Queen of the Hillbillies: The Writings of May Kennedy McCord

By Patti McCord

May Kennedy McCord, lovingly nicknamed “First Lady of the Ozarks” and “Queen of the Hillbillies,” spent half a century sharing the history, songs, and stories of her native Ozarks through newspaper columns, radio programs, and music festivals. Though her work made her one of the twentieth century’s preeminent folklorists, McCord was first and foremost an entertainer—at one time nearly as renowned as the hills she loved.

Despite the encouragement of her contemporaries, McCord never published a collection of her work. In 1956, Vance Randolph wrote to her, “If you didn’t have such a mental block against writing books, I could show you how to make a book out of extracts from your columns. It would be very little work, and sell like hotcakes. . . . I could write a solemn little introduction, telling the citizens what a fine gal you are! The hell of it is, most of the readers know all about you.” In Queen of the Hillbillies, editors Patti McCord and Kristene Sutliff at last bring together the best of McCord’s published and previously unpublished writings to share her knowledge, humor, and inimitable spirit with a new generation of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781610757669

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Remembering May Kennedy McCord

First Lady of the Ozarks . . . Queen of the Hillbillies

Deep in the Ozark Mountains of the 1880s and ’90s the only roads were Indian trails and the Old Wire Road, which was built to follow the telegraph lines during the Civil War. No hospitals, most medical care provided by country doctors, or by old grannies with local folk treatments. No electricity. Fresh water came from springs and wells. For sustenance, the clear streams and rivers were full of bass and jack salmon, and the woods were full of squirrels, possums, beavers, and wild turkeys. The people themselves were always full of music and stories. Families gathered to play fiddle tunes, sing the old ballads, and tell and retell the old, old stories in the colorful language of people who did not always understand words on paper. Town parties were held in schoolhouses that were then used for church on Sunday, for shoutin’ the old-time Glory Hallelujahs.¹ Square dancin’s and apple peelin’s and spelling bees and horse swappin’s and even revivals were times of entertainment, as was just plain visiting around. Everybody was as good as everybody else, and nobody was looked down on unless they were caught looking down on somebody else—being uppity they called it, and they didn’t tolerate it.

This is the world May Anderson Kennedy McCord grew up in. More accurately, it is the ideal world she remembered and passionately shared with her readers and listeners for decades. The simple life of an Ozarker in the days of her childhood, May once told a reporter, required nothing more than a little cot, a wife and kids, a houn’ dog, a little patch of corn, a pipe to smoke, bread, fat-back and molasses, a little store sweetenin’ now and then, a fiddle, a coon-skin hung over the door—and bliss complete.²

May was born on December 1, 1880, in Carthage, Missouri, and moved with her family to Galena, Missouri, when she was six. Although May proudly recognized Galena as her hometown, making her a daughter of the hills, her family background was not that of the poor, hard-scrabble farmers and other humble people whose lives she would later chronicle. Her educated parents were not originally from the Ozarks and passed on to her somewhat of an outsider’s perspective. Her own education and travel widened her reference for understanding her environment. May was intelligent and attractive, with a sense of humor that endeared her to people, and she had the rare ability to relate to people from all stations in life. She was outgoing and comfortable in the limelight. As her career later developed, these experiences and personal qualities put her in an unusual position as a mediator between the rural Ozarkers she loved, and who loved her, and the academic and professional outsiders who were interested in the culture of the Ozarks.

May had a nation-wide reputation as an authority on American folklore.³ Many worked in this field with differing agendas. May simply told it as she saw it. Her writings and lectures show that she, like many reformers in her time, shared a belief about the basic goodness of ordinary folk, but she showed no interest in changing the lives of common Ozarkers, nor do her writings suggest any effort to steer others toward more rustic Ozarkian values. May was friends with academics and often participated in their seminars, but her writings show her lack of interest in scholarly analysis or interpretation. Her straightforward reporting made her writings and lectures valuable to others who needed an unfil-tered source for their work.

Image: May Kennedy McCord. Courtesy of the Springfield News-Leader.

May Kennedy McCord. Courtesy of the Springfield News-Leader.

May’s father, Jesse Thomas Tom Kennedy, was born in Palestine, Illinois, in 1843, and her mother, Delia Melissa Fike, was born in St. Clair County, Illinois, in 1845. Education was important to both, and they encouraged May’s love of great literature and poetry and helped her develop the language to retell it all. Delia had graduated from the Greenville Female Seminary (now closed) and attended McKendree College, both in St. Clair County. Tom’s educational background is unknown, but May wrote that both of her parents had been teachers. Music was also important in May’s family; according to May, her mother had a lovely singing voice, played a small organ they had at home, and sang many of the old ballads that May would later perform.⁴

May wrote that her parents first moved to Carthage when her father was hired to teach in a local grade school, and he was later an auditor for the Robert Moore Lumber Company. When he developed tuberculosis, Tom was advised to move deeper into the Ozarks, and in 1886 the family settled in Galena, where Tom was a partner with Thomas J. Porter in a general merchandise business. When May was nine, her parents traveled west for a drier climate, for a time leaving May with their friend Aunt Polly Crouch in Dry Creek, a more remote area west of Galena. This was an important time for May’s education about Ozarks heritage; she learned many old ballads and shared the daily life of rural hill people, learning their dialect and absorbing their philosophy and love of the hills.

Later, May went with her mother and two siblings to be with her father in Arizona, where they lived in the Salt River Valley near Phoenix for two years until her father’s death in 1892. After Tom’s death, Delia brought the family back to Galena and soon married Benjamin Yocum, a judge, attorney, and Civil War pensioner. May always spoke warmly about her stepfather.

