Mildred, Quit Hollering!

Mildred, Quit Hollering! and Other Ozark Folktales is the last collection of folktales by celebrated Ozarks historian and storyteller, Vance Randolph. These folktales--nearly forty in all--represent some of the best stories assembled by Randolph over five decades of wandering the hills and hollers of the Missouri/Arkansas Ozark Mountains--a celebration of the life and humor enjoyed by folks in rural America and assembled during Randolph's final years spent in a nursing home. Now published nearly forty-four years after Randolph's death, Mildred, Quit Hollering! includes the biographies of the men and women who originally passed each story along to Randolph, which makes for interesting reading in itself, plus additional commentary from Augustus Finch, the self-proclaimed "Reverend, Biblical Expositor and Eschatologist", who presents an entire new collection of his own bawdy tales. The last compilation of "Mr. Ozark" himself, Mildred, Quit Hollering! is both a tribute to the late Vance Randolph, but also a reminder that people are still people wherever you go, and it's okay to laugh at ourselves sometimes.

More about the author, as shared by Encyclopedia of Arkansas:

"Randolph’s first wife died in 1937, and the couple had no children. For most of the 1940s and 1950s, he lived in Arkansas, mostly in Eureka Springs but also in Fayetteville. In March 1962, Randolph married Mary Celestia Parler, a folklore researcher and English professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He later published a collection of Ozark jokes and jests, Hot Springs and Hell (1965), and Ozark Folklore: A Bibliography (1972). Pissing in the Snow (1976), a collection of bawdy folk tales, became far and away his most popular book.

In 1978, Randolph was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. He died on November 1, 1980, in Fayetteville and is buried in the National Cemetery there, as a consequence of a brief military service earlier in his life."¹

^{Source: Cochran, Robert B. 2024. “Randolph, Vance - Encyclopedia of Arkansas.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. April 18, 2024. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/vance-randolph-2265/.}