Friday Video: Preview of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot

Earlier this week, on May 1st, International Worker’s Day,  Appashop released the film,  Anne Braden: Southern Patriot.  Produced by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering, Appalshop describes the film as a ”feature length documentary exploring the remarkable legacy of this grassroots organizer, committed journalist, civil rights leader, movement strategist, social chronicler, public intellectual, teacher and mentor to three generations of social justice activists.”

Braden made her home in Kentucky and was branded a communist and seditionist for buying a house in Louisville for an African American family during the Cold War 1954.  Throughout her life she worked toward, as Media Database says, “awakening the consciousness of whites to the legacy of racial injustice, and demonstrated that racism is a social construct that can be deconstructed.”

In this short clip Braden says, “I never knew anybody who really got active because of guilt.  Everybody I know that’s white that’s got involved in this struggle got into it because they glimpsed a different world to live in.  . . Human beings have always been able to envision something better…All through history they’re have been people who have envisioned something better in the most dire situations.  That’s what you want to be a part of.” 

Here’s a three minute sample from the producers.  Follow their facebook page to keep up with all the showings.  If anyone is interested in providing a space to view the film in Little Rock, please contact us! We’ll provide the organizing if you can provide the space! 

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006) — 3 minute sample from Anne Lewis on Vimeo.

Friday Video: Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story.

From PBS.

While in Memphis for the Folklorists in the South retreat we visited the amazing Stax Museum and heard a little bit about working behind the scenes at the museum from Levon Williams, curator of collections.  The visit to Stax was inspiring, and an excellent example of the power of music to work toward change.  So this week’s Friday Video is a trailer from PBS’s 2007 Great Performances presentation, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story. 

Stax was amazing for many reasons, especially its integrated approach to music in the same town where sanitation workers were paid less-than-human wages, leading to the Sanitation Worker’s Strike which was linked to MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign.   In addition to the genre-altering and community-building music, they also produced documentaries like the Wattstax concert and documentary in Los Angeles,  a film, according to PBS POV, that “captures a heady moment in mid-1970s, “black-is-beautiful” African-American culture, when Los Angeles’s black community came together just seven years after the Watts riots to celebrate its survival and a renewed hope in its future.” To enable everyone a chance to attend, tickets were sold for only a dollar each.  On many levels Stax was a movement a gave birth to a new form of music, soul music,  a raw and transcendent blend of gospel, blues, country, and jazz.

Here’s what PBS says about Stax and this film:

The legacy of Stax Records is a unique one that spans more than half a century. Stax Records is critical in American music history as it’s one of the most popular soul music record labels of all time – second only to Motown in sales and influence, but first in gritty, raw, stripped-down soul music. In 15 years, Stax placed more than 167 hit songs in the Top 100 on the pop charts, and a staggering 243 hits in the Top 100 R&B charts. It launched the careers of such legendary artists as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, Rufus & Carla Thomas, Booker T, & the MGs, and numerous others. Among the many artists who recorded on the various Stax Records labels were the Staple Singers, Luther Ingram, Wilson Pickett, Albert King, Big Star, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, the Rance Allen Group, and Moms Mabley.

But Stax Records was more than just a label. It was a culture. While segregation was fervently supported in the South during Stax’s formative years in the 1960s, Stax was one of the most successfully integrated companies in the country – from top management and administration to its artists. With more than 200 employees, it was the fifth-largest African-American owned business in the United States during its time.

Teachers should take note that this film comes with a lesson plan including assignments that help students to both identify genres of music and the role Stax played in the community.  Check out the lesson plans by clicking here. 

For more information on the film and viewing options click here.  

The Seed and the Story: ARVAC and VISTA, Folk arts and the War on Poverty in Arkansas.

