“‘Bless your hearts, here I am again! Bad pennies will bob up, you know,’ Ozarks entertainer and folklorist May Kennedy McCord once joked. McCord has largely faded from public memory, but as historian Brooks Blevins acknowledges, ‘back in the hills and hollers in the middle of the twentieth century no one rivaled her celebrity’. McCord’s granddaughter Patti, together with Missouri State University professor emerita Kristene Sutliff, gathered dozens of McCord’s published and unpublished columns, articles, and radio scripts to produce the first comprehensive collection of her work. … This overdue appraisal of her life and legacy adroitly welcomes ‘the Queen back to the realm.’”
—Missouri Historical Review, October 2022
May Kennedy McCord, lovingly nicknamed “First Lady of the Ozarks” and “Queen of the Hillbillies,” spent half a century sharing the history, songs, and stories of her native Ozarks through newspaper columns, radio programs, and music festivals. Though her work made her one of the twentieth century’s preeminent folklorists, McCord was first and foremost an entertainer—at one time nearly as renowned as the hills she loved.
Despite the encouragement of her contemporaries, McCord never published a collection of her work. In 1956, Vance Randolph 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.” In Queen of the Hillbillies, editors Patti McCord and Kristene Sutliff at last bring together the best of McCord’s published and previously unpublished writings to share her knowledge, humor, and inimitable spirit with a new generation of readers.