Branding the Ozarks

YOU ONE-GALLUSED HILL BILLIES, BEHAVE

Genuine Curteich – Chicago. “C. T. Art – Colortone” Postcard, early 1950s. (click to enlarge)

Genuine Curteich – Chicago. “C. T. Art – Colortone” Postcard, early 1950s. (click to enlarge)

hill billy n. Uncouth countrymen, particularly from the hills. “You one-gallused hill billies, behave yourselves.”

This definition of a hillbilly is from an entry by University of Arkansas professor J. W. Carr in Vol. II of Dialect Notes, published in 1904.  It is the earliest academic recognition of the word, which was likely coined in the preceding decade. “One-gallused,” denoting suspenders with one broken strap worn by a poor rustic, is earlier rural slang than “hill billie”.

Relax, self-identified hillbillies and hard country music fans.  We are not assailing your proud but mythological heritage. Things hillbilly – music, humor, cartoons, feuding mountaineer fables – have been motivated by capitalism, facilitated by industrial technology, and distributed by mass media to serve modern sensibilities.

Don’t believe the advertising. Disregard the packaging. Unwrapped, this anti-modern icon is revealed to be a hybrid rural/urban interactive product assembled from many sources. Our uncouth, but musical, countryman is not exclusively of the Appalachians, his legendary association with the mountain South notwithstanding.

Hillbilly humor for instance has been influenced by New England books and plays, minstrel shows, and vaudeville. Country music, originally called ‘hillbilly’, has undeniable southern white roots, but has had players, fans, and management from other demographics.  Folks with a rural family background are especially interested in accounts of that rude past. Authentic or contrived, they don’t seem to care.  Few, however, wish to return to the harsh privations and poverty of subsistence agriculture as the “Who Longs For The Good Old Days?” postcard asks. Visions of Arcadian rusticity are more likely to be floating in the heads of educated urbanites.

Only comic strip hillbillies are true primitives. Country musicians from the start embraced improvements to transportation and communications. They have since shown an extraordinary capacity to respond to changing public taste and unfolding commercial opportunities. Though this genre ritualistically acknowledges rural traditions, its performers and their audiences are forever evolving and adapting to new circumstances.

This pop culture icon is a product of the machine age’s alternating nostalgia and disdain for our agrarian past.  Hillbillies are not really an outsider, other, or folk phenomenon. Hillbillies are interesting, sometimes captivating, even if they are manufactured rustics. There is no one hillbilly type, but many and they continue to evolve.

Just as the country was slipping into a catastrophic financial chasm in the late 1920s, mass media discovered the public had an insatiable interest in the outlandish behavior of impoverished rustics.  The hillbilly is the incarnation of anti-materialism. Yet he lives self-satisfied within a family, in a community, somehow surviving though ignorant, foolish, and often a vessel of bad habits. He does possess frontier skills and is stubbornly self-reliant. It was during this tragic time that the colorful mountaineer character thrived providing some consolation to a populace who felt its streamliner train ride to modernity had gone off the rails.

Just as the country was slipping into a catastrophic financial chasm in the late 1920s, mass media discovered the public had an insatiable interest in the outlandish behavior of impoverished rustics. The hillbilly is the incarnation of anti-materialism. Yet he lives self-satisfied within a family, in a community, somehow surviving though ignorant, foolish, and often a vessel of bad habits. He does possess frontier skills and is stubbornly self-reliant. It was during this tragic time that the colorful mountaineer character thrived providing some consolation to a populace who felt its streamliner train ride to modernity had gone off the rails.

Hillbillies are a six-pack of fun, but with hangover potential.  Droll, but given to outbursts of violence, they are a blend of half a dozen stock American characters. Unlike African-Americans or Native Americans, these rustics are yet allowable stereotypes.  The rains of reform have not sanitized this personification of multi-dimensional incorrectness. Nor has he been completely forgotten.

Hillbillies are a six-pack of fun, but with hangover potential. Droll, but given to outbursts of violence, they are a blend of half a dozen stock American characters. Unlike African-Americans or Native Americans, these rustics are yet allowable stereotypes. The rains of reform have not sanitized this personification of multi-dimensional incorrectness. Nor has he been completely forgotten.

about-6This content is edited from our 500 page book project, Hillbillies Rustics to Rednecks. Join our email list to be notified of its availability.


BUFFALOS OF BUFFALO – Part 2

bl053

Minimalist buffalos on a fence, Buffalo, Missouri (click to enlarge)

After discovering a startling, hundred and fifty foot or so long, grazing buffalo painting on the side of a new flea market we returned the next Sunday to pursue photographing these symbols of Buffalo, Missouri. Actually it wasn’t until we had gotten home and looked at Crystal’s digital shots of the eye-catching mural on a computer screen that we decided to return. The hunting was good.

Renditions of bison are scattered all over town. A variety of styles were evident from sketchy, minimalist drawings to every-little-shaggy-hair kind of realism. There were naïve versions; others looked to be borrowed from the clip art now readily available on the Internet. Downtown there was another mural, a more conventional rendition than the flea market art by Susan Owensby. This work on a brick wall was signed Ron and Laura Allison.

