There's so much to admire about the Ozarks.

And one of those things is the rich musical tradition in the Ozarks.

And for me, house parties, pie suppers, weekly jam sessions, church choirs are all sort of the subsoil of all the music that comes out of the Ozarks.

[folk music] [engine running] [insects chirping] [hawk screeching] The Ozarks Studies Institute has been an establishment at Missouri State University since 1987, where it began as the center for Ozarks studies to help preserve the heritage, culture, and history of the Ozarks.

Its biennial publication "OzarksWatch Magazine" has continued for more than 30 years and is the inspiration and namesake of the program you're watching today.

In 2017, management of the Ozarks Studies Institute was shifted to MSU's Meyer Library, where it has continued its mission to present the history and culture of the Ozarks in new and interesting ways.

My guest today is Tom Peters, Dean of Library Services here at Missouri state University.

And we're going to talk about some of the unique initiatives of the Ozarks Studies Institute and some of the exciting projects being developed.

Stay tuned.

[folk music] ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Well, appreciate your being with me today, and look forward to learning all about the Ozarks, and McClurg, and all the different kinds of aspects that make up your life lately.

Well, thanks for having me.

Let's start it off a little bit, just give a little bit of background to the viewers so they know where you came from and how you got here.

Yeah, so I was born and raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Northwest Iowa.

Bicentennial High School, class of 1976.

Fort Dodge Dodgers.

Most of my higher education was in the state of Iowa.

I've been a librarian for 35 years.

I've worked at six public regional universities in the midwest.

Didn't plan it that way, but that's how it played out.

And I've also served a few years as what I like to call a rogue librarian.

I was self-employed, but I was doing library work on contract with the Library of Congress and the American Library Association.

I loved it.

The Great Recession kind of put the kibosh on that, so.

That sounds like an interesting-- rogue librarian, I've not heard that term before, but that's pretty good.

So you ended up, got an honest job, I guess, at Missouri State, then.

Right.

I took a job at Illinois State.

It just didn't work out.

It wasn't my performance, but they had some issues at that library.

Great, good library, but every library goes through its rough patch.

So I was like, I need to move on.

And the job here opened up back in 2012, and I've been here coming up on 10 years.

And since you've been here, you've really gotten immersed and know a lot of Ozarks things, and we'll talk a little bit about that.

But the first thing is, I always have to ask you about your ownering a town and being the city-- you know, the mayor, and the chief of police, and everything else.

There is a little town in northeast Taney County by the name of McClurg.

You can find it on Google Maps.

When I'm in town, the population is two.

So there are two homes-- I bought one of the homes in McClurg-- and the general store.

And so if your viewers are aware of McClurg at all, it's probably because of a weekly music jam session that's a long tradition in McClurg.

COVID caused some problems for that weekly jam session, but I was able to acquire the property and we fully intend to restart and continue those weekly music jam sessions which are absolutely wonderful, indescribable.

Yeah, interestingly, the very, very, very first show that we did many years ago was at McClurg, and it was a house party.

And I remember the food was terrific, the music was fun.

I went down with Gordon McCann.

Yeah, Gordon's a big devotee.

Oh, he's a devotee.

And he was taking us to all these different house parties.

And I finally tell him, I said, "Gordon, I'm working.

I can't do all these things."

But that was a great time, but it was at the McClurg General Store, so.

Yeah.

It's, I would say, a magical place.

And I'm a foreigner.

I came from Iowa.

I'm an Iowa boy, but there's so much to admire about the Ozarks.

And one of those things is the rich musical tradition in the Ozarks.

And for me, house parties, pie suppers, weekly jam sessions, church choirs are all sort of the subsoil of all the music that comes out of the Ozarks.

So people performing in Branson tonight probably got their start house party, pie supper, jam session, church choir, that kind of thing.

Yeah, I always enjoyed those visits, because one things about it, it also tells a lot about the history of the place.

Because when those kinds of things were really in vogue, there was not a lot of entertainment from the outside world.

I always visualize a person getting on their horse and taking, going over to this house party because they're living out in the rural area and isolated.

Yeah.

And so you make your own-- you don't have the entertainment there.

You can't pipe it in.

You don't have Netflix.

Right.

