Customer Reviews

Roll Me in Your Arms Vol. 1: Folksongs and Music (Unprintable Ozark Folksongs and Folklore)

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Vance Randolph and Gershon Legman are the Johnson and Boswell, Lewis and Clark and Will and Ariel Durant of coarse and vulgar humor as a literary subject. Randolph's Pissing in the Snow is the standard popular introductory work on the subject, just as Legman's two volume masterpiece No Laughing Matter sets the standard for deeper historical, semantic and psychological consideration of dirty jokes. Here, Randolph and Legman do for the dirty song (or vulgar version of a standard song) what those works did for the dirty joke, namely provide an exposition of the funny material along with a discussion of its historical context, how the information was collected and some comparisons with other similar treasures. As the other reviewer in this thread noted, the irony of this as a subject of serious study is entertaining in and of itself. While this book is a bit pricey, I will vouch that it is worth every penny and might be the finest thing to come out of Arkansas in the 1990's.

I enjoyed this book so much! The irony of an academic study of something usually ignored drew me to the work, but its bawdy and fascinating content kept me reading all the way to the end. I've heard some of the versions of the hymns and bluegrass songs parodied by the Ozarkians interviewed, but some were totally new and entertaining. Read it and you'll be laughing silently every time you hear the "usual" versions of Casey Jones, Frankie and Johnny, At the Cross, Ida Red, and so many others.