Such fine folk

Rackensack chapter in its 49th year of keeping Arkansas’ music alive


Rackensack Folklore Society members (from left) Will Taylor, Denise Hammett, Lawrence Gray, Brode Morgan and Lealon Worrell whup it like a mule at the March, 2012, meeting of the Pulaski County chapter at the Arkansas Arts Center.
Rackensack Folklore Society members (from left) Will Taylor, Denise Hammett, Lawrence Gray, Brode Morgan and Lealon Worrell whup it like a mule at the March, 2012, meeting of the Pulaski County chapter at the Arkansas Arts Center.

— It’s the first Monday night in March and a small auditorium at the Arkansas Arts Center bubbles with acoustic energy. For nearly three hours, musicians in iterations of one, two, three and four play and sing old tunes, mountain tunes, folk tunes.

One of them, Marvin Schwartz of Little Rock, waits his turn, mandolin hanging over his back. It’s a Gibson F9, he says, the Florentine model, the kind of mandolin played by the late Bill Monroe, folk musician and father of bluegrass.

Watch and listen to excerpts from a recent gathering of the Rackensack Folklore Society.

Sounds of the Rackensack Folklore Society

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Schwartz met Monroe once, and asked the old master how best to play the mandolin.

Said Monroe: “Whup it like a mule.”

There was plenty of mule-whuppin’ on this night at the regular monthly meeting of the Rackensack Folklore Society, Pulaski County chapter. Formed in August 1963, the Rackensack (named for an archaic slang word for an Arkansan) has been meeting and playing at the Arts Center ever since, with the mission of preserving and promoting the music and culture of the Ozarks. The chapter formed after the original Rackensack came together that year in Mountain View, under the leadership of folk music legend Jimmy Driftwood.

As described in a 1964 news story in the Arkansas Democrat, this is pure folk music, “conceived by someone for his own entertainment, a song from an isolated or uninhibited person.”

Charlotte Copeland of Monticello, a retired academic librarian, was certainly uninhibited with guitar and harmonica on a whimsical tune called “The Frozen Logger.”

The harmonica is an unusual instrument for women to play, fellow Rackensacker Jim Munns said. Copeland agreed. Women who play the harmonica are “a rare breed. It’s not an instrument women seem to pick up.” She learned to play during a period when she couldn’t sing and wanted another way to convey a melody.

Copeland grew up during the folk renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s, has played a guitar for most of her life, and started coming to Rackensack about three years ago.

“It’s the friendliest venue you’ll find. I love the music, and you become like family with each other. The tradition has been going on for many years - thank you, Jimmy Driftwood.”

Rackensack starts with Driftwood, who was born in Stone County and lived much of his life there. He died in 1998 at the age of 91. He achieved fame in the 1950s as a songwriter and won a Grammy Award in 1959 for Song of the Year for “The Battle of New Orleans,” a chart-topping hit by Johnny Horton. (That same year the comedy team of Homer and Jethro also won a Grammy for their parody of Driftwood’s song, “The Battle of Kookamonga.”)

In 1962, residents of Stone County decided to stage a fair in Mountain View and persuaded Driftwood to lead the musical entertainment. The Rackensack Folklore Society was born, with a focus on the musical instruments of Driftwood’s childhood: acoustic guitar, fiddle, mountain dulcimer, bass washtub, mouth bow and banjo.

The first festival, in 1963, brought 20,000 people to the town of 700.

In Little Rock, in August of that year, a Rackensack chapter formed and met at the Arkansas Arts Center. Forty-nine years later, it still does. The first president was George Fisher, later an editorial cartoonist for the Arkansas Gazette. Other officers included Miriam Doege, Ray Cooper, Jerry Russell, Joan Davis, Lorna Dickson, John Belford and Vernon Hensley.

Annual dues were $3.50. They have since skyrocketed to $10.

Copeland was worth the sawbuck all by herself.

“The Frozen Logger,” written by James Stevens in 1928, and first published in 1949, was one of her solo offerings. Some of the lyrics:

“I see you are a logger and not just a common bum; for nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.”

And “My sweetheart was a logger, there’s none like him today. If you poured whiskey on it, he’d eat a bale of hay.”

“The Frozen Logger” got plenty of delighted laughter from the appreciative crowd.

“It’s a nonsensical ballad,” Copeland said. “So many ballads are weepy or sad, I thought it would be fun to do a lighthearted thing.”

Munns, secretary of the group, offers his view of folk music.

