Waltz the Hall: The American Play Party

Spurgeon has provided the academic world with a superb exampleof how oral history has the power not only to supplement thehistorical and academic record but also to enlarge our understandingof a topic. These days, few know of the esoteric folklore genre,the play party, and those who do might well assume that it hasbeen defunct for several decades. Even nineteenth- to earlytwentieth-century folklorists wrote about it as an old and dyingform of childhood recreation. Vance Randolph wrote some