Branding the Ozarks, Hillbillies

PROBABLE GENESIS OF THE HILLBILLY OUTHOUSE CLICHÉ: PART 2

November 3, 2014 • 1 Comment

This 1919 sheet music was written by Will E. Skidmore and Marshal Walker. It is subtitled “A Novelty Surprise Package.” In the center of the “drawn by Gosh” cartooned cover is a photo captioned “Successfully Introduced by Chick Sale in New York Winter Garden.”

From the lyrics of ON THE OZARK TRAIL:

Way down yon-der in the O-zark Moun-tins, where folks aint ver-y good at books or coun-tin; There lived old Zeke, an odd “Ga-loot”, -Bout all he knew was how to shoot; He had a gal and he would al-ways tell ‘er To nev-er monk-ey with a cit-y Fel-ler; This cit-y chap came with-out fail And Zek-ie shot ‘im on the O-zark Trail

CHORUS (slow)

On the O-zark Trail – that’s where they shot him On the O-zark Trail; They come and got ‘im , Zek-ie saved his Fam’-ly’s Name; But since that cit-y Fel-ler came Zek-ie‘s gal don’t act the same – On the O-zark Trail. On the Trail. –

Though the hayseeds on the cover aren’t dressed hillbilly and the word isn’t used, the Ozarks is identified as a place populated by ignorant and violence-prone people who fear competition from “city fellers” for their women. Gradually the generic country bumpkin merged with the maverick mountaineer of journalism and fiction. The earlier rube survived in country comedy concurrently with the rawer hillbilly that was not always so funny, and if he were the humor might not be of the gentle bucolic variety.

It’s a theory of course that the hillbilly outhouse fixture and its abundant commodifications derived from Chuck Sales privy builder skit, but we’ve discovered no other antecedents in hillbilly history. Our point is that the hillbilly gradually absorbed many of the primitive traits that were attributed to rural folks nationwide. The Ozarks even in 1919 had already been targeted as being especially “hick” even before the hillbilly had been completely created by mass media.

Branding the Ozarks, Hillbillies

PROBABLE GENESIS OF THE HILLBILLY OUTHOUSE CLICHÉ: PART 1

October 31, 2014 • 0 Comments

Charles (Chic) Sales’ 1929 book, The Specialist, along with his stage version of his story of a dedicated outhouse architect introduced the “little house out back” as a subject of humor to the broad American public. After Sales’ death in 1936, it became a hillbilly trope and its vaudeville origins were all but forgotten. (click to enlarge)

This outhouse business is strong evidence that the hillbilly is a synthesis assembled from rural and urban realities, mutual misconceptions, and collective national fantasies. Hillbilly music, moonshine making, and feuds have some genesis in frontier and relic pioneer societies. On the other hand, outhouses as a hillbilly trope might be attributable to an all but forgotten vaudevillian named Charles (Chick) Sale.

Sale was born in Huron, South Dakota in 1885. The tall, rail-thin comedian had a genius for mimicking rural types, which he perfected on the boards of vaudeville. Later he had a Hollywood movie career where he played elderly, naïve, but affable rubes. Reviewers praised his convincing “agricultural types” which conveyed “irresistible nostalgia.” He became a mainliner at top venues like the Ziegfeld Follies and Schubert’s Winter Garden. Sale developed a crowd-pleasing monologue about a fictional carpenter who built privies. It was so popular other comics swiped it. In order to protect his creation through copyright law, Sale published a slim illustrated version titled The Specialist. It sold a million copies.

To his chagrin, outhouses began to be called “Chick Sales.” It’s written in folksy dialogue and pretends to be an after-dinner speech delivered by carpenter Lem Putt. The Specialist proudly describes his trade as the champion privy builder of Sagamon County (Illinois). It ‘s a clever ploy to discuss a delicate subject for proper middle class Americans of that era. Victorian taboos yet colored 1920s speech. Lem was able to fairly straightforwardly bring up taboo subjects like multi-holed privies, women’s shyness about being seen going to the outhouse, even the relative merits of mail order catalog pages vs. corncobs.

Hillbilly Plumbing and Hauling is a firm that supplies port-a-potties. (click to enlarge)

Nowhere does Sale indicate this was for or about hillfolk. Like several bits of vaudeville humor the subject became part of the shtick of string band comics, eventually migrated into hillbilly mythos, and has since been artifactually perpetuated in a thousand ways. It’s true that as sanitary awareness replaced outhouses with indoor toilets, rural areas were the last to be modernized. In time, hillbillies – as the penultimate rubes – became uniquely associated with a number of outdated practices and anachronistic behaviors that urban Americans conveniently forgot their own ancestors once participated in.

Branding the Ozarks, Hillbillies

HILLBILLY OUTHOUSES

October 29, 2014 • 0 Comments

Hillbilly homesteads are rarely without an outhouse, inevitably embellished with a half moon carved in the door. Countless postcards and souvenirs perpetuate this concept. Unlike other hillbilly attributes like long guns and moonshine jugs, this privy mountaineer syndrome has no genesis in historical accounts. Back in the log cabin era, dimension lumber to construct the little house out back wasn’t available. We have never seen a log cabin privy. Pioneers likely did their business in the woods in shallow pits occasionally spanning them with a section of tree trunk to sit on.

Jokey souvenirs and novelties of hillbilly outhouses have been marketed to a public that readily accepts the backwoods mountaineer as a symbol of perpetual revolt against industrial society’s improvements to hygiene, health, and comfort. (click on any image to start slide show)

Our next post will explore the likelihood that the hillbilly outhouse syndrome did not originate in the mountains.

Branding the Ozarks, Hillbillies

HILLBILLY CLOWN SHRINERS

October 22, 2014 • 1 Comment

Shriner hillbilly degree emblem. Click to enlarge.

Hillbilly Days, a three day festival held