Mary Celestia Parler was born in 1904, in Wedgefield, South Carolina. She came to University of Arkansas in 1948 as an associate professor of English, specializing in the works of Chaucer. In 1949, she participated in the formation of the Arkansas Folklore Society with John Gould Fletcher and Vance Randolph, whom she later married. Also that year she developed the university's curriculum for Arkansas folklore and became the director of the University of Arkansas Folklore Research Project. During the next fifteen years, she along with her students amassed a collection of over 3,000 audio recordings of folksong and tales. Aside from the audio collection, now known as the Mary Celestia Parler Ozark Folksong Collection, she also produced twelve volumes of adjectival comparisons, proverbs, riddles, beliefs and superstitions, and ballads taken from over sixty-thousand note cards which she collected from her students during her twenty-six year career at the university. She also published a compilation entitled Arkansas Ballet Book, taken from songs found in the folksong collection in 1963.