A dark, handsome youth, whom I later learned to know as John Denby, also took an interest in Woodville’s dream girl. He was a strapping fellow from the Bull Creek neighborhood, hill-bred but graceful, and it looked as though anything might happen if he and Wade should tangle. But we were locked in the maze of “Old Dan Tucker” at the moment.
Old Dan Tucker is a fine old man,
Washed his face in a fryin’ pan,
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,
An’ died with th’ toothache in his heel.
Away, away for old Dan Tucker,
He’s too late t’ get his supper;
Supper’s over, breakfast a-cookin’,
Old Dan Tucker standin’ a-lookin’.
Gaily sang the crowd of husky youths and buxom maidens as they followed the turns and twists of the old party game. Ludie’s mother looked on with approval as her charming daughter bowed and swung gracefully in turn. It was a high moment in the social life of the community; old and young forgot dull care and joined in the happy rhythm of the song.
All went well until the “cheating” started in “Pig in the Parlor.” Young Denby beat Wade’s time by a margin and a look passed between them that was not in harmony with the festive occasion. It was a mere spark of passion’s fire, but with power to flame and destroy. That night, after Spillman had carried Ludie home on his horse, there was a meeting of the young men at the crossroads near the Devil’s Eyebrow. Hot words were exchanged and a fight followed. That was the beginning of a period of community warfare which cast a long shadow over Woodville and the adjacent country for several months. It led to battle royal in which friends and relatives took part. Luckily, there were no casualties, but bitter hate had come to poison the heart of this arcadian land, and an actual feud between the Spillman and Denby clans was imminent.
Then came the excitement of our entry into the great World War and the lesser struggle was forgotten. Both Wade and John were drafted into the army during the first months of the war, and went to France. Denby returned the next year, shell-shocked—a total physical and mental wreck. Spillman was listed as missing in the Meuse–Argonne offensive and, at the end of the war, his machine-gun outfit returned without him.
Ludie did not marry although her chances were legion. Spring came to the hills with its lavish spread of beauty. Summer returned with its mild zephyrs carrying fragrance and memories. Winter’s loneliness iced her features, but left her heart warm with expectancy. But Wade Spillman failed to make his appearance.
Five years after the war closed, I revisited the Woodville community and spent a week fishing on the river near the Evans mill. Ludie was a woman now, possessed with the quiet dignity of her people. She had retained much of her youthful beauty even while stepping in the lonely treadmill that life had bequeathed her. For hours at a time she would stand by the signal oak, looking longingly into the valley that leads to the level land. “He will come, he must come,” she would sob as she rekindled the fire of hope which time had never quenched.
Twenty-three years have passed since the World War and the Ozark Country has taken on many modern improvements. The old ferry on White River has been eliminated and a steel bridge now spans the stream. Graveled highways have been constructed to serve practically the entire county. Tart Tuttle has put in a filling station adjoining his store and is thinking of opening a tourist camp. The old log schoolhouse at Bug Tussle has been torn down and the district consolidated with the school at the county seat. Millie Adams is the mother of five boys with no time to paint her face or curl her hair. Drusilla Bullock has married a hard-shell preacher and lost her giggle. John Denby sleeps in the Antioch Cemetery on Paw-Paw Ridge. But Ludie Evans, now a woman of middle age, remains true to the sweetheart of her youth. Her constancy is unshaken.
Economic Drift
Folklore, formerly known by the awkward name “popular antiquities,” is concerned with what might be called the organic age. This epoch began long before the dawn of history seven thousand years ago. Primitive man showed shrewdness in selecting and taming animals best adapted to domestic use, and plants which responded best to cultivation. Science has been unable to find wild plants comparable in value to the staple varieties such as wheat, oats, rye, and rice—plants selected and tamed by man in prehistoric times. And the same may be said of animals. Long before the invention of written language, the dog, horse, cow, sheep, and goat had been domesticated. But in the inorganic world, in fields of physics and chemistry, ancient man did not explore. The adventure with molecules and atoms was reserved for the historic age. Steam and electricity, and all their modernistic trappings, are products of the machine age. Folklore is part and parcel of pastoral life. With the coming of science, it folds its tent and sulks away.
When social workers first entered the Ozarks a few years ago and made surveys of rural condition they found the natives, for the most part, satisfied with things as they existed. “Leave us alone and we will scrape up a living some way,” was the answer given when relief was offered. Any assistance bordering on charity was spurned except by the class recognized as social deadwood. The average hillsman craved neither work nor luxuries. His fierce pride resented being told what to do and how to do it. His greatest wish was to be left alone.
The social workers soon realized that instinctive caution is deeply seated in the hillsman’s nature. It is an accredited folkway to outwit changing conditions cautiously like a cat playing with a mouse. Belief and practice in the backhills may have strange imprints of inconsistency. A man may jokingly refer to some household superstition, but you don’t find him burning sassafras wood in the fireplace or ignoring a chain letter. His creed may be as antique as his walnut furniture but he clings to it like a tenderfoot riding a raft.
