Missouri Folklore Society

In literature, the movement that would come to be known as "local color" and the political disposition known as populism worked together to prosper an interest in what Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for, long ago, in a genuinely American literary culture: rejecting "the courtly muses of Europe" in favor of "the near, the low, the common."

The students of the English Club conceived of what would now be called a project in fieldwork and salvage ethnography; aware that sociological trends did not favor the preservation of materials of limited distribution and held in oral tradition, they proposed to gather the lore of Missouri into bound volumes, as an archive for future researchers.

The collection project was an item of discussion at the 1905 meeting of the Modern Language Society in Chicago, where the fact that ancient ballads continued to be sung in rural areas was received as something of a revelation, though one to which the "popular antiquities" orientation of incipient folklore studies was favorably disposed.

Belden published results of his students’ researches in Modern Philology and the Journal of American Folklore, and the club had achieved sufficient stability as to establish itself officially on December 15, 1906.

The innovations here are numerous: the recognition of fieldwork as an academic enterprise, the development of collection and archiving protocols, and the participation of undergraduates in original research (a novelty which lies behind such projects as the Foxfire books, Bittersweet and The Chariton Collector).

As a result of a combination of factors, including disappointment over the derailment of the organization's signature project, but perhaps primarily because of a failure of continuity in leadership and philosophy, the society "fell into a coma in 1920 from which it has not recovered.

The basic frameworks for the annual Missouri Folklore Society Journal (long edited by Donald Lance) and the statewide meeting, to be held each year in a different part of the state were established.