In the late 1970s we often drove through Buffalo on our way to some place else. It was still pretty much a farming trade center then. The largest employer was a poultry processing center that has since closed. An improved highway has facilitated commuting to Springfield. New businesses are out on 65 highway, but the old downtown isn’t burdened by buildings about to collapse as is the case in many small towns.

The abundance of buffalo imagery we take to indicate a resurgence of civic pride. Nothing says Buffalo like a buffalo. Perhaps civic boosters have learned from progressive municipalities like Springfield that a “vibrant” art community is good for business. Buffalo had its third annual art fair this year. But there seems to be no top-down imposition of standards on the depictions of bison. Even if it’s an idea introduced from the outside, it is undeniably popular.

Rural Ruins Junkies was the working title for a book project we started a few years ago. Then we were visiting more isolated villages that were fast crumbling into photogenic ruins. This was not a particularly original idea, and it brought back how we had once traveled the rural Midwest picking antiques from such environments. Under Confessions we’ll post a fragment of writing we did that contrasts with our more upbeat coverage of Buffalo.

At any rate that Sunday Buffalo shoot revealed a less melancholy small town than we had imaged when working on Rural Ruins Junkies. Seeing this excess of civic symbolism did not erase our recollection of fading small towns, but it did mitigate the fatalism. Our experience in Buffalo dovetails with some observations made revisiting Branson – i.e. the Hypercommon hypothesis. Nostalgia can be overly pessimistic. The Buffalos of Buffalo, an exercise in iconography that was only incidentally esthetic, exuded a small bit of hopeful energy in their variety and abundance.

bl057

Bar with Anthony Bail Bonds sign, Buffalo, Missouri (click to enlarge)

Such unschooled graphics may not be conventionally acceptable as folk, naïve, or primitive art, but its assertion of naïve confidence in commonality is arresting.

We will, by the way, stop again in Buffalo and document the abundance and variety of the many Bail Bonds businesses.

Click any image to view a gallery of Buffalo photographs by Crystal Payton

BUFFALOS OF BUFFALO – Part 1

bc041

Buffalo Motel, Buffalo Missouri, 2007. (Click to enlarge.)

For decades travelers on U.S. Highway 65 have been reminded they are motoring through Buffalo, Missouri by an eye-catching, neon-outlined Buffalo Motel sign. This county seat of about three thousand got its name – one might guess – from a pioneer encounter with a bison. This is a forested region that once had strips of prairie, buffalo habitat, which were kept free of trees by fires started by the Osage Indians. By the time America acquired these lands the Osages had eliminated such big game in western Missouri and were pursuing these beasts hundreds of miles into western prairies. There might have been a few stragglers, but the big herds had long been gone from this region.

A credible account of the origins of the town’s name is on the website of the City of Buffalo. Mark Reynolds of Tennessee, it states, was the first white settler. “Mr. Reynolds found a stake on one of the Blue Mounds that had been left there earlier by some unknown traveler and he placed the nearby skull of a buffalo on that stake. Hence the name, Buffalo Head Prairie.”

Wikipedia has another explanation. “Buffalo was laid out in 1854 by Joseph F. Miles. It was named after Miles’ birthplace at Buffalo, New York.”

When the Buffalo Inn & Suites was built it too used a more abstracted buffalo on its sign. Obviously the citizens believed the genesis of its name had something to do with the hulking prairie animal.

Crystal Payton photographing the Buffalo Missouri flea market mural. (Click to enlarge.)

Crystal Payton photographing the Buffalo Missouri flea market mural. (Click to enlarge.)

This August, coming back from a trip to document an alleged abandoned cemetery on the shores of Truman Reservoir, we turned into a new flea market parking lot and discovered a small herd of buffalo had rumbled into town. On the side of a long, corrugated metal building, under a purple and magenta radioactive sky, were seven buffalos in various tranquil poses. The tufts of grass sticking through the gravel of the parking lot looked like an overgrazed buffalo prairie. The mural spoke to Crystal. While the senior photographer with the heavy, detachable lens Nikon went inside to futilely look through stalls of crafts and garage sale merchandise she took a series of shots with her little Sony camera. These images would later prove that the one with the most expensive camera doesn’t always grasp the photogenic potential of a given built environment.

Crystal also photographed a billboard that depicted a buffalo for Buffalo Prairie Dentist, “Smiles above the rest. Welcome to Buffalo,” at the entrance to the flea market parking lot. The bold mural was signed “Susan Owensby, June 2014.” The Buffalo dental billboard looked new too.

What’s with all this embrace of buffalos, we wondered. We’ve been driving through Buffalo for more than twenty years and were not aware of the current fad of buffalo branding. The next weekend we drove back and found the town had indeed gone buffalo crazy.

We’ll cover this in Part Two of the Buffalos of Buffalo.

Click on any image below for a gallery of Crystal’s Buffalo mural photographs.