Ballad Hunting with Max Hunter
Song hunters were usually ethnomusicologists with academic support who ventured deep into the heartland of one nation or another where repositories of folk traditions still resided. By contrast, Max Hunter, a traveling salesman with little formal education, became an important collector of Ozark ballads, recording hundreds of traditional songs as sung by some 200 inhabitants of the region.
Folklorist Sarah Jane Nelson stumbled across one of Hunter’s recordings on the internet, an emotionally urgent performance by a Missourian, Krisanne Parker, of “Careless Love.” Nelson embarked on a cross-country journey seeking out the story of Hunter, a song collector who briefly intersected the limelight before fading into obscurity and death. He was the amateur Alan Lomax of his region, “a man of down-to-earth temperament and sharp observational skill,” unwilling to romanticize Ozark folk culture but fascinated with preserving the music as it morphed under the pressure of social change and commercialism.