May went to the little school in Galena and later graduated from Sheldon’s Private College in Aurora, Missouri (now closed). In later years she often said her real education came from people such as Aunt Polly, who knew all the moon signs and how to cure ailments and sang the ballads that told the stories of old times. She embodied the wisdom of the ages that May absorbed as a child—including Aunt Polly’s belief that a lot of people knew things but a heap of what they knew hain’t so.

May loved to participate in the theatrical events held frequently in her small town. She first sang in a public event when she was only six—an old temperance tearjerker, Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now. As told by scholar Robert K. Gilmore, "When she was a girl of sixteen in Galena, the family minister was upset with her title role in The Gypsy’s Daughter. He called at her home after opening night and prayed over her, telling her parents that such a role would cause her to become ‘worldly—may even lead her to be an actress!’ A direr fate would have been hard for the Ozarker to imagine."⁵

May was well known in Galena for swimming her horse across the James River, chestnut hair streaming behind her; rowing a boat like a sailor; shooting the river’s ripples fearlessly in the unsteady birch-bark canoe her stepfather gave her; sitting at the piano, her exceptional memory and singing spirit recreating every ballad she had ever heard. But she also had a philosophical side that sought the solitude of the hills and streams and found joy in the simple pleasures of working in her garden and in her Methodist Church, down on her prayer bones.⁶

May had a brother, Leslie; a sister, Maudeva, who was murdered by a jealous lover at age eighteen; a younger brother who died as a toddler; and a half-sister, Vera Courtney Thomas, her mother’s child from a previous marriage. Vera had a magnificent voice. In 1890, at age twenty-two, she ventured to Paris for voice training and later gained success singing leading roles with the Opéra Comique in Paris, had an opera written for her by Massenet,⁷ and toured with the Metropolitan Opera Company, singing leading roles with Caruso. May and her half-sister did not grow up together—Vera was twelve years older than May and lived with her father in Clinton, Missouri, during her later childhood. Nevertheless, May often spoke of her half-sister’s talent and her adventurous spirit that enabled her to travel abroad and pursue an ambitious career.

The 1900 census found nineteen-year-old May still living at home in Galena and teaching music part time.⁸ The following year she decided it was time to do something with her future and set out for St. Louis, where she landed an office job as a stenographer that paid ten dollars per week. Her main weekly expense was four dollars for room, board, and a practice piano.⁹ Her brother, Leslie, also struck out on his own at about this same time and went to California, where he found employment with the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light.

May returned to Galena for a Christmas visit in 1902, and on January 3, 1903, married her childhood sweetheart Charles C. McCord, son of the town doctor. In about 1908 they moved to St. Louis but returned to Galena by 1914 when the Shapleigh Hardware Company of St. Louis hired Charles as their salesman for the Ozarks area. Back in Galena, Charles would pick up a horse and wagon on Monday mornings and travel through southern Missouri and northern Arkansas to sell his wares, leaving May alone in Galena. They lived only a couple blocks from the town square, and May loved being in the center of the community. While Charles was away, May spent her time with their three children: Charles Jr., born in 1903; Maudeva, born in 1905; and Leslie, born in 1913. May was active organizing social activities, plays, Women’s Christian Temperance Union events, singing contests, and the like. She often traveled with Dr. McCord in his horse and buggy to help with a birth or see an ill backcountry patient. The country people generally trusted old grannies more than they did doctors, and it was during these trips that May learned many old remedies.

In 1918 the Shapleigh Hardware Company named Charles director of sales for the Springfield area, and the family moved from Galena to Springfield. May later wrote, When we were forced to move almost with a club, because it is my better half’s trade territory (he’s one of those ‘drummers,’ you know) I thought my heart would die within me. Almost would I rather have been taken out on the hill of my little hometown and planted beside my beloved ones. No one knows what I experienced. But here I have made my friends and pitched my tent and loosed my shoes and found my sky. I love it.¹⁰

Charles’s new position continued to require frequent travel. With extra time now available, May joined the Springfield Music Club, the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union chapter, the Grace Methodist Church, and several local writers’ groups. Soon she began playing piano accompaniment for other musicians, speaking about the hill country, and singing ballads at various meetings, such as ladies’ social clubs, missionary societies, and veterans’ and church groups. She even played a role in a musical comedy put on by the Shrine Patrol Association in the auditorium of Springfield’s Abou Ben Adhem Shrine Mosque.

May had developed an interest in writing early in her life. As a child she wrote poetry but hid it because she thought her schoolmates would make fun of it as proof of her feeble mind. By the early 1920s, May’s participation in local activities was making her known in the community. Thomas Nickel, a writer for a Springfield newspaper, sought May out from her literary seclusion and asked her to write a silly poem for his Midget Magazine. He printed her poem Alarming in July 1924.¹¹ This small success spurred May’s interest in writing, and when she saw a notice in the Sample Case, her husband’s trade magazine, soliciting submissions, she sent in a story. In December 1925, they printed her first story, The Buryin’.¹² Although this story was fictional, her later writings were mostly nonfiction or at least based on actual events. She wrote using the dialect of the deep hills of the Ozarks.

By the 1930s May’s writing career was well underway. In addition to her regular contributions to friend Otto Ernest Rayburn’s Ozark Life and Arcadian Magazine, she was recruited by the Springfield News and Leader to write her weekly column, Hillbilly Heartbeats, beginning October 23, 1932. She moved to the Springfield Daily News on April 1, 1938, and wrote three columns each week through July 25,