The old, established community, with its folk code, its superstitions, its prejudices, imaginations, etc., in direct opposition to the new or modern world of reality and progress, can hardly survive. A man from this community sells his body to some fairly modern doctors, and from then on lives in fear and cowardice – continually weighing his fate after death, including the idea of resurrection, against the moral obligation of his bargain – and after his death becomes the community hero. –Ruth Ann Musick-summarizing theme of Hell’s Holler

Hell’s Holler was the 1943 University of Iowa doctoral dissertation of Ruth Ann Musick, who became one of the country’s premiere folklorists during the mid-twentieth century, founding the West Virginia Folklore Journal and managing that state’s Folklore Center. Set in the rural Northeast Missouri area where she grew up, Hell’s Holler recounts ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of George and Mary Moore, their children, parents, and neighbors. It features the folklore, customs, songs, dances, and superstitions of the region, and especially attends to questions about medicine and health prompted by Musick’s interest in the nearby College of Osteopathic Medicine. This publication includes dozens of sketches by the author’s brother, Archie Musick, who went on to become a well known mid-century artist–a friend and protege of Thomas Hart Benton, and a colleague of Jackson Pollack.

The novel is accompanied by two Prefaces and an Afterword. The first preface, by Missouri Folklore Society’s Adam Davis, deals mainly with historical contexts, folkloric contents, and the training in folklore collecting which helped Musick create the characters and world of Hell’s Holler. The second, by artist Pat Musick–niece of the author and daughter of the artist–foregrounds the extraordinarily talented family which produced Ruth Ann and Archie. Pat Musick relies on a trove of letters and journals, drafts and synopses, to understand the attitudes, anxieties, and exaggerations which inhabit Hell’s Holler, and in some cases, the real-life models for characters. The Afterword is by Judy Prozzillo Byers, student, folklorist, friend, and biographer of the author. As director of the West Virginia Folklore Center at the university where Musick taught for thirty years, Byers accents the ways in which the novel reveals its author’s values. She reads Hell’s Holler as a classic example of how Musick fought for underdogs–in this case, uneducated farmers whose superstitions nourished and grounded them as firmly as their music and church services did.