Before radio came into the Ozarks really in the '30s in a big way, having a fiddler in your holler was a boon, you know?

That was a good thing to have a fiddler in your midst.

And if you needed to have some kind of a party, you got a fiddler.

You got a party.

You got some music there.

And I remember we did a show with Bob Holt who's a tremendous fiddle player.

And he was talking about all the-- it was literally thousands of tunes.

He called them tunes, but he knew all these things just by memory.

TOM PETERS: Yeah.

JIM BAKER: So he would go to these things, and then someone would play kind of like a rhythm guitar just a little bit with it and everything else, but he would do all these songs.

And it was amazing, the repertoire he had.

I mean, it was incredible.

TOM PETERS: Yeah, and all just from memory.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

TOM PETERS: They don't read music.

Most of those people don't read music, they just know the songs.

And I've been studying the "Ozark Jubilee" and a lot of those people did pie suppers and jam sessions.

That's where they learned their craft.

And when there's good music, people will come.

There was a story that they were down somewhere, doing some, you know, they'd advertise for a place.

It was just out-- it wasn't McClurg, but it was out there somewhere.

They thought, we'll never get a crowd here.

And by the time they started playing, the place was packed.

People just come out of the hills and down the draws coming to hear the music.

Yeah, the music traditions here, like you said, are really rich.

And I mean, they extend out to today.

Yeah.

I mean, with some of the different groups.

And if you want to pick up some good music, live music, there's plenty of places to-- Plenty of live music.

Of course, most of it starts past my bedtime these days.

[laughing] There's still a good-- you know, the Ozarks has a rich musical tradition right now.

A lot of amazing things going on.

There's a couple of things that I really want to talk about, and I'm going to forget them if I'm not careful.

So your job is to remind me after we meander through a couple of other things, is that I want to talk a little bit about the Smithsonian and what you're going to be doing with that.

Because that's very, very interesting.

So we've been working with the Smithsonian Institution, which is huge.

It's 20 plus museums, a zoo.

They operate a zoo.

They have you know, rich resources.

They're amazing organization.

One of the many things they do is called a Folklife Festival.

And they've been doing it for 53 years.

And they approached Missouri State University about serving as the lead organization to do a Folklife Festival program on the Ozarks.

Now by program, they mean 10 days on the National Mall.

If we get beyond COVID, it'll be like a million people visiting the National Mall.

So "program" is a little bit of a misnomer in my mind.

It's a major undertaking.

And so Missouri State University in general and the Ozarks Studies Institute at the MSU Libraries are leading the charge and organizing this festival program about the entire Ozarks, not just southwest Missouri, northeast Taney County, much as I'd like to focus just on northeast Taney County.

A lot of people-- when you talk about the Ozarks, generally you're talking about Arkansas and Missouri.

There's the general ones, but then a little bit of Oklahoma, a little bit of.

Yeah, so we actually have five states, and working with the Smithsonian.

They're very, you know, welcoming and inclusive.

So when we got talking about where are the Ozarks, which is a perennial topic of discussion-- JIM BAKER: Right.

TOM PETERS: Nobody agrees.

Where do they begin, where do they end?

Who are the Ozarkers?

But we sort of settled on Missouri, Arkansas, parts of eastern Oklahoma, a little bit of extreme southeastern Kansas, and then portions of southern Illinois.

Which most people are like, what are you talking about?

But there's a claim that parts of southern Illinois are part of the Ozarks.

I always thought there was a couple of ways to define the Ozarks.

One is through the cultural heritage where people-- you know, that whole thing about the built environment.

And then the others, the geological formations that kind of separate it out from other.

And the story I've heard-- it's probably apocryphal-- but when they were first surveying this region and they were like, is this in the Ozarks or isn't it, they just had like, you know, a metal rod.

And they'd poke it down in the ground.

If they hit karst within, like, the first six inches then OK, this is the Ozarks.

Yeah.

They'd have this little rod.

OK, we're still in the Ozarks.

[laughing] I can't believe it.

When I first moved here, I was going to build a fence.

And I had one of those fence post diggers.

And I slammed it down and it went brr, and you know.

And every time I would do it, no matter where I went there was stone or rock, hence the name Stone County, I imagine.

