Capitalizing on the booming postwar travel and tourism market, he reached an ever-expanding national audience with Rayburn’s Ozark Guide, which eventually grew to a fat eighty pages in length. Though the chamber of commerce and town leaders shot down his grand vision of “Pioneer Village”—a sort of nineteenth-century Ozarks version of Colonial Williamsburg—Rayburn had otherwise found his elusive arcadia and the financial security to enjoy it. He would spend the rest of his life in Eureka Springs, the only time in his rambling adult existence that he tarried more than half a dozen years in one place. Penning colorful stories of the backwoods, peddling real estate, running a bookshop, and guiding tours of his unique new hometown, Rayburn invited readers to come experience the fleeting old days in the Ozarks. At the center of an eclectic coterie of writers, artists, and Ozarks enthusiasts, he coordinated the annual Ozark Folk Festival and played a leading role in the creation of the Arkansas Folklore Society. Rayburn’s years of boosterism and promotion brought him recognition in the 1950s, including a distinguished service award from the Ozark Playgrounds Association and the honorary titles of Arkansas Traveler and Ambassador of Arkansas from governor Orval Faubus. And the prolific Rayburn continued to find time for writing outside his work on the magazine, finishing his autobiography and a history of Eureka Springs, all while amassing a forty-foot-long shelf of notes and files that he called the Ozark Folk Encyclopedia.11
He was still dutifully adding to this collection when he died at the age of sixty-nine on October 30, 1960. At the time of his death, Otto Ernest Rayburn had certainly made himself one of the leading voices of the Ozarks, contributing more to the understanding—and mythologizing—of the region than anyone not named Vance Randolph. No one did more to promote the Ozarks to tourists, readers, and home seekers, and no one—not even Randolph—developed a deeper admiration for the region and its people. Per his wishes, the Ozark Folk Encyclopedia—which Rayburn considered his “major contribution to culture and to the Ozarks”—eventually found its way to the special collections of the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville. It remains at the university today, as does the most complete collection of surviving issues of Rayburn’s magazines. For researchers, the Ozark Folk Encyclopedia is an amazing grab bag of all things Ozarks, as esoteric as it is encyclopedic. Some six decades since his death, however, Rayburn’s most enduring and accessible contribution to his adopted region is Ozark Country.12
Ozark Country was the third nonfiction book on the region released to a national audience in the last half of 1941. Rayburn’s romantic spirit matched that of Marguerite Lyon, whose Take to the Hills was the first of the trio to emerge. A copywriter for a Chicago advertising agency, Lyon and her husband had bought a farm near Mountain View, Missouri, during the Depression. While Mr. Lyon went back to the land fulltime, Marge spent weekends and holidays in rural southern Missouri and began writing about the couple’s experiences and colorful neighbors in “Marge of Sunrise Mountain Farm” features for the Chicago Tribune in 1939. Largely made up of these features, Lyon’s Take to the Hills proved a hit with its target audience: city folk with a nostalgic jonesing for an imagined, idealized rural life.
The book published between the release of Take to the Hills and Ozark Country, however, set a very different tone. Despite its romantic title, Yesterday Today was the yin to Ozark Country’s yang. The author, Catherine S. Barker, was an educated newcomer to the region who accompanied her academician husband to northern Arkansas and then found herself traveling backroads through the hills and hollers of the Ozarks as a New Deal social worker. Spending her time with the region’s most destitute and desperate residents, her account of the Ozarks was a critical one, more condemnatory than celebratory.