Click on the photo to connect to ordering info via Amazon.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

Alongside researching the history of Chickalah and Harkey’s Valley, I’ve been reading In Service to America: A History of Vista in Arkansas 1965-1985.  Written by Marvin Schwartz, this 1988 publication traces the VISTA organization throughout the state.   I’ve been particularly interested in the work of this organization in central Arkansas, including the creation of a craft co-op, which served both Yell and Pope Counties.

Created in 1965, VISTA was an outgrowth of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  This national legislation sought to provide lasting and locally based solutions to struggling communities.  Operating much like a domestic version of the Peace Corp, volunteers in the VISTA program received a subsistence wage and lived in economically poor areas where they worked in partnership with community members to generate economic initiatives and help residents gain access to health care and adequate food.  VISTA volunteers, many of them college age, worked to help create grassroots programs which focused on local needs, thus making each VISTA program unique to its region.

In 1960 approximately 40% of the population in the river valley was living below the poverty line.  Illiteracy, inadequate housing, and unemployment were rampant.  One of the first VISTA programs in the nation was the Yell County Economic Opportunity Program, a pilot recipient of an OEA grant.  The organization was soon absorbed into its larger sister organization, ARVAC (Arkansas River Valley Area Council), which hosted numerous national and local volunteers.   ARVAC formed programs such as the Housing Development Corporation, an organization utilizing the rural tradition of barn raising to help low income families secure homes, and ARVAC Rural Folkcrafts, a network which provided a market for rural quilters, white oak basket makers, seamstresses, and other artisans, allowing them to sell their traditional wares and earn a living for their families. Another organization, Counseling Associates (formerly known as ARVAC Community Mental Health Program), began under the ARVAC VISTA program and operates independently today.

In its early days VISTA brought in volunteers from around the nation, but in later years became more focused on long-term, locally based volunteers, which helped the programs thrive.   From the beginning, the goal of VISTA programs was to become self-sufficient. ARVAC stuck around and quickly became a model of successful VISTA organizing.   ARVAC’s craft co-op, which began in 1975, continued throughout the 1980s, as did housing initiative, which later became known as Universal, INC.

Schwartz’s book features interviews with a few river valley VISTA workers, including the late Myrtle Cress who worked in Ola and Betty Burnett who organized a housing co-op in Dardanelle.  It also highlights the work of Lou Vitale who was instrumental in founding the crafts co-op. I’d love to learn more about the creation of these initiatives, how people felt about the work, the craftspeople who sold at the co-op, and the use of the barn raising tradition in area housing initiatives.   Were you affiliated with VISTA?  Did you or someone in your family sell crafts at the co-op?  Perhaps your house was built utilizing the barn raising tradition?  I’d love to hear more.   An extra special thanks to Mike Luster of the Arkansas Folklife Program for introducing me to this book.

Also please don’t forget we’re still working on compiling stories of plants and seeds for our book on stories and gardening in the area.  We’d love to include your story!  To learn more visit us here.  To read a little bit about the backstory of the garden book read this column.

The Seed and the Story for March 7: Sulphur Springs

Old hotel. Date unknown. From the Sulphur Springs Cemetery Association, Yell County, Arkansas.

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

Most Arkansans are familiar with the historic healing waters of Hot Springs in Garland County and the former resorts of Eureka Springs in the Carroll County Ozarks.  In the mid to late 1800s Yell County, Arkansas was once home to its own resort community.  Located about ten miles southwest of Dardanelle near the rural communities of Chickalah and Harkey’s Valley, Sulphur Springs was the site of a two-story hotel and free flowing medicinal springs that attracted folks from as far away as Boston and California.

According to the 1997 book Yell County Heritage published by the Yell County Historical and Genealogical Association, the first hotel was burned by “bushwhackers” during the Civil War.  A new hotel was built in 1867 and completed in 1872. At one point the building was owned by a New York-based company, and in 1878 the thirty-six room structure was filled to capacity, populated by victims of the yellow fever epidemic from Memphis.  By that time the town had grown considerably and boasted multiple streets and several houses.  The hotel itself encompassed an entire block.  Photos of the large wood structure show several white women, and at least one young girl, sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch.