This inconsistency in behavior is probably responsible for the apparent break in the traditional morale of the hillsman in recent years. He saw the handwriting on the wall and realized that his way of life must go. He decided to crush pride with the heel of necessity and accept government aid. He adjusted his logic as best he could and tried to save face by accepting employment on federal projects. He had come to the end of his primitive trail of freedom, and necessity forced him onto the regimented high road.
The Ozarks without the independent spirit of the hillsman will be as drab as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with Juliet left out. But it is useless to butt heads against the wall of the inevitable. The economic drift is toward regimentation and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put the old freedom into the hills again. The very thing the hillsman feared ten years ago is rapidly coming to pass. Perhaps the Ozarker is in the same position as the stranger who stopped at a mountain cabin to inquire for the location of a hillbilly’s still. The wildcatter’s son offered to direct the man to the still for a quarter, but asked payment in advance. “I’ll pay you when I get back,” said the stranger. “But,” said the boy, “you ain’t comin’ back.”
The following agencies now render aid to farmers in the hill country: Civilian Conservation Corps, Soil Conservation Service, Farm Security Administration, National Youth Administration, Vocational Agriculture, Farm Credit Bureau, Protective Credit Association, and the National Forestry Service. These agencies do not overlap and each has its place in modernized rural life. It has taken several years to prove to Ozark farmers that these agencies are at their disposal to aid them in keeping the soil that the soil may keep them.
The social workers say that during the Depression, especially from 1930 to 1933, conditions in some parts of the Ozarks were pitiful, but that in the last few years the government agencies have penetrated each rural community and that the economic level has been greatly raised. They hold that many of the people living in the underprivileged sections will always have to be helped by someone: their neighbors, the community, the state, or the federal government. At present they are being assisted by the United States government through employment on projects of the Works Progress Administration or by
direct relief.
The Ozarkian desire for freedom still lives in the hearts of thousands of the people and I believe this feeling will continue as long as the blood stays pure Ozarkian. But the machine age has brought a new order of life to the backhills and the Elizabethan remnants are in the melting pot. No one knows what the outcome will be.
NOTES TO THE TEXT
The following notes, all written by the editor of this reissue, are not intended as an exhaustive annotation. They are meant to clarify the meaning of obscure vernacular words and phrases, to provide historical context or correction, and to suggest further reading on certain subjects that have been submitted to scholarly examination since the first publication of this book.
CHAPTER I
1. Anyone who writes about the Ozarks must settle on a definition of the region. In Ozark Country Rayburn uses what might be called a broad cultural definition of the Ozarks, albeit one that quickly fell out of use in the years after the book’s publication. Geographers continue to classify both the Ozarks and the Ouachitas as parts of the US Interior Highlands, but most scholarly studies concentrate on one region or the other. It was only in the early twentieth century that professional geographers such as Curtis Fletcher Marbut and Carl O. Sauer began differentiating between the geologically distinct Ouachita Mountains south of the Arkansas River and the Ozark Uplift north of the river. But the more widely recognized “Ozark” label continued to be applied to some places south of the Arkansas River. Some promotional materials for Hot Springs, Arkansas, continued to advertise the resort town’s location in the Ozarks into the post–World War I era. The Ozark National Forest still contains a section, the Mount Magazine District, that is located south of the Arkansas. Like Rayburn, folklorist Vance Randolph also used examples from both the Ouachitas and the Ozarks in his early books, but the practice mostly disappeared after World War II. See Marbut, Soil Reconnaissance of the Ozark Region of Missouri and Arkansas (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1914) and Sauer, Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri (New York: Greenwood Press, [1920] 1968).
2. There have been almost as many explanations for the etymology of the word “Ozarks” as there have been chroniclers of the region. The most widely accepted explanation today suggests that the regional term is related to the roots of the word Arkansas. French explorers of the Mississippi Valley adopted the Illini word for the Native Americans now known as the Quapaw, calling them the “Arcansas.” At the Arkansas Post in the eighteenth century, French officials began signing their letters with the abbreviated aux arc or aux arcs, meaning “at the land of the Arkansas.” This new geographical designator gradually made its way up the Arkansas and White Rivers, and British and English-speaking American settlers anglicized it as Ozark or Ozarks. Lynn Morrow, “Ozark/Ozarks: Establishing a Regional Term,” White River Valley Historical Quarterly 36 (Fall 1996): 4, 5.
3. The most commonly accepted explanation for the etymology of the word “Ouachita” is quite similar to Rayburn’s final example. According to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, “the Ouachita name came from the French spelling of the Indian word washita, meaning ‘good hunting ground.’” Shayne R. Cole and Richard A. Marston, “Ouachita Mountains,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc.php?entry=OU001.
4. Though still treasured by many, the account of Schoolcraft’s journey is not as rare as it was in Rayburn’s day. See Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks: Schoolcraft’s Ozark Journal, 1818–1819, introduction, maps, and appendix by Milton D. Rafferty (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996). See also Schoolcraft, A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri (New York: Charles Wiley & Co., 1819).