Rayburn was well aware of the side of Ozark life that the chambers of commerce and boosters generally ignored—unsanitary homes with no outhouses or wells, illnesses resulting from insufficient diets, substandard schools, grinding poverty—all things chronicled by Barker. But it wasn’t in his nature to dwell on such negatives. After all, it was his romantic attachment to a fictionalized Ozarks that lured him to the region. He remained committed to perpetuating this idealized and nostalgic image of his adopted home throughout his thirty-five years of chronicling the Ozarks. This commitment was nowhere on better display than in Ozark Country, which, like Lyon’s book, contained a number of anecdotes and stories previously published as newspaper features.13
Reinforcing his sepia-toned vision of the Ozarks, Rayburn introduces readers to his region through the people and customs of fictional Woodville, Missouri, a whitewashed (and seemingly whites-only) utopian composite of the many small towns and rural places he had called home. His decision to introduce each chapter with a Woodville vignette reflects the seamless melding of truth and fiction, reality and legend, in Rayburn’s Ozarks. “It is not my business to draw the line between fact and fallacy,” he claims in Ozark Country, and he made good on the promise. The book contains snippets of history—albeit history riddled with inaccuracies—but its primary focus is the subject of its series, folkways. Consequently, Rayburn covers much of the same ground cultivated by Randolph ten years earlier in The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society. He does so, however, without Randolph’s fascination with the darker, seamier side of their adopted region or his more consciously anthropological approach. Rayburn also lacks Randolph’s flair for sophisticated yet accessible wordsmanship that better endures the ravages of time and changes in taste. Modern readers will likely struggle through Rayburn’s slavish recreations of thick Ozarks dialect and repeated references to the “redman” and “redskins,” among other terms now considered offensive. The supposedly pure northern European racial heritage celebrated in the book’s second chapter serves as another reminder that Ozark Country and its author were products of a less inclusive era.
Rayburn’s style blended elements of folklore, travel writing, and regional boosterism—“readable Americana” was the politely dismissive phrase one reviewer employed. Looking back at Ozark Country sixteen years after its publication, Rayburn admitted to writing the book in “the spirit of romanticism.” “I was looking at the Ozarks through rose colored glasses,” he recalled. “I saw only what I wanted to see.”14 What Rayburn saw was an Ozarks where country folk carried the undiluted blood of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors and spoke a dialect little changed in more than three centuries, a land of old-timey mountain music, granny women, tall tales, and superstitions. In Rayburn’s Ozarks it was still worthwhile to talk about black bears, water-powered gristmills, and backroom spinning wheels, even if they were rarer than airports by midcentury.
Ozark Country had the misfortune of being released at the moment the Year of the Ozarks was transformed into the year the United States entered World War II. With one exception, Rayburn’s book received little national promotion from reviewers—but that exception was a big one. On January 18, 1942, the New York Times gave Ozark Country full-page treatment on the front page of its book review section. Under the headline “The Ozarks, Deep in America,” reviewer R. L. Duffus admitted that “if you are looking for folkways you can hardly do better than turn to the Ozarks.” Given the recent barrage of Ozark folksiness in books and popular culture, the statement was probably more a message of surrender at that point. Duffus, a middle-aged, Stanford-educated New Englander with a list of erudite books to his credit, was polite, even though he recognized Ozark Country for the overwrought celebration that it was. “Page Messrs. Rousseau and Chateaubriand!” he declared after quoting one particularly romantic passage lauding the unspoiled solitude of the hill people. Beneath the placid surface of Rayburn’s storybook Ozarks, Duffus sensed a more realistic and less idealized existence, especially for one half of the population. “This seems to be a man’s world,” the reviewer noted of an account slanted heavily toward the male perspective. “One suspects a good many wives are overworked in this Ozark Arcadia. The men do the hunting and fishing—it is, indeed, their duty. The women, as is also t
heir duty, cook, clean house, sew and look after the children.” All things considered, Duffus found Rayburn’s Ozarks too good to be true. “The present reviewer doesn’t for a moment believe that the Ozarks are as picturesque and as Arcadian as Mr. Rayburn says they are,” he concluded. “A good part of the Arcadia is in Mr. Rayburn’s head. But that is the way with most Arcadias, and the one Mr. Rayburn describes is a pleasant one to visit.” Duffus may have written his review with one decidedly arched brow, but he was not immune to the guileless charms of a veteran promoter. “Maybe we wouldn’t like to live in the Ozarks,” he confessed, “but it is agreeable to visit them in Mr. Rayburn’s company. Mr. Rayburn is just ingenuous enough, by art or artlessness, to be the best of guides.”15
Indeed he was, and more than a few people were guided to and through the Ozarks by Rayburn’s magazines or Ozark Country. Despite initially disappointing sales, by the time Rayburn self-published his autobiographical Forty Years in the Ozarks in 1957, Ozark Country was in its fourth printing. More than a few readers must have agreed with Duffus’s recommendation of the book as a pleasant diversion to “take one’s mind off the war.”16 In the postwar years, Ozark Country continued to appeal to people who believed the modern world was wiping out an existence that once was comforting and nourishing, a style of life more tranquil than volatile, more dogtrot than rat race. The passage of time continuously replenishes this population, each generation convinced that something fundamental, something vital to humanity’s understanding of itself, withers as the physical and cultural markers of its youth pass from the scene. All of us reach this understanding if given enough time. Rayburn simply got there quicker than most. He was one of those rare souls born with a powerful sense of loss, even before losing a thing. In his bones he knew the Ozarks flickered with the embers of a lost world. The arcadia in his mind fanned those embers into a roaring Ozark Country.
