BALANCING THE HILLBILLY AND PROGRESSIVE OZARKS: The saga of a forthright newspaperwoman

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 052023
 

Like the pioneer newspaperwoman’s prose, this is well researched and very readable. It’s in the Ozarks Studies Series, edited by Prof. Brooks Blevins. It is footnoted and indexed but does not have an academic tone. The author credits Dr. Blevins encouragement and acknowledges Lynn Morrow for “setting me straight innumerable times.” Morrow also knew and admired Lucile. Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks: The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton. Susan Croce Kelly. University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville. 2023.

by Leland Payton

The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton reads the subtitle of Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks, a new book by Susan Croce Kelly. The author knew the pioneering woman journalist. Lucile was her great aunt. It’s much more than a genealogical tribute, though, familiarity with her “bookish family” and small-town background gave insight into Lucille’s rare ability to champion modern technology and at the same time accept the unenlightened behavior of the legendary Ozark hill folk.

Way back when someone was bitten by a dog suspected of having rabies, they would borrow the Morris family’s “madstone”—a small, calcified object found in the gut of a white deer. Backwoods folk believed when this rare object was soaked in warm milk it would draw the “pi-zen” out of the wound. Her literate family knew better but they played along with the superstition. Decades later, when the Springfield business community lit into “hillbilliness” she supported a folk festival which celebrated the old-time ways in her column. The belief Ozark hills and hollows sheltered communities living like our ancestors made good copy and attracted tourists.

Lucile Morris not only wrote hundreds of features covering the atavistic Ozarks, but she also wrote a column for the Springfield News and Leader, “Over the Ozarks,” inviting readers to submit folk songs, legends, and poems. This recognition of the vernacular gave her a large following.

As a child she was enthralled by old timers’ tales of the Civil War and its turbulent aftermath. An outbreak of unsettled scores in the region was covered nationally. Lucile is best known today for her study of the Baldknobbers, the Ozarks’ bloodthirsty post-Civil War vigilantes.

All aspects of the past interested her. The fact that the home of Daniel Boone’s son, Nathan, is a state park and Wilson’s Creek Civil War Battlefield was incorporated into the National Park System is due in large part to her persistent advocacy for their preservation.

Journalists today are often accused of political bias and advocacy in their reporting. Lucile Upton distanced herself from politics or social movements. Susan Kelly notes that although women were once discouraged as newspaper reporters, she was not an active feminist. That her family were all Democrats in a Republican stronghold perhaps made her wary of partisanship. She acknowledged issues had two sides and vigorously pursued objectivity and fairness.

The writer of this biography shares this interest in stories that connect the past with the present. Susan Croce Kelly was once, like Lucile, employed as a reporter by the Springfield News-Leader.  Her book Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery was praised for connecting its subject’s personality and the times in which he lived. That gift of portraying people against a historical backdrop connects the two related writers.

Lucile Morris Upton grasped that the hillbilly was derived from observations of authentic Ozark folk culture. If a pop culture cliché, she didn’t blame the cartoonist, Hollywood, or the media for exploiting this rustic’s popularity. “The public, however, is entitled to know the difference between the genuine and the synthetic,” she believed.

Bald Knobbers, published by Claxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho. 1939, is a stirring account of vigilante violence in the aftermath of the Civil War. This first edition with graphic dust jacket can go for hundreds of dollars. Lucile interviewed old timers with memories of the night riders who terrorized the White River hills until three Bald Knobbers were hung on the courthouse square in Ozark Missouri in 1889.

Her well-researched book on the Baldknobbers was the first to cover the violent post-Civil War Ozark vigilante. Since that time, numerous accounts have been published, both fiction and nonfiction. Hollywood was interested in making her version into a movie, but World War II redirected their priorities. A recent locally produced movie has been released on DVD. A well-known musical group, The Baldknobbers, have entertained Branson visitors for 60 years.

Lucile worked for years on two unpublished novels. Her characters and locations were praised by editors, but they thought the plots lacked excitement. This is surprising given her vivid account of post-Civil War violence.

On Sept. 7, 2023 Susan Croce Kelly gave a lecture on her new book at the Springfield-Greene County library Center. it was a cut-to-the -chase presentation. Kelly, like her great aunt Lucile Upton, been a journalist of the old school—terse, factual prose without an agenda.