5. For an updated and more accurate rendition of this story, see Lynn Morrow, “The Yocum Silver Dollar,” White River Valley Historical Quarterly 8 (Spring 1985): 3–10.
6. Basic information on most of the people Rayburn mentions can easily be found in online encyclopedias, including Wikipedia. Exceptions are Nancy Clemens, May Kennedy McCord, Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey, and “Mirandy.” Nancy Clemens was one of several pen names used by Ozarks native Fern Nance (1910–2003), a one-time Springfield, Missouri, reporter who published a number of books and magazine articles in the 1930s. As Fern Shumate, she returned to regional prominence in the 1980s as a regular columnist in the Ozarks Mountaineer magazine. May Kennedy McCord (1880–1979), the self-styled “Queen of the Hillbillies,” was a southwestern Missouri native who became a noted newspaper columnist, radio personality, and amateur folklorist in Springfield. Her life and columns are the subjects of Queen of the Hillbillies: Writings of May Kennedy McCord, Chronicles of the Ozarks, edited by Patti McCord and Kristene Sutliff (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021). Born in Harrison, Arkansas, but a resident of Taney County, Missouri, most of her life, Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey (1877–1948) was a rural storekeeper and postmistress who, for more than half a century, contributed community news, reminiscences, and poetry to newspapers in southwestern Missouri. Mahnkey became something of a regional celebrity in 1936 when a New York publishing company named her the nation’s outstanding country correspondent and publicized her trip to the city. Rayburn’s reference to “Mirandy” most likely signifies the radio character from “Uncle Luke and Aunt Mirandy of Persimmon Holler,” a regular skit featured on The National Farm and Home Hour, which was broadcast to a nationwide audience out of Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mirandy was voiced by Marian Driscoll Jordan (1898–1961), a native of Peoria, Illinois, who had no known connection to the Ozarks and who later went on to fame as Molly in the long-running and beloved radio program Fibber McGee and Molly.
CHAPTER II
1. Rayburn’s celebration of the “Anglo-Saxonism” of the Ozarks and the region’s “Elizabethan culture” was common among chroniclers of the Ozarks and Appalachia in the first half of the twentieth century. Motivated by xenophobic fears of the “new immigration” of the late 1800s and early 1900s, imperial racial theories, and Jim Crow–era racism, many white Americans of Protestant, northern European lineage romanticized the southern highlands as the country’s last bastion of white racial purity. This romanticization also downplayed the racial and ethnic diversity that existed in parts of the highlands. See Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Ian C. Hartman, In the Shadow of Boone and Crockett: Race, Culture, and the Politics of Representation in the Upland South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015).
2. See Arthur H. Estabrook, “The Population of the Ozarks,” Mountain Life and Work 5 (1929): 7–12.
CHAPTER V
1. For more information on play parties and play-party music, see Alan L. Spurgeon, Waltz the Hall: The American Play Party (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).
CHAPTER VI
1. “Whetting a banter” (or banner) was a phrase indicating a reaper’s boastful challenge to fellow reapers. Technically it refers to loudly scraping or sharpening a scythe with a whetstone. See Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 298.
2. “Sowbelly with the buttons on” was once a common phrase associated with the consumption of salted fat pork from the belly of a pig, called sowbelly. The word “buttons” likely refers to the animal’s teats, since sowbelly was routinely eaten with the skin left on the cut of meat.
3. The phrase “took bread and had bread” indicated that someone at the table took another piece of bread before finishing the one on their plate, an omen that a hungry person was sure to visit.
CHAPTER VII
1. In old Ozarks vernacular, to “hone for” something was to desire or crave it.
> 2. The most common monster in Ozarks tall tales and folklore, the gowrow was a giant, tusked reptile with sharp blades on its tail. It was reported to live in caves or under rock ledges and feed on large mammals, perhaps even humans. See Vance Randolph, “Fabulous Monsters in the Ozarks,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 9 (Summer 1950): 55–65.
3. The razorback made a bold comeback in the Ozarks in the early twenty-first century. At the current time, feral pigs are a major issue for the region’s farmers, and a number of government agencies (the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the National Park Service) continue to develop methods for reducing the population of an invasive species that was once almost eradicated.
4. The term “jack salmon” refers to the walleye. Until a generation or so ago, walleye fishermen in the region commonly used the abbreviated term “jack salmon” or “jack” to refer to this game fish. “Redhorse” in the next line refers to one species of suckerfish, which were commonly gigged, grabbed, or netted during their annual spring spawning run. The town of Nixa, Missouri, has celebrated Sucker Day since 1957.
CHAPTER IX
1. There are numerous works on the traditional music of the Ozarks, but nothing is more fundamental than Vance Randolph’s four-volume Ozark Folksongs, published between 1946 and 1950 by the State Historical Society of Missouri. Twenty-first-century students and fans of the region’s traditional music have access to a wealth of original recordings and other materials through three online collections: the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection (https://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/), the John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection (web.lyon.edu/wolfcollection/), and the Ozark Folksong Collection (digitalcollections.uark.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/OzarkFolkSong).
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