Book review: “Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales” by Vance Randolph

Think of Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales as a kind of grass-roots version of the 14^th century Decameron.  In fact, Randolph might have had that masterpiece of Italian literarture in mind when he put together his book.

Written by Giovanni Boccaccio, the Decameron begins with a group of seven young women and three young men who, to escape an epidemic in Florence, set themselves up in a secluded villa and spend their time telling stories — one a day over the course of ten days for a total of 100.

Many, but not all, of the tales are comically bawdy. Over the course of the hundred stories, both sexes are portrayed as lusty and crafty enough to employ a variety of strategies to find a bed partner. The strongest satire has to do with priests, monks and nuns who, despite their vow of celibacy, are portrayed as perhaps even more randy than lay people.

Pissing in the Snow is made up of 101 playful stories, all of them ribald or scatological, that Randolph collected from Ozarks residents during a half-century career as a folklorist.  It was one of more than twenty books he wrote on the region which includes portions of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, but it was the most difficult to get published.

Although the manuscript was completed in 1954, the book didn’t see the light of day until 1976 when the University of Illinois Press brought it out.

 

Actual earthy words

The reason for that delay wasn’t only because Randolph was dealing with off-color stories, but mainly because he insisted on using that actual words of his informants, even the earthy ones dealing with excretory and sexual functions.

Folktales, he wrote in the book’s preface, “can’t be presented in this academic jargon, because they depend upon linguistic as well as situational elements for effect.” And he went on:

An honest folklorist cannot substitute feces for shit, or write copulate when his informant says fuck, diddle, roger, or tread…Many of these stories are innocent, even childish, but they do contain vulgar terms like cunt and twitchet, therefore the gentlemen who edit the scholarly journals will not print them…

It is impossible to present a well-rounded picture of Ozark folklore without some obscene items.

 

Lusty and crafty

Like the Decameron, the tales in Pissing in the Snow portray lusty and crafty Ozarkers who cleverly find ways to enjoy sex.

Like Boccaccio’s book, the tellers of the tales are men and women, equally robust at recounting sexual scheming, especially when a trick or a comeuppance is involved.

A good number of the Ozarks stories, as their predecessors five hundred years earlier, have to do with comic stereotypes, such as incest in isolated families and the lecherousness of men of the cloth.

 

“Amen!”

For instance, Story 17 is titled “The Two Preachers.” Randolph reports that he heard it from Jeff Strong, at Roaring River near Cassville, Mo. It has to do with two preachers who are holding a big camp-meeting in the wood, one young, one older.

They was both married, but they done a lot of outside fucking on camp-meeting nights. So one evening they got to bragging how many of the womenfolks they had diddled. And that same night they both stood in front of the brush-arbor while the congregation was a-coming in.

Whenever a woman came along that one of ‘em had screwed, he could say “Amen!” And if a woman come past that both of ‘em had laid up with, they would both holler “Amen!”

That was fine and dandy for the two puffed-up preachers, but then, when the young one’s wife came along, her husband hollered “Amen!” — and so did the older one. That young preacher scowled and fumed but couldn’t do anything until the old preacher’s wife arrived with her teen-age daughter.

The old preacher says “Amen!” when her and the girl come by. But the young preacher says “Amen! Amen!” like that.

The old man just stood there with his mouth open for a minute, and then him and the young fellow begun to fight like wildcats.

The fight ruined the revival and was a terrible disgrace to the ministers.

But the folks that live around there never did find out what them preachers was a-fighting about.

 

“Like a tree”

Then there was the Yankee army veteran named Jubal who was trying to get a government pension, the subject of Story 14, “He Didn’t Get No Pension,” told to Randolph by Price Paine of Noel, Missouri, in 1923.

Jubal claimed he had all these ailments, but, to the doctor who examined him, he seemed as strong as an ox.

There was a card hung with letters on it, but Jubal says he don’t see no letters.

Pretty soon a girl come in the office, and she pulled up her dress to show her legs. “That sure is a pretty girl, ain’t it?” says the doctor. Jubal says he don’t see no girl, but he begun to sweat.

So the doctor gave a sign to the girl, and she took off all her clothes.

There she was a-prancing around without a stitch on only her shoes and stockings. Jubal never batted an eye, but the girl busted out laughing. “Look at his pecker, Doc,” she says. “It’s a-standing up like a tree!”

 

“No milk at all”

Story 88 is called “The Baby Lost Weight,” and it was related by George Head of Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  It has to do with a young woman who brings a baby into Doc Henderson’s office, complaining that the baby is losing weight.

The doctor asked the woman what sort of victuals she was eating, and she replied, “What I eat ain’t got nothing to do with the baby being skinny.”

Doc examined her mighty careful, anyhow. And he pulled her dress open, to see if something is the matter with her breasts. The woman wiggled a good deal, but he sucked her tits, first one and then the other. There wasn’t no milk at all.

Finally she says, “That’s my sister’s baby, you know.”

The humor in the story, of course, has to do with the doctor bulling ahead, knowing that he knows what the problem is — when he doesn’t. But there’s a second punchline.

Doc Henderson is taken aback because he never ever thought that the baby wasn’t hers.

“Hell’s fire,” he says, “you shouldn’t have come!” The young woman just kind of giggled. “I didn’t,” she says, “till you started a-sucking the second one.”

“Right there in the snow”

One final example of the stories in Pissing in the Snow is the tale that gave the book its name, Story 1, told to Randolph by Frank Hembree of Galena, Missouri.

One time there was two farmers that lived out on the road to Carico. They was always good friends, and Bill’s oldest boy had been a-sparking one of Sam’s daughters. Everything was going fine till the morning they met down by the creek, and Sam was pretty goddam mad. “Bill,” says he, “from now on I don’t want that boy of yours to set food on my place.”

Why? Well, says Sam, he pissed in the snow, right in front of Sam’s house.  No harm in that, says Bill.

“No harm!” hollered Sam. “Hell’s fire, he pissed so it spelled Lucy’s name, right there in the snow.”

Well, yeah, the boy shouldn’t have done that, Bill says, but he doesn’t think it’s all that terrible.

“Well, by God, I do!” yelled Sam. “There was two sets of tracks! And besides, don’t you think I know my own daughter’s handwriting?”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.17.25