This basic study by a renowned folklorist includes eye-opening information on yarb doctors, charms, spells, witches, ghosts, weather magic, crops a...
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Jan 24, 2012
Amanda
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I love this book. It was sent to me by a friend who found it "too creepy" to continue reading. My mother's family are from the Ozarks, and have been there for ages. So, I started out with an interest before I even cracked the cover. The stories are told by a man who seems to have married an Ozark girl, but was still considered an outsider. Many of the stories are quite humorous, some are sad, and some are a little shocking. Quite a few are creepy, too. Awesome book. Would never part wi
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Dec 25, 2011
Stephanie
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I have enjoyed this book very much. It is so information dense that I have to take breaks from it to digest it all (but that's a good thing).
The author is an outsider to the culture, and he is candid about the occasions when the people of the area would refuse to go further in discussing a topic with him. I appreciate it so much that he chose not to embellish when those gaps came up. The main area where his status as an outsider interferes with his ability to receive information fr More...
The author is an outsider to the culture, and he is candid about the occasions when the people of the area would refuse to go further in discussing a topic with him. I appreciate it so much that he chose not to embellish when those gaps came up. The main area where his status as an outsider interferes with his ability to receive information fr More...
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Mar 16, 2008
Amber
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It's funny - while I appreciate the trove he's collected, Vance doesn't seem (or won't admit) that he believes any of it. And I think that part of the time, the Ozark folks are just screwing around with him!
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Apr 07, 2010
David
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Vance Randolph meticulously documented the customs and practices of Ozarkers, both their dialect and, in this book, their superstitions and magical practices. It's an interesting read to get a glimpse of a culture that's now mostly gone, as modernization was beginning to take hold in the Ozarks even during the time Randolph was writing this.
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Oct 28, 2008
Oakley
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This is an extensive laundry list of all the superstitions and practices of the hill-people from the Ozark region in 1947. It has many different remedies, directions on how to divine water, ways to put spells on lovers, predict the weather and how to put a soul at rest. It even has some local ghost stories. Most of these beliefs are mystifying, i.e. "The woman who throws an eggshell into a fire on May 1st and sees a drop of blood on that shell will not live to see another may day."
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May 22, 2007
Neal
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I've really only read part's of this, its not much for straight reading but its got a lot of interesting superstitions for the area like one where a girl takes a stone from the bottom of a stream wraps a lock of her hair around it and puts it back in the water to make her hair glossy, and if your right elbow aches on a thursday it means two weeks of rain starting tuesday. The weirdest part are the ghost stories from this region, they're kind of "wacky" and anti-climatic. And I use th
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Oct 21, 2009
Kristopher
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Published in 1940, and trying to record a way of life that was vanishing even then, this is a great collection stuffed with superstitions, folklore, and mountain medicine.
There's a few long antidotes, and Randolph occasionally speculates where a particular myth might comes from, but 90% of the entries are only a sentence or two long, collected under broad chapter headings like "Animal Folklore" or "Death and Burial." I admit I skimmed most of this book, and skimm More...
There's a few long antidotes, and Randolph occasionally speculates where a particular myth might comes from, but 90% of the entries are only a sentence or two long, collected under broad chapter headings like "Animal Folklore" or "Death and Burial." I admit I skimmed most of this book, and skimm More...
Jul 15, 2011
From the bibliographies of Ellen Dugan's Garden Witchery (2003) and Green Witch's Herbal (2009)
Jul 01, 2009
Trinette
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This caught my eye on a library display. Turns out I had read this before, so I just skimmed through it. Mildly amusing, especially since I grew up on the edge of the Ozarks.
Jul 17, 2009
Nancy
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This was a fun book to read. The main thing I learned from this book was that the Ozark people set quite a store by urine as a cure-all for most everything. It was fun seeing how many superstitions cross cultural lines (salt over the shoulder, seeing two crows= good luck, horseshoes turned the correct way over a door frame to bring fortune to a home, eating greens and peas on New Year's Day, etc.)
Jun 21, 2008
Russ
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This book is fantastic! I got it in Arizona almost as a joke, but it's really grown on me the more I've read it. There is no filler, just tale after tale, superstition after superstition... Being written in the 1940s, it is much closer to the sources than anything written today could hope to be (lots of the superstitions and stories come from folks who lived during the Civil War era).
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