By 1901 the structure and the springs were owned by Judge John F. Choate, a Yell County Clerk who raised a family in the area. According to reports, he gave the springs over to the public, an effort to spread the wealth of the healing waters, which before were reserved only for visitors with great wealth.  By 1926 fire claimed the hotel once again and the structure was never rebuilt.  According to written reports, both members of the Harkey and Tucker families worked at the hotel in the early 1900s, but very few oral histories of the town have been recorded.  Chickalah native Bud Rector, born in 1914, remembers the hotel, but says that as a young boy he never had occasion to venture down into the town itself, which was a considerable distance from Harkey’s Valley when your only mode of transpiration was walking.  He does, however, remember the strong smell of sulphur, as do many others who were raised in the area long after the hotel burned.

As I learn more about the community, several questions come to mind that I suspect many of you could answer.  How and when were the springs discovered and how many locals were able to access their supposed healing powers? What information is out there to help flesh out our understanding of what drew people to the location?  Is there anyone still living who worked at, or visited, the hotel and the spring?  Perhaps you were a child when the hotel was around and remember growing up in the vicinity.

And what about those outside the community?  Surely in an attic somewhere in Boston, Chicago, or New Orleans there must be a dusty shoebox and inside a postcard from a deceased relative who attempted to find healing in a rural Arkansas community so far from home.  I’d love to hear your stories.  I look forward to learning more.

The Seed and the Story for January 25, 2012: Visiting with Bud Rector

Bud Rector and J.L. Martin Chickalah, Arkansas, 2012

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

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Before I get into this week’s column, I want to thank all those who called or wrote in response to the previous column about the history of Chickalah.  It’s such an honor to hear from readers with memories and stories to share, and I’m thankful to all of you who took the time to tell me about the places you call home.  I learned from Carolyn Garner that back in the 1940s people would gather to watch outdoor movies on the back wall of Neil Cowger’s Chickalah store.  And I had several people tell me about the rural baseball league from the area, including the days when the Dean brothers lived on Chickalah Mountain.  So this week’s column is a continuation of the recent Chickalah research and will highlight just few stories I learned from a man many of you know and love: Bud Rector.

My father and I recently had the opportunity to visit with Bud in his home on Harkey’s Valley road in Chickalah where we were greeted by his friendly dog who got up from her cozy front porch chair to come say hello.  Bud Rector was born in 1914 and has lived in the Harkey’s Valley area all of his life.  He’s hauled logs in the timber woods, raised chickens and cows, worked for the WPA, driven the rural bus route for Dardanelle Schools for decades, and traveled throughout the area singing in a gospel quartet.  He’s also an excellent storyteller and a joy to be around.  I can’t begin to do justice to all his stories in this short column, so I’ll just highlight a few.

For decades the Chickalah area was home to a thriving timber economy, and Bud recalled many of the early logging operations and sawmills that dotted the mountains.  He and my father swapped memories of those days when, as Bud recalled, “everybody was going around with the chopping ax and cross cut saw.”  While my father recalled skidding logs, Bud and his brother Buford found work hauling the lumber to town.  He mentioned his short stint with the WPA where men were given shovels to help dig out the bluff and told of the well known store in Sulpher Springs operated by a man with, quite possibly, one of the best names I’ve ever come across: Bonaparte Rutledge.  Come to find out, my own grandparents were married in front of Mr. Rutledge store.

Thanks your suggestions, I was sure to ask him about the rural baseball leagues that were so popular in the area during the 1930s and 1940s.  He recalled teams from Spring Creek, Chickalah Mountain, Chicklalah Village, Slo Fork, Pisgah, Casa, Sulpher Springs, Ard, and Harkey’s Valley, the team for which he played.  While he never had the chance to play with Dizzy, he did play with Paul and their younger brother, often known as “Poodle.” The teams played at places like the old Gatley ball field near Sulphar Springs and in numerous cow pastures all around the county.  Readers might recall the team’s manager Pete McMullan and some of well-known players like Burt Tucker, Roger Harkey, Grover Martin, John Martin, and Ame Bates.

