Pissing in the snow and other Ozark folktales

How can you not love a book called 'Pissing in the Snow?' The book presents a wide variety of Ozark folktales that give light to the rich culture from which they came.

This could have been a fun little book of bawdy Ozark folktales, assembled by Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph. But someone got hold of it and added comments ("annotations") at the end of each story, explaining the "true" origins of each story, and comparing it to other stories across the ages. It

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took something amusing and turned it into serious study. I tried to not read the annotations, but I couldn't, and they really detracted from some of the stories.

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This is an odd little book, essentially a collection of bawdy stories collected by folklorist Vance Randolph but never included in the scholarly collections because of the subject matter.

It's all dressed up with serious introductions, footnotes, and references, but at its heart (and elsewhere),

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it's a collection of naughty tales about traveling salesmen, farmers' daughters, dim-witted farm boys, libertine preachers, sexually frustrated widows, brothels, barrooms, and bedrooms, and the misadventures that occur therein. Some of the stories may be familiar -- in fact, my dad's favorite blue joke is in there -- and the afterwords following most of the tales trace them back in time, some as far as the middle ages.

Indeed, the ultimate moral may be that there's no such thing as a new dirty joke, so if you're in the mood for a retelling of some blue classics, this is an amusing way to spend an evening.

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