The romanticism and primitivism that motivated Rayburn were very much in line with the spirit flowing through most other Ozarks works of the age and the fascination with the region in general. Whether outsiders like Rayburn, Randolph, and Lyon, or natives like Broadfoot and Murphy, the chroniclers of the Ozarks shared with other seekers of anachronism a primitivist streak, a romantic’s desire to discover in a rural and marginal region the survival of an authentic premodernism. For the traditionalist disillusioned with the seeming failure of America’s brand of modernism, the Ozarks was about projection and protection. It was a region upon which the hopes and desires of disenchanted observers could be projected, a place whose allegedly premodern residents should be protected against the harmful and irreversible effects of the modernizing world.
The Ozarks had come of age by 1941, its image fully formed in the American consciousness. It is fitting, then, that a fellow who contributed so much to that regional social construct had the last word on the Ozarks that same year. So, in the inviting spirit of Otto Ernest Rayburn, I welcome you back to an age of fascination with regional distinctiveness. Welcome back to the Year of the Ozarks. Welcome back to Ozark Country.
Brooks Blevins
NOTES
1. Dennis Murphy, Doomed Race (Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance and Company Publishers, 1941), 13; Lennis L. Broadfoot, Pioneers of the Ozarks (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1944).
2. See chapter 3 of Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009); Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 51; Jeffrey Marlett, “Mickey Owen,” https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/mickey-owen/, accessed August 3, 2020.
3. Marguerite Lyon, Take to the Hills: A Chronicle of the Ozarks (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1941); Catherine S. Barker, Yesterday Today: Life in the Ozarks (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1941); Otto Ernest Rayburn, Ozark Country (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1941), 32, 34.
4. Ethel C. Simpson, “Otto Ernest Rayburn,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net, accessed March 13, 2018; “Marionville Collegiate Institute,” www.lostcolleges.com/marionville-college, accessed March 13, 2018; Otto Ernest Rayburn, Forty Years in the Ozarks (Eureka Springs, AR: Ozark Guide Press, 1957), 4, 18–19, 50; Brooks Blevins, Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 142–43. Information on Rayburn’s stay at Baker University courtesy of Baker University archivist Sara DeCaro, via email to Blevins, March 13, 2018. See also Simpson, “Otto Ernest Rayburn, An Early Promoter of the Ozarks,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58 (Summer 1999): 160–179.