TOM PETERS: No, it's actually named for a person.

Oh, really?

I always thought it was for a rock.

I think it's named for a person.

I forget his first name.

But again, every foreigner has that story.

I grew up in Iowa.

Planting a tree in Iowa was like a half hour job max, you know?

If you had one about the size of that table, a tree with a bulb.

I tried to plant one here.

After about, you know, 10 trips to the do-it-yourself store and very sore hands from digging in the ground, took me all day to plant that tree in the Ozarks.

Before we leave the Smithsonian, I mean, that's something I'm kind of putting on my to do list.

I really do want to go there because-- that's going to cover a whole bunch of areas, I suppose.

The Smithsonian does a great job of looking at the whole picture.

They're very good.

And you know, we can't cover the entire Ozarks.

There's just too many different types of people that have come in for different reasons.

But you know, it's people and their ways, and the land, and how the land and the water and all the natural resources and the forests and the wildlife sort of affect and inform the folk ways.

So for example, foraging in the Ozarks is a huge thing, from mushrooms in the spring and ginseng root.

We're one of the big sources worldwide for ginseng root.

And one of my favorite ones, and I think it's the most broadly practiced foraging is walnut gathering in the fall.

A lot of people go out and gather walnuts for a wide variety of reasons.

And if you ever want to experience the wonders of the Ozarks, go to a walnut hulling station in October.

I mean, it's amazing.

Yeah, actually, it turns into quite an industry.

TOM PETERS: Yeah, it's an industry, and every part of it's used.

The hull, the shell, the meat, the nut meat, it all has value.

The first time I went, I was totally amazed that you got this machine that's just like clacking around, you know, the hulling machine.

And literally the day I was there, there was a young couple with a pickup load, and I'm guessing they were just looking for date money for that night, you know?

Then the next vehicle is like a family, and this is like a major source of income for them.

And then you got this guy in an SUV who just wants the walnuts off his lawn, you know kind of guy, and then you've got somebody who's got permission to go onto golf courses and gather the walnuts, because they don't want the walnuts on the golf course.

And so you get this whole kind of slice of Ozarks life right there waiting to have-- and you get paid by the pound, hundred pound, you know?

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

You're not making minimum wage when you gather walnuts.

They've got their own machines, you know, to gather the walnuts if you're really serious about it.

Yeah.

Hammond Industries is quite large.

And we did we did a show about that.

And I was amazed at how big of a manufacturing, production facility, see what they have and what they do.

I need to get up there.

I've been invited to come up there and see the operation.

Oh, it's worth going up to see, because it's amazing what they do.

And for your viewers, there's a walnut belt that kind of goes from right here in the Ozarks all the way to, like, eastern Pennsylvania, maybe even in new Jersey.

But most of the walnuts that are grown are right here.

Now if you're talking about English walnuts, that's a whole 'nother story.

Oh, yeah.

Black walnuts, English walnuts, very different.

Yeah.

Because black walnuts, those are not cultivated.

That's why I call it foraging.

Because they're just wild.

JIM BAKER: Yeah, they're just wild.

It's just there, yeah.

They're just wild.

English walnuts are grown out in California, and they're all in rows and the machine comes and shakes the tree, you know?

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

It's totally automated.

But around here, it's like, you go and pick them up.

And prepare to have your fingers peel.

So the Smithsonian-- shifting away from walnuts for a moment-- I guess at the Smithsonian, one of the things that'll be going on is a lot of music and a lot of dance.

A lot of music, a lot of dancing, a lot of food, a lot of crafts, broadly defined.

So for example, in the history of the Ozarks, what's known as tie hacking.

So a good axe man could hack a railroad tie.

What he was making was railroad ties.

He could do about one an hour.

So you know a typical eight or 10 hour day, about one an hour.

You get paid about a dollar per tie.

It had a huge effect on the economy of the Ozarks.

So we're going to try to actually have-- we're going to try to find somebody who still does it the old fashioned way with a with an axe and have them hack a tie, pretty much one every day over 10 days and just talk about this craft and how railroads really needed those ties.

You could just tell them you're going to pay them a dollar a tie and you'll get people flooding in to do it.

They will just line up to hack those ties.