As a native, Lucile had a feeling for the landscape and the people who settled it. She didn’t always share their attachment to primitive ways, but she understood it was a component of their identity.  She disagreed with the modernist, progressive beliefs of Springfield Chamber of Commerce president, John T. Woodruff who underestimated the commerciality of hillbilly-ness as a tourist draw.

Through the many years as a News-Leader reporter, she produced countless features covering every aspect of Ozark folk culture. She covered Thomas Hart Benton, the Herschends, Rose Wilder Lane, the Lynches, Rose O’Neill, Otto Earnest Rayburn, and Harold Bell Wright. She reviewed Vance Randolph’s books but they had an “on again, off again” relationship as Susan Kelly put it.

 

 

                                     Susan Croce Kelly signs a book for
Crystal Payton after her Springfield Library talk.

 

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UP SOUTH IN THE OZARKS – Sampling the cultural DNA of a legendary region

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Mar 032023
 

Brooks Blevins lectures frequently after the publication of his many studies of the Ozarks.

5-Star Review of Brooks Blevins new book by Leland Payton

National and regional identities may not have disappeared but what defines a people and their relationship with place has undergone evolution. Colorful identities are challenged by the homogenization of modernization. In rural regions, more than in urban, lifestyle relates more to geographic specificities. A rural place’s reputation may not have been created by—or accurately reflect the perceptions of, its natives. Academic studies of the Ozarks are scarce compared to other regions of the U.S. Tourism and popular culture have largely shaped its image, but not always falsely, Blevins concedes.

Brooks Blevins’ latest take is Up South in the Ozarks. Subtitled, Dispatches from the Margins, Blevins challenges the overall accuracy of the place’s most dominant symbol, the hillbilly, but acknowledges that the definition of a region needs to account for its clichés. Curiously, many Ozarkers accept cartoonish rustic depictions. Professor Blevins melds academic expertise from many disciplines— an appreciation for folklore, familiarity with both literature and journalism—with the personal, insightful observations of a native son. His encyclopedic geographic and historical knowledge is delivered with humor and a talent for metaphor. Throughout he contrasts and compares this Midwestern river-cut uplifted plateau with both the Deep South and the Appalachian Mountains.

Missionaries and writers descended on the southern highlands of Appalachia before they came to save souls or describe the more isolated Ozarks. In the chapter, “A Time Zone Away and a Generation Behind,” he analogizes the Ozarks to a younger sibling: “You were never first, never original, never completely yourself. Even at school, your teachers knew you as your big brother’s little brother. If that’s your story, you know how the Ozarks feels.”

His chapter, “The South According to Andy,” makes the case that the 1960s TV show set in a fictional mountain south small town was a portrait well received by Ozarkers: “Andy’s South was not the South. It was a South. … It was a projection of something quite southern, even if not a complete portrait of the South.”

Dr. Blevins doesn’t idealize the Ozarks. He confronts the idea that the mountain south was exempt from the past racial prejudices that characterize the Deep South. In “Revisiting Race Relations in the Upland South,” he admits his earlier position based on that premise was wrong: “But the equation of a small Black population with a comparative degree of racial harmony has not always appeared so self-evident to scholars and observers of the South.” He follows facts down unmapped, rocky trails no matter where they lead.

A generational lag in scholarship he believes may be closing: “In 2010, Missouri State University established the region’s first Ozarks Studies minor for undergraduates. Five years later, the University of Arkansas Press launched a monograph series in Ozarks Studies. (They published this book). We may never be first in the Ozarks, but we get around to it eventually. Such is the life of a regional little sibling.”  Blevins is on the board of the Ozarks Studies Institute, an initiative of the Missouri State University Libraries. Dr. Blevins also teaches classes on Ozark history at MSU.

Up South in the Ozarks seeks the nuanced realities of a large, misunderstood region that is paradoxically both romanticized and maligned. Brooks Blevins cherishes the Ozarks and believes its story is worthy of an honest telling, quirky, droll, and marginal as its realities often are.

Available from the University of Arkansas Press, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

THE OZARKS: Where It’s Been, Where It’s Going. Vol. 3 in Brooks Blevins’ Trilogy

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Jan 022022
 

Brooks Blevins discussing the third volume of his trilogy, A History of the Ozarks, Dec. 13 at The Library Center in Springfield.