5. Rayburn, Forty Years, 7, 28–44.
6. Simpson, “Otto Ernest Rayburn”; Rayburn, Forty Years, 45–51.
7. Rayburn, Forty Years, 52–55.
8. Rayburn, Forty Years, 59–72.
9. Rayburn, Forty Years, 50, 74–79.
10. Rayburn, Forty Years, 79–85.
11. Rayburn, Forty Years, 86–97.
12. Rayburn, Forty Years, 86–97.
13. Rayburn, Forty Years, 8.
14. Edith H. Crowell, “Review of Ozark Country,” Library Journal, November 15, 1941, 999; Rayburn, Forty Years, 8.
15. R. L. Duffus, “The Ozarks, Deep in America,” New York Times, January 18, 1942, 6: 1.
16. Duffus, “Ozarks, Deep,” 6: 1.
EDITOR’S NOTE
To improve the readability of Ozark Country, this reissue includes minor adjustments to formatting and punctuation. It also includes corrections of misspelled words and other small errors contained in the original version, such as incorrectly identified newspaper or book titles. Otherwise, the style and language of the original, including words and phrases considered offensive today, appear as they did in 1941.
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
The characters in the first sketch of each chapter of this book are fictional and do not refer to actual persons, living or dead.
Some parts of this book have appeared in the Arkansas Gazette, the Arkansas Democrat, Ozark Life, Arcadian Magazine, and Arcadian Life. I have drawn upon several books and periodicals for basic historical facts, notably Fred Allsopp’s Folklore of Romantic Arkansas, Vance Randolph’s Ozark Mountain Folks and other works on the Ozarks, and May Kennedy McCord’s “Hillbilly Heartbeats” in the Springfield News and Leader.
I am indebted to innumerable persons for assistance in the folklore research necessary for this work, but I cannot hope to list all their names here. Thanks are due in a large measure also to June Denby, Vance Randolph, and Arthur H. Estabrook for reading first drafts of the manuscript and offering suggestions.
Otto Ernest Rayburn
Caddo Gap, Arkansas
CHAPTER I
A World Apart
Loafer’s Glory
Woodville is an Ozark community nestled in the elbow of contentment. A quarter of a century ago, this backhill village had no roads for motor convenience, and no inclination among its citizens to build them. The utopian complexion of the neighborhood was freckled with squatty cabins and scarred with broken-down rail fences. The atmosphere of the place was charged with wholesome laziness and tranquil indifference. Beyond the hills, a machine age was being ushered in and the commercial world throbbed with expectancy. But all was quiet as a stark calm at Woodville in the Missouri Ozarks. There was no dominant urge to chase industrial phantoms, no quest for sophisticated culture. Life moved along in its commonplace way with the customs of the fathers acceptable to the children, even to the fourth generation. The hillsman had learned to polish his jewels of consistency with arcadian simplicity and was satisfied with things as he found them.
I sat on the counter in Tart Tuttle’s general store satisfied with life. The open prune box by my side offered the maximum of opportunity and I helped myself. Lazily I ate the fruit and flipped the seeds at the old cat drowsing contentedly on a sack of dried apples by the salt barrel. Tart was occupied with reading the postal cards that had arrived on the
twice-a-week mail. He gave me and the prunes no attention at all. What matter a few prunes, thought the merchant, if the goodwill of a customer is retained.
It was high noon in the quiet hills. Within an hour or two the “store-porch jury” would assemble to sprawl in the welcome shade, discuss current topics, pass judgment, and whittle time into nothingness. I had arrived at the store an hour early to read my mail before the crowd gathered. My appetite for prunes satisfied, I stretched myself the full length of the counter and watched a mouse inspect the butter tub and shy away. Surely, I thought, this is the ideal place to loiter and recuperate, to harness life’s forces against evil days that follow civilization’s excesses. It was the laziest place I had found in the drowsy Ozarks since leaving my home in a neighboring state and burning the bridges behind me.
Tuttle’s store hung on the brow of a knoll in a little valley that bordered a tumbling river. The ramshackle building was shaded by a large tree known in the neighborhood as the Old Drunk Walnut. Many years before a pioneer had built a distillery by the tree and dumped the mash waste out the door. The effect of the seepage was miraculous. The tree got hilariously drunk and never sobered up. The leaves on the tipsy limbs curled like a hillbilly’s trigger finger. But the old walnut appeared to be endowed with good nature and did not grow any nuts to drop on loafers’ heads. It seemed to wink approval at everything we said and did.
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