Ozark Culture, Mountain Music

by Stuart Englert

With a full moon overhead, Ethan Ray, 14, stands in front of the Stone County Courthouse in Mountain View, Ark. (pop. 2,975), singing "Keep on the Sunny Side" accompanied by his mother, Lisa, on guitar and family friend Wayne Choate on acoustic bass.

Across the lawn, Janis Huff of Lonedell, Mo., plays "Golden Slippers" on her hammered dulcimer, while within earshot, another group of musicians performs "I’ll Fly Away," a local gospel favorite.

Night or day, weather permitting, the music of guitars, mandolins, fiddles, banjos and dulcimers drifts through downtown Mountain View. And on weekends, hundreds of spectators gather around the courthouse square to soak up the free, folksy entertainment.

"Everybody in Stone County’s a musician," says James "Rusty" Fraser, publisher of the Stone County Leader. "Most people around here play something."

Mountain View has been known as the "Folk Music Capital of the World" since the 1960s when local musicians first gathered on the courthouse lawn during the Arkansas Folk Festival. In its 44th year, the festival, scheduled April 14 to 16, celebrates the handmade crafts, homespun humor and mountain music of the Ozark people.

The courthouse square isn’t the only place to hear live music in Mountain View. Bluegrass, folk, country and gospel tunes are performed several nights a week at a half-dozen local musical theaters, including the Jimmy Driftwood Barn two miles north of town. Built by Driftwood and friends in 1976, the wooden barn continues the legacy of the Stone County native who wrote the 1959 hit songs "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Tennessee Stud."

Glen Branscum, 77, and his wife, Nellie, 64, host admission-free variety shows at the barn each Friday and Sunday evening, carrying on the family friendly entertainment favored by Driftwood. "What Jimmy wanted and played was as good as you could get, so that’s the reason we do it that way," Branscum says.

Driftwood, who died in 1998, was instrumental in bringing national attention to old-time music and promoting establishment of the Ozark Folk Center, which opened a few miles north of town in 1973.

The center’s mission is to preserve and perpetuate the cultural heritage of the self-reliant people who settled the uplands of Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma between 1820 and 1920. Isolated by rugged terrain, people in the Ozarks used ingenuity and whatever materials were available to make life easier and more enjoyable, whether it was creating a patchwork quilt with leftover pieces of fabric or fashioning a musical instrument from a gourd grown in their garden.

"They were the original recyclers," says Kay Thomas, who retired as crafts director at the Ozark Folk Center in 2004. "They used everything they had and left little to waste."

Located in an 800-acre state park, the center offers heritage craft and music workshops from March to October as well as demonstrations of basket and broom making, pottery and woodworking, candle and soap making, wool spinning and weaving and other pioneer skills.

"There’s a lot of hand work in these knives," says Jack Thomas, 61, the center’s knife maker and gunsmith, smoothing a steel blade with a piece of sandpaper. "It’s not a sitting-down job."

In the adjoining blacksmith shop, Caleb Barksdale, 17, works a piece of metal clamped in a vice, practicing a trade that’s been passed down from generation to generation in the Ozarks. "If you learn some of these skills, you don’t have to have someone else do it for you," says Barksdale, while his sister, Brook, 22, attends a fiddle workshop at the center.

Later in the evening, the Barksdale siblings, from nearby Calico Rock, Ark. (pop. 991), play guitar and fiddle at the Stone County Courthouse alongside dozens of other musicians performing—and selling—the music of the Ozarks. The toads and crickets sing along.

"This is our last song," Ethan Ray hollers to the crowd seated in lawn chairs, "so if you want a CD, you better come and get it now while supplies last."

Visit www.ozarkgetaways.com or call (870) 269-8068 for more information.

Stuart Englert is American Profile's Senior Editor.

first appeared: 4/2/2006