In the near future I’ll have some of the audio of Bud up online so you can listen to Bud telling these and other stories in his own words.   Do you remember the ball teams, the logging woods, or Bonepart’s store?  I’d love to hear from you!  A very special thank you to Mr. Bud Rector for allowing me to visit and share some of his stories here.

The Seed and the Story for January 11, 2012: Chickalah Academy

Chickalah Methodist Cemetery. Click on photo to see full listing of graves in cemetery.

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend! And thanks for reading!

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I recently began doing some research on the history of Chickalah and have been reading two books which provide a great deal of information about this and other rural communities in the area.  Both Wayne Banks’ 1959 publication, A History of Yell County Arkansas, and Catherine Eikleberry Roger’s Readin’, ‘Ritin, and ‘Rithmetic, published in 1981, are filled with oral histories from community members who have long since passed away.  In addition to many of the stories I’ve heard over the years from family and friends, these books help shed light on this community which once boasted eight businesses and two hundred and fifty residents.

Today Chickalah is a small, rural community with a few churches, a community center, and a rural fire department.  In the late 1800s, however, Chickalah, often referred to as Chickalah Village, was located about a mile north of its present location and was home to the Chickalah Academy, a two story building which provided the first non-denominational educational opportunities in the area.  Prior to the Academy, all schools in the village were subscription based and conducted by the Methodist church on Harkey’s Valley road across from Little Chickalah Creek.  The Chickalah Academy, located near where the fire station stands today, was a two story building with four separate entrances.  The school boasted three departments: “Primary,” “Grammar” and “Academic,” and in addition to these regular classes students also had access to classes in vocal instruction, piano, organ, guitar, and violin. 

The Chickalah Academy burned sometime during the early 1900s, and although another two story building was constructed, the subsequent school appears to have only hired two teachers.  Eventually that building was torn down and replaced by the one-story, two room building that still operates today as the Chickalah Community Center.  As many readers may remember, beginning in the 1930s, the Chickalah School began a gradual process of consolidation with Dardanelle Public Schools.

To my knowledge there is no one living today who attended the Chickalah Academy, but some of you have probably heard stories about the school, and no doubt there are many readers who remember attending the later school before consolidation.  In my quest to understand more about Chickalah, I’m especially curious to learn more about the coming of Highway 27 and how this shifted the population from what is often referred to as Chicklaha Village to the Chicklah we know today.   I’m also curious to learn more about a shoe factory that may have once been located in the area.  Operated by the McCray family, the factory would have existed sometime in the mid 1800s.  I’d also love to learn as much as possible about the sawmills in the area and the role they played in the larger timber industry. Do you know anything about these topics?  I’d love to include this and any other information in our ongoing research at the community center I’m working to open, the McElroy House: Organization for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action.   As always, I’d love to hear your stories.  You can visit me online at www.boileddownjuice.com.  If you want to know more about the McElroy House and our goals, you can check us out online at www.mcelroyhouse.wordpress.com. Of course, I always love handwritten letters or phone calls as well!  Thanks so much for reading and sharing your stories.  I feel very thankful to be learning from you all.   

The Seed and the Story for November 2, 2011: Rest in Peace Exhibit on Death and Dying in the Ozarks

From the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History

The Seed and the Story column is published every other week in the Post Dispatch and syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper!

      Rituals to honor the dead are a fundamental part of the human experience.  Here in the Yell County and River Valley, funerals, visitations, and Decoration Days are just a few of the traditions we observe that pay homage to the deceased and acknowledge a family’s loss.  A photo exhibit currently on display at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale examines the history of regional funeral and death rituals in the Ozark Mountains through the lens of a lesser-discussed tradition: mortuary photographs.  Entitled “Rest in Peace,” the exhibit features black and white photos of burials and grave side services, still born infants surrounded by flowers, shots of decorated graves mounded with flowers, and portraits of family members in mourning clothing.  The images are tender and moving in their depictions of human fragility.

