When I lived on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, one of my favorite annual events was the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall. I would visit with people from the featured parts of the country, try food from those areas and listen to music. It was a good way to spend a Saturday.
This year's festival will feature the Ozarks. Musicians, artisans, performers and cooks will be on the National Mall from June 29-July 9 to share their culture. There will be live performances, workshops and other events that highlight the region. The festival is free and open to the public. It draws hundreds of thousands of visitors.
The Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage called on an Arkansan, historian Brooks Blevins, to educate Americans in advance of the festival. I wrote in Wednesday's column about Blevins' most recent book, "Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins," which was released late last year by the University of Arkansas Press. Blevins, an Izard County native, is the foremost authority on the Ozarks.
Blevins is now the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, but he still calls Arkansas home. He describes the Ozarks as "an American region with no single story to tell, a place more complex than you imagined but maybe just as colorful as you hoped."
Last month, he wrote an introduction to the Ozarks for the Smithsonian titled "It's Not What You Might Expect."
"This is a place long controlled by the Native Osages, claimed by the French, and for decades under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Crown," he wrote. "It is a place that became the first 'Indian Territory' for Native Americans who were pressured out of their ancestral homelands and pushed across the Mississippi River, a place traversed by thousands of Cherokees on the last leg of their Trail of Tears.
"It was a destination for Tennesseans, Kentuckians and Carolinians in ox carts and covered wagons. It was a launching point for forty-niners and cattle drives to the West Coast. It was the place where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant received his first star. It was home to lead miners and iron mongers, to cowboys and the enslaved, to circuit riders and trappers, dirt farmers and counterfeiters."
Blevins, of course, went on to note that it's now home to "the world's largest retail corporation, the nation's leading meat-producing company and the premier collection of American art." For those familiar only with hillbilly stereotypes, Blevins' introduction probably came as a surprise. He wasn't finished.
"It was the last hunting ground of Daniel Boone, the home of industrialist Moses Austin and his son Stephen F., the Father of Texas," he wrote. "It is the birthplace and childhood home of African American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver. It was home to Hermann Jaeger, a Swiss immigrant who saved the European wine industry in the 19th century.
"It was the site of Wild Bill Hickok's first shootout and Jesse James' first train robbery. It was where a teenage Charlie Parker honed his licks on the alto sax and the birthplace of network television's first regularly scheduled country music show."
Blevins said the Ozarks indeed contained some of what visitors to the Folklife Festival might expect: "What if I told you it was a region settled overwhelmingly by white pioneers from the Appalachians, some of whose descendants were still singing 17th century British ballads and making moonshine whiskey in hidden caves at the dawn of color television? That it is a place where the rules of neighborly civility melted in the heat of the Civil War, where racially motivated violence occurred at a per capita rate matched by few other areas in the years around the turn of the 20th century?
"That vast stretches of its rocky, infertile ridges and hollers provided little more than bare subsistence for generations of families and that these families once composed a significant percentage of the country's migrant labor supply? That it was home to at least one community tucked so far back into the inaccessible hills that electric power lines finally reached it the same year that humans piloted a rocket ship to the moon and back? That it contains some of the nation's most concentrated districts of white poverty, some of the poorest counties west of the Mississippi?"
There are several versions of the Ozarks. In his three-volume history of the region for the University of Illinois Press, Blevins explained those subregions.
He wrote for the Smithsonian: "The Ozarks in the 21st century is a spatially divided place and a land of haves and have-nots. The most fertile, diverse and prosperous subregion, the Springfield Plain, remains the most densely populated and most heavily capitalized of all the subregions--the locus of major universities, Fortune 500 companies and metropolitan statistical areas.
"In stark contrast, rural subregions such as the Boston Mountains ... envelop within their romantic ridges and hollers sparse, almost all-white populations whose generations of poverty evince no signs of abating. Some might say that the Springfield Plain looks like America and always has, while the Boston Mountains ... look like the Ozarks.
"It would be more accurate, however, to claim that the Ozarks in toto looks more like America, with oases of wealth and prosperity amid vast stretches of countryside and towns whose fortunes range from middling to just north of hopeless. All of these places reflect an Ozarks evolving with an ever-changing nation and world."
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.