Max Franklin Hunter[1] (July 2, 1921 – November 6, 1999) was an American folklorist who, while working as a travelling salesman, compiled an archive of nearly 1,600 folk songs from the Ozarks region of the southern United States between 1956 and 1976.

[3] At the Ozark Folk Festival circa 1956, he met folklorists Vance Randolph and Mary Celestia Parler, who saw his potential as a collector and shared some basic archiving skills.

[3] Over his career, he recorded hundreds of singers, including Almeda Riddle, Ollie Gilbert, Fred High, May Kennedy McCord, Raymond Sanders, Jimmy Driftwood, and others who were active in the American folk music revival movement.

[4] Hunter was the last of the major Ozark ballad collectors,[3] and defied the conventional wisdom of archivists at the time, who thought that such oral traditions had already been fully documented.

[6] In 1972, he gave his audio tapes to the Springfield-Greene County Library, ignoring the advice of friends who urged him to give them to an academic institution where he worried the songs would get buried.