The Missouri Folklore Society

The Missouri Folklore Society was organized December 15, 1906, "to encourage the collection, preservation and study of folklore in the widest sense, including customs, institutions, beliefs, signs, legends, language, literature, musical arts, and folk arts and crafts of all ethnic groups throughout the State of Missouri."

The roots of MFS go back to a meeting held in the offices of the English Department at the University of Missouri at the turn of the twentieth century. The "Writer’s Club" expressed interest in "folksongs and literary material to be found in Missouri," as reported in the M.S.U. Independent on March 6, 1903. The State Historical Society of Missouri had recently opened its library in what is now Jesse Hall, and the cultural moment had arrived for the development of a new academic field which would blend the materials and methods of many traditional disciplines – philology, literature and history -- as well as connecting to the newer fields of sociology and anthropology. 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, and probably feeling, as some Midwestern students perhaps continue to do, that their own culture hardly qualified as such in the eyes of more prestigious institutions on the Eastern seaboard, they proposed to gather the lore of Missouri into bound volumes, as an archive for future researchers. This collection project, with leadership from the English Club’s faculty sponsor, Henry Marvin Belden and its secretary-treasurer, Maude Williams, would form the basis for the Society’s single most-cited work, Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folklore Society, published in 1940 (second edition, 1955; reprinted 1966 and 1973).

...
Wikipedia