      The images might appear unusual to some in this age where our sick often die in hospitals and professionals take care of everything from post mortem care to grave digging.  While our medical advancements have certainly not saved us from the loss of family and friends, we have been able, to some degree, to remove ourselves from much of the physical process surrounding death and dying.  This exhibit features a time when death was less hidden.  The introduction to the exhibit explains it this way: “In some ways, our ancestors were closer to the realities of death a century ago than we are today. Because many of them lived with their extended family in small communities, without access to hospitals and funeral homes, they saw all phases of dying and death. They took care of the ill and prepared the deceased’s body. They made funeral clothes and sat with the corpse before burial. They built the coffin and dug the grave. They grieved with family and friends and memorialized their loved ones.”  While many of us sit with the dying, seldom do we help dig the grave or dress the body of a loved one or friend. 

One of the most striking photos shows a group of family members in Kingston, Arkansas lovingly placing the lid on the coffin of their loved one after the visitation had ended.  Abby Burnett, a historian who helped with research for the exhibit, believes that in an age where few people had cameras it’s telling that they were often used to photograph the dead.  Mourning was, to a large degree, a communal activity, she explains, not something to be hidden.  “What I learned as I researched is how much we’ve gotten away from a practice that, at one time, involved everyone. Even small children played a part,” she explained. One of the more touching photos from the exhibit shows four young girls posing beside a flower-mounded grave.  The caption explains that young children would often walk in procession behind the coffin, even serve as pallbearers.   This is certainly different from our modern response of increasingly shielding the younger generation from concepts of death, often excluding them from our communal rituals for saying goodbye.  

      The exhibit “Rest In Peace” will be on display the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History through December  17^th.  The Shiloh Museum is home to an extensive photo collection depicting of life in the Ozarks and features regularly rotating exhibits.  They can be found online at www.shilohmuseum.org. 

I’d love to hear your memories of such topics here in the Yell County area.  Do you have a story to share?  Email me at the contact link above or leave a comment below.  Thanks so much for reading.   

Thoughts on a Landscape of Faith. By NElda Ault.

Fayette Cemetery facing west. Photo by NElda Ault.

I received an email the other day from good friend and fellow folklorist NElda Ault, which contained three beautiful photos of Decoration Days near her home in rural, central Utah.

Throughout our graduate school days, NElda and I spent a great deal of time talking about the nuances in the drastically different landscapes we call home.  I remember one afternoon as we were driving through rural Kentucky, a landscape that is much like my native Arkansas,  she mentioned how she missed the wide, expanse of the desert.  The hills and thick groves of trees in the southern mountains, she explained, felt cramped in comparison to the openness she was used to back home in Utah.

That comment stayed with me.  Although I had never been to Utah, I suspect the openness would overwhelm me and leave me longing for thick clusters of vegetation.  We went on to have many subsequent conversations, ruminating on how the landscapes we internalize in our childhood years often frames our adult perceptions of the world—past, present, even future. I love the way NElda helped me to understand more about what it means to call a place home.  Whenever I see a photo of the western deserts or those huge mountains, I think of NElda and her love for open spaces.

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What’s In the Works ~ The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research

After much thought and time spent wondering where to go from here, I have decided to begin the process of creating a small oral history and folklife research center in my hometown. I have included my plans and ideas for the Center listed at the bottom of this post. I welcome any feedback! Continue reading »

Native Seeds/S*E*A*R*C*H

Just the other day my friend Dr. Kristin Dowell, an anthropologist who works with Native American communities, suggested I look into a project called Native Seeds, a seed bank and cultural memory bank based in the southwest. It am so excited about the information that I had to post about it.
Native Seeds

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”
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