Missouri Folklore Society Journal Special Issue: Hell's Holler: A Novel Based on the Folklore of the Missouri Chariton Hill Country: 38AND39

The old established community with its folk code its superstitions its prejudices imaginations etc. in direct opposition to the new or modern world of reality and progress can hardly survive. A man from this community sells his body to some fairly modern doctors and from then on lives in fear and cowardice -- continually weighing his fate after death including the idea of resurrection against the moral obligation of his bargain -- and after his death becomes the community hero. --Ruth Ann Musick-summarizing theme of Hells HollerHells Holler was the 1943 University of Iowa doctoral dissertation of Ruth Ann Musick who became one of the countrys premiere folklorists during the mid-twentieth century founding the West Virginia Folklore Journal and managing that states Folklore Center. Set in the rural Northeast Missouri area where she grew up Hells Holler recounts ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of George and Mary Moore their children parents and neighbors. It features the folklore customs songs dances and superstitions of the region and especially attends to questions about medicine and health prompted by Musicks interest in the nearby College of Osteopathic Medicine. This publication includes dozens of sketches by the authors brother Archie Musick who went on to become a well known mid-century artist--a friend and protege of Thomas Hart Benton and a colleague of Jackson Pollack. The novel is accompanied by two Prefaces and an Afterword. The first preface by Missouri Folklore Societys Adam Davis deals mainly with historical contexts folkloric contents and the training in folklore collecting which helped Musick create the characters and world of Hells Holler. The second by artist Pat Musick--niece of the author and daughter of the artist--foregrounds the extraordinarily talented family which produced Ruth Ann and Archie. Pat Musick relies on a trove of letters and journals drafts and synopses to understand the attitudes anxieties and exaggerations which inhabit Hells Holler and in some cases the real-life models for characters. The Afterword is by Judy Prozzillo Byers student folklorist friend and biographer of the author. As director of the West Virginia Folklore Center at the university where Musick taught for thirty years Byers accents the ways in which the novel reveals its authors values. She reads Hells Holler as a classic example of how Musick fought for underdogs--in this case uneducated farmers whose superstitions nourished and grounded them as firmly as their music and church services did.