Well, I think-- you know, to me, it sounds like it's going to be really a great way to get immersed into a lot of Ozark history, culture, traditions, you know?

Yeah.

And so on.

And it's an opportunity to sort of show the Ozarks region and its people and their ways, past, present, and into the future as near as we can see to people.

What I've heard is that the typical attendees at the Smithsonian are-- about 60% of them are just people that live in the greater D.C. area and it's just a thing to do.

Right.

Like, we go to the Ozark Empire Fair or whatever, you know?

Or Cider Days or whatever.

About 20% of US tourists, because again, once we get through this COVID situation, DC is a big tourism location.

Yeah, it'll be nice to have people really be able to see the Ozarks for something besides what they see on the movies and the darkness of things.

Netflix series.

Yeah, so you can see a little bit different.

On a different topic, on the "Ozarks Jubilee."

I know you've been doing a lot of work on that.

Can you talk a little bit about the "Jubilee" and about the digitization projects and all the things that are going on with that?

Yeah, I'd be happy to.

So just this spring, we finished our first wave of the Ozark Jubilee Digitization Project.

The "Ozark Jubilee" was a nationally broadcast weekly television program on ABC TV 55 to 60, almost six years.

Every week.

[folk music] There was no sign of hiatus.

If Saturday night-- and it did-- if it fell on Christmas Eve, or New Year's Eve, they would do a show.

So it was live television, but Wayne Glenn, the old record collector, soon after I arrived here, he met with me he said I found a series of what were called kinescopes that are basically movies of the live program At UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Well, that led to a big, long discussion with them about, you know, we want to get these.

Would they sell them to us?

No.

But they were willing to digitize them if we paid them and give us non-exclusive rights to make them freely available online, which we've done.

We've got a YouTube channel.

So we've finished that.

We've got 74 half-hour segments.

So they sort of produced the show in half hour segments.

Some of the markets didn't show-- if it was a 90-minute show, some of the markets would only show an hour of it, for example.

So we've got 74 of those, primarily from the '55 and '56, which were the early years of the Jubilee.

Red Foley was the host.

He was not an Ozarker.

He was from around Berea, Kentucky.

JIM BAKER: Mm-hmm.

But you know, Slim Wilson, Speedy Haworth, Wanda Jackson, Porter Wagoner, Brenda Lee.

Just about everybody who was anybody in country music in general on the national scale or in Ozarks music played on the Jubilee.

And it was singing, playing instruments, fiddle, guitar, banjo, bass, those kinds of things, comedy routine, and dance.

Those four elements, that was the "Ozark Jubilee."

And they pretty much stayed with that formula and didn't deviate.

Didn't deviate.

You know, they'd have gospel groups on, and there was a few rockabilly, which are just wonderful.

Carl Perkins played on the Jubilee.

He was great, you know?

But pretty much broadly defined country music.

One of the things, and you have several duties, the librarian, but you also were the head of the Ozark Studies Institute.

TOM PETERS: Yes.

And kind of talk just a little bit about the Ozark Studies Institute and also "OzarksWatch Magazine."

And before you do that, I'll say that the name "OzarksWatch Video Magazine" came from "OzarksWatch Magazine" because I was-- when I first got here, I was reading some of the magazines, and I thought, well, this is pretty cool.

We should just-- TOM PETERS: Well, I've got the retroactive royalties.

Yeah.

We should just stick the word "video" and wa-la, we got a new name.

You owe us with interest for using that name.

[laughing] No, so yeah, the "OzarkWatch Magazine" started back in summer of '87, so we're coming up on 35 years.

Bob Gilmore was one of the founding members.

And so you know, the SMS MSU has a long tradition of service to the region of various types.

By the way, Milt Rafferty and Don Holliday.

There was a lot of faculty that they focused on the Ozarks.

So it's 35 years.

About five years ago, Kris Sutliff in English had been in charge of the Ozarks Studies Institute, and she decided to retire, which is, you know, everybody's going to retire eventually.

JIM BAKER: Right.

Sooner or later.

Some of us sooner rather than later.

She decided to retire.

And so I report to the provost, Dr. Einhellig, and I meet with him officially monthly, once a month.

And during one of those meetings, I said, "what's going to happen with the Ozarks Studies Institute now that Kris is retiring?"

