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.

Vance Randolph (1892-1980) was an American writer and folklorist who concentrated his work in the Ozarks, with nearly twenty books produced about stories heard throughout his travels through the rural countryside.