The Ozarks, Still Becoming: History and Music at the Honors College House Concert

The Ozarks have never been only a place on a map. They are also a collection of sounds and stories, inherited traditions and contested identities, a region whose boundaries can seem certain one moment and surprisingly elusive the next.

At this year’s Honors College House Concert, the Ozarks will be heard as well as considered on Wednesday, October 28th at 6 p.m. in the Honors Student Lounge (GEAR 130). Historian Brooks Blevins will join the Ozark Highballers, a three-piece string band steeped in the musical traditions of the region, for an evening of music and conversation about how places acquire identities of their own and why, at certain moments, we become newly interested in what makes them distinctive.

The concert is free and open to all. Guests are encouraged to arrive early to find a seat. Parking is available in the Harmon Avenue Parking Garage. 

Attendees should register in advance here. Students may use their UARK ID to log in; community members may register using a guest account.

The House Concert comes at a fitting moment for the university. This fall, the U of A launched a new minor https://history.uark.edu/undergraduate/ozark-studies.php in Ozarks Studies, led by Jared Phillips, teaching associate professor of history. Phillips hopes that the new minor will help students from the Ozarks feel more at home here at the U of A as well as helping students new to the area appreciate just how much more there is to the Ozarks than the old hillbilly stereotypes.

“I’m more than grateful to partner with the Honors College on all things Ozarks,” Phillips said. He noted that the College has been a key supporter in the effort to build the new program for several years, and the House Concert provides yet another opportunity for students and community members to see how the Honors Program takes its role in the region and state seriously.

The history

Few scholars have spent as much time thinking about the Ozarks and what it means to belong to them as Blevins. A native of Izard County, Arkansas, Blevins has devoted much of his career to uncovering the history of the region he grew up in and deepening our understanding of the people and forces that shaped it. Since 2008, he has served as the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, where he helped establish the university’s minor in Ozarks Studies. His scholarship includes numerous books on the region, most notably the three-volume “A History of the Ozarks,” (University of Illinois Press, 2018–2021) an expansive account of Ozarks life from its earliest settlement through the twentieth century. 

But Blevins did not grow up thinking of himself as an Ozarker. That changed, almost by accident, when he encountered geographer Milton D. Rafferty’s “The Ozarks: Land and Life” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1980; 2nd ed., University of Arkansas Press, 2001) as an undergraduate. A wide-ranging study of the region’s geography, history and culture, the book sought to describe the Ozarks as a distinct place, down to the question of where, exactly, its boundaries lay. 

Leafing through it in the library, Blevins came across a map that placed his own home within the region. The discovery gave a name and a larger geography to a place he already knew intimately. 

His talk will explore the ways Americans have understood regions and regional distinctiveness and how that attention has waxed and waned over time. There are periods, Blevins notes, when regional differences seem to recede from view, followed by moments when people become newly interested in the character of particular places. 

The Ozarks, he argues, are experiencing just such a moment. Blevins will place the region within the broader history of regional studies, asking where our ideas about distinctive regions come from, how the Ozarks came to be understood as one, and why scholars and institutions, including the University of Arkansas, are turning renewed attention toward the region today. 

In Northwest Arkansas, rapid growth has brought new industries, greater racial and cultural diversity, and institutions like Crystal Bridges. Across the Ozarks, an increasingly visible outdoor culture has gathered around its rivers, trails and mountains. Those changes are altering not only life in the region, Blevins suggests, but the way the Ozarks are imagined beyond it. 

“There is almost a new Ozarks image that has been evolving,” Blevins said. “We’re still in a period of flux. We’ve definitely moved mostly away from that old hillbilly image that dominated the 20th century. But where we end up, I can’t tell that just yet.” 

For students, Blevins hopes the evening will make the idea of regional change feel less abstract. In Northwest Arkansas, it is happening just beyond the edges of campus and town, where fields and farms are rapidly becoming neighborhoods, shopping centers and new developments. It is easy, he said, to accept that transformation as the ordinary backdrop of living in a booming region. But growth on this scale carries consequences, for the landscape, certainly, but also for the history, traditions and sense of place tied to it. 

“You want to have economic opportunity,” Blevins said. “You want to think that you live in a place where your kids might eventually come back and get really good jobs and have a life for themselves instead of having to move off. But at the same time, that development is very destructive of a lot of things. History and tradition and all that stuff kind of gets bulldozed away as these places develop.” 

The music

After Blevins considers the Ozarks from the historian’s perspective, the evening will turn to another kind of regional record: its music.  

The Honors College House Concert trades the stage and auditorium for the couches, reading chairs and fireplace of the Honors Student Lounge. There is little distance between performer and audience, and that intimacy feels especially fitting for the Ozark Highballers, whose music comes from a tradition shaped not only on stages, but in homes, on porches and wherever people gathered to play and dance. 

Based in Fayetteville, the old-time string band has spent more than a decade immersed in the repertoire and style of rural Ozark musicians of the early 20th century. Roy Pilgrim plays fiddle alongside Seth Shumate on harmonica, with Clarke Buehling on five-string banjo and Aviva Pilgrim on guitar. Since forming in 2014, the Highballers have performed and taught throughout the region and beyond, bringing the sounds of Ozark string bands to contemporary audiences. 

For Pilgrim, that informality is part of the point. Despite its age, the music the Highballers play is not something they regard as an artifact to be carefully preserved behind glass. 

“We use Ozark old-time music as a daily part of our lives to celebrate, relax and socialize,” Pilgrim said. “So it is really more of a living, breathing tradition than an act of preservation or reenactment.” 

That living tradition depends upon musicians learning from those who came before them without pretending the music stopped changing somewhere in the past. When learning a tune from an older musician or recording, Pilgrim said, the aim is to listen closely, to the notes, the style and even the particular movements that give a tune its character, while recognizing that no musician can reproduce another perfectly. 

“I always try within the best of my ability to learn the notes and bowing as the original fiddler played it,” he said, “But inevitably the way I play a tune is going to evolve and become my way of playing it.” 

That evolution is part of what allows music to carry a different kind of history. A document can record names, dates and events; a tune can preserve something considerably harder to file away. 

“I think you can hear joys, struggles, personality and culture through the music,” Pilgrim said.  

And should anyone at the House Concert find themselves wondering what might have filled a dance floor in the Ozarks a century ago, the band has already selected the soundtrack. 

Handed the proverbial aux cord at a square dance in 1926 and charged with getting everyone onto the floor, they did not hesitate: 

“Marmaduke’s Hornpipe!” 

About the Honors College: The University of Arkansas Honors College was established in 2002 and brings together high-achieving undergraduate students and the university’s top professors to share transformative learning experiences. Each year the Honors College awards up to 90 freshman fellowships that provide $80,000 over four years, and more than $1 million in undergraduate research and study abroad grants. The Honors College is nationally recognized for the high caliber of students it admits and graduates. Honors students enjoy small, in-depth classes, and programs are offered in all disciplines, tailored to students’ academic interests, with interdisciplinary collaborations encouraged. All Honors College graduates have engaged in mentored research.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $3 billion to Arkansas’ economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research and Economic Development News.