"Do you want it?"

And I was like, "no, no, no.

I just wondered what's going to happen to it."

So anyway, we ended up taking it on.

We do the "OzarkWatch Magazine" twice a year.

We've got an issue out, being printed right now on Hollywood and the Ozarks, which is a lot of fun, issue.

The next issue is going to be on foraging.

And then we'll have a special issue on the Smithsonian project.

So it just goes on and on, twice a year.

About 75 pages per issue.

And then we started a book series too.

So we now have five books out about the Ozarks.

The latest one is Mara Cohen Ioannides' "Jews of Missouri."

She's a Jewish scholar.

The next one after that is going to be one on Horton Smith, the phenomenal golfer that came out of Rogersville, rural Rogersville.

Tremendous golfer back in the '20s.

JIM BAKER: Won the Masters and all that.

He won the first and the third Masters and just was phenomenal.

So we just do a-- we have a book series.

We do author talks.

We do digitization projects.

We have an Ozarks room that we really opened up during COVID, but we had our grand opening last fall.

We have an Ozarks collection, just fiction and nonfiction about the Ozarks, a growing collection.

So we try to do all kinds of things.

Yeah, I think one thing that I always try to impress on the viewers is that if you really want to learn about the Ozarks, or you know, there's places like, say, the University of Arkansas.

Missouri State certainly is right up there with everybody as far as-- College of the Ozarks has a lot of good material.

The University of Missouri has some items.

Yeah, they have some.

And so there's a lot of materials that are available.

One thing I'm really pleased with Missouri State is the extent that you've always made things at the library available online so that people can access it.

Yeah.

Back when I was a rogue librarian, one of the major lessons I learned was if you do something online, whether it's a book talk or something, and you record it and make it available, you will see much more usage after the event than you ever got people coming into the online room to hear an author talk.

So the real power is in the recordings, really.

You put those online, make them freely available.

Quick story.

Back in the late '70s there was a series of documentaries about Shannon County that were made here at SMS at the time.

And they were good.

There were two of them, about an hour long.

They were on VHS tape.

We made them available, but about five years ago, we digitized them and put them on that YouTube channel, and they got more use because people find them then.

But then when Netflix "Ozark" series came out, the use of those documentaries went through the roof.

It's up like 1.5 million for each one, views.

Holy cow.

And YouTube will tell you what the average watch time is.

And I thought, oh, they're only looking at it for two-odd minutes or so, and then they're on to the next thing.

The average watch time is in the 40 minute range.

Those videos, if you start to watch them, they capture you.

They're incredibly interesting.

They capture you.

And they're capturing like, you know, three million people, because people are like second screen.

I don't know, they're watching Netflix, and they're like, oh, what about the Ozarks?

And those things pop up.

The trick on all this stuff is to have a keyword so when somebody keys on those it goes to your thing instead of-- Well, we should all be thankful that there's very few-- if it's not about the Ozarks, O-Z-A-R-K is probably not going to be the root of that word.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

We only have about a minute left, so what's in your future plans for the Ozark Studies Institute?

Just kind of more of the same?

I'm actually-- so on the Smithsonian project, we are working with a lot of other universities and organizations.

We've been out to meet with representatives from the Cherokee nation over in Tahlequah.

My colleague and I are going down to Fayetteville tomorrow to meet with some people.

So we're trying to get everybody in the Ozarks region that cares about Ozarks folkways and folk culture and history in general involved.

I'm hoping that by the time we finish with this particular program, which is almost like, it's closer to the Olympics then, you know, a half-day seminar.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

Once we get through that, then we're in much better position as a region to capture and celebrate all of the wonderful things and some of the not so wonderful things about the Ozarks.

Which is really what the Appalachian region did [inaudible].

Exactly.

So hopefully we can get there.

We're out of time.

But I'll have to have you back some other time.

And we'll talk about home ownership and [inaudible].. All right.

Thanks again for being with us today.

Thank you very much.

We'll be back in a moment.

[folk music] ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I hope you enjoyed learning about some of the great resources available through the Ozarks Studies Institute and the Missouri State University Library.

I'd like to thank Tom Peters for talking with us today.

And I invite you to join us again next time for "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

[folk music]