloved hills, and often entertained tour groups that wanted to learn about the Ozarks.
Yet McCord is not as well known as her contemporaries who also worked to preserve and promote the history and culture of the Ozarks because unlike her friends Otto Rayburn, Vance Randolph, and Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey, McCord never published a collection of her work. Randolph encouraged her to do so; in 1956 he wrote to her, “If you didn’t have such a mental block against writing books, I could show you how to make a book out of extracts from your columns. It would be very little work, and sell like hotcakes. . . . I could write a solemn little introduction, telling the citizens what a fine gal you are! The hell of it is, most of the readers know all about you, and they would say ‘But who is this fellow Randolph?’”
Belatedly, this book fulfills that almost lost idea by bringing together the best of May Kennedy McCord’s widely scattered columns, articles, stories, and ballads as well as unpublished material from her personal files. It is part of the Chronicles of the Ozarks series from the University of Arkansas Press, a reprint series that will make available some of the depression era’s Ozark books with introductions and editorial notes that place each book and its author against the backdrop of the era and its popular assumptions and myths of life in the Ozarks. Previous books in the series include Back Yonder: An Ozark Chronicle by Charles Wayman Hogue, The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society by Vance Randolph, Yesterday Today: Life in the Ozarks by Catherine S. Barker, and Ozark Country by Otto Ernest Rayburn.
Queen of the Hillbillies: The Writings of May Kennedy McCord will be published in April, 2022.