Brooks Blevins finds it endlessly fascinating why a modest uplift in the center of America is believed to be the homeland of a race of slack-jawed yokels in spite of compelling demographic evidence it is inhabited by a populace not dissimilar to those of surrounding states. Fans of Dr. Blevins will find in Volume 3 of A History of the Ozarks: The Ozarkers a definitive answer to that paradox and a good guess as to the durability of that region’s hillbilly identity. Given the long literary origins of the trope it seems unlikely associating the Ozark hills with old timey ways will completely die out even though the place is in a rebranding phase.

Professor Blevins is more familiar with popular culture than many historians—and more respectful of its influence. His lively writing style is animated by these cultural conflicts. He points out a year before Alice Walton’s (of Walmart) toney art museum opened, a violent meth film set in the Ozarks premiered: “The fact that the movie Winter’s Bone dominated national perceptions of the Ozarks during the year and a half preceding the opening of Crystal Bridges made the museum’s premiere that much more jarring and its impact on the region’s image that much more transformative … But the twenty-first century has certainly sparked a reimagining of the Ozarks and Ozarkers. It was inevitable that at some point the reality of life in the Ozarks would stray so far from the region’s stubborn image that the dissonance would be impossible to ignore.”

His two earlier volumes are solid reconstructions of the place’s past. Volume 3 brilliantly shows how legend and myth infiltrate our perceptions of the past. Such stereotyping displeases the business community but is a gift to novelists, folklorists, and souvenir makers. The hillbilly was once a tourist icon—and to some degree may still be in spite of greater sensitivity to negative regional profiling. Another reasoned, well researched, and fun read from Missouri State University Professor Blevins.

 

A History of the Ozarks: The Ozarkers is available at the University of Illinois Press or on amazon

 

Harold Bell Wright’s erstwhile melodrama jump-starts Ozark tourism

 See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Apr 082020
 

Real photo postcard circa 1910 by G. E. Hall. Captioned on front, “At the Deer Lick, 33 Hall Photo Co.” Deer Lick is a location in the novel, The Shepherd of the Hills.

Printed on back of this very early Hall postcard is “The Shepherd of the Hills series,” Made by G. E. Hall, Notch, Mo.” At that time the entire region from Galena to Branson and surrounding hills and river bottoms of Taney and Stone counties was known as the Shepherd of the Hills Country.

In his just-published Volume 2, A History of the Ozarks, The Conflicted Ozarks, Brooks Blevins gives credit to Harold Bell Wright’s 1907 novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, for fixing an image of the Ozarks as a homeland of dramatically primitive but appealing Americans. Blevins attended a performance of the Shepherd of the Hills outdoor theater near Branson in 2013: “It wasn’t Chekov; no one goes to the ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ thinking it’s going to be. But it was entertaining—and melodramatic, syrupy, platitudinous, and predictable, just like the beloved novel on which it as based.” Blevins goes on to point out some real history about the truly dramatic night-riding Baldknobbers is worked into the sentimental storyline.

Locals began representing themselves as the real characters in Wright’s book. Photographic images of them at the landmarks where the novel took place helped perpetuate the idea the region was populated with somewhat backward but appealing characters, whose lives were uncommonly dramatic.

Lens & Pen books are available for purchase on this website on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. See sample pages from our new book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, on our website: hypercommon.com

 

THE LATEST – AND BEST YET – TAKE ON THE OZARKS. Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 The Old Ozarks

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Sep 012018
 

The ability to integrate anecdotes into concepts isn’t universal among novelists, much less historians. Even rarer is the talent for melding personal observations with academic studies. Brooks Blevins is a writer with both these gifts. This first installment of a trilogy on the Ozarks sets a new standard for the region’s history. Provocatively, he challenges the long-held idea that the Ozarks is an “arrested frontier,” but doesn’t yield to the temptation of revisionists to dismiss all earlier thinking on the subject.  Inappropriately applied concepts are part of our human past.

The seeds of Ozark primitivism came from beyond its borders. Some Ozarkers even watered this weed. They did so for complicated reasons—not the least of which was their inability to devise an original, more realistic narrative to explain their sometimes-difficult existence in a place with negligible political power and an original economy based on small-scale agriculture and extractive industries. Lack of originality in matters of identity creation—either individually or collectively, isn’t unique. It’s unlikely by this late date these deep, romantic roots can be ripped out. Occasional pruning is in order and Dr. Blevins has sharp shears.

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks is available at Barnes & Noble in Springfield, and on amazon.com in hardcover ($31.45) and in Kindle editions ($14.95)

 

  • ISBN-10: 0252041917
  • ISBN-13: 978-0252041914