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.[2][3][4]
Life and career
Hunter was born on July 2, 1921, to a family with deep roots in the Ozarks.[3] He grew up in Springfield, Missouri, attending Baptist and Methodist church services and singing with his family.[3] He married Virginia Mercer in 1939 and started working for her father as a refrigeratorsalesman.[3]
In 1952, he began working for the John Rhodes Refrigeration Supply Company, traveling on a 150-mile circuit through the Ozarks.[3] During his travels, he began using a tape recorder to record songs from people he met.[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]
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.[5] His archival philosophy was to make absolutely no changes to the songs he collected, even to correct obvious errors.[6]