“We try to encourage people to play only music [written] for acoustic instruments. That limits you to prior to 1942, when the electric guitar was invented. That was the end of acoustic as the only idiom there was.”

Munns stands out in the group as a professional musician. He’s minister of music at Pulaski Heights Baptist Church, and has a master’s degree in music from Ouachita Baptist University. At Rackensack meetings he plays a mountain dulcimer, also known as a lap dulcimer.

Other instruments, he said, include the guitar, fiddle, banjo, string bass, harmonica, penny whistle - a small wind instrument often heard in Scottish or Irish music - auto-harp, ukulele and accordion.

Brode Morgan, 64, a mostly retired electrical engineer for Garver Engineers, is president. He grew up in Chicot County, and got his first guitar in third grade, delivered by mail from Sears Roebuck.

There are 53 active and paid-up members of the Pulaski County chapter, he said, and as many more not paid up. Morgan showed up in 1976. At the time, Rackensack was going strong and included fiddle player Ken Blessing.

“As soon as I saw him, I thought, man, I want to do that,” Morgan said. He got a fiddle - it, too, came from Sears Roebuck. Blessing died in December. At the time of his death, Munns described Blessing as “the most phenomenal player I’ve ever heard. His repertoire was just unbelievable.”

A typical meeting starts with a hoedown, an en masse playing by several fiddlers, a string bass player and several guitar players. They mostly play traditional instrumental fiddle tunes in the public domain. “We like to say from the hills of Arkansas, but really they’re from the hills of Scotland, truth be known,” Morgan said.

And then a waltz, after which people are invited to play two numbers of their own choice. No matter their skill level, Morgan said, they have support, and learn not be intimidated to play in front of a crowd.

Sometimes there are storytellers, who describe how life used to be in the Ozarks. One member, Woodrow Bettis, used to bray like a mule, Morgan said. Bettis has passed on, Morgan said. “Woodrow thought he could bray better than the mule itself.”

The group plays until 9:30or 10 p.m., finishing en masse sometimes with “Down in the Arkansas.” As in, “the prettiest girl I ever saw was down in the Ar-kan-sas.”

It’s an old tune, Morgan said, author unknown.

“We haven’t figured out who wrote it.”

The Rackensack is a nonprofit, Morgan said. Its mission? “To preserve the traditional music and culture of the Ozarks.” To do so, some members perform in nursing homes and public schools, “public places of all kinds.”

Some members concentrate on the music of Driftwood. He and George Fisher, Morgan said, “were two of the greatest treasures Arkansas has produced, in my estimation.”

“George was a guitar player of sorts,” Morgan said. “We often had to tune his guitar for him, but he was a born entertainer.”

Rackensack will have to evolve to some degree, Morgan said. For the mission to last another 50 years, it will have to attract young people. “The acoustic standards we set for ourselves is a great tool to engender that.”

Rackensack used to have an annual concert. Now it’s biennial, Morgan said, although there’s interest in making it annual again. The next concert is at 7 p.m. June 2 at the Arts Center.

Denise Hammett of Little Rock came back last summer after 24 years in Virginia. She’s a fiddler like Ken Blessing, her father.

“I grew up listening to Daddy play,” Hammett said. “It’s been part of my whole life. I want to keep these old tunes alive because they’re so rich and a part of our history.” Such songs, she said, were played at funerals, weddings and barn-raisings.

Rackensack, she said, embraces musicians of all levels of skill.

“All of us are amateurs at different places but everyone is accepted.”

“This kind of music connected me with my Daddy,” Hammett added. “I feel it’s the same connection with these people here when you share that intimacy through music.”

Back in Mountain View, Carl Adkins is the music director of the Ozark Folk Center, built in the 1970s after Driftwood persuaded Congress to appropriate $2.1 million for its construction, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Driftwood was removed as music director of the center in 1975. Many of the Racken-sackers left with him. Driftwood bought land north of the Folk Center; his music endures at The Jimmy Driftwood Barn.

Adkins offers his appraisal of folk music.

“It lives in people,” he said. “It doesn’t live in MP3 players or recordings or archives. Certainly a lot of it is archived, but folk music is learned face to face, person to person. You don’t learn it off of an iPad or sheet music.

“You learn it by hanging around people.” The Pulaski County chapter of the Rackensack Society meets every first Monday at 7 p.m. at the Arkansas Arts Center, 501 E.

Ninth St. in Little Rock. The public is welcome. For information, go to rackensack.org.

Style, Pages 45 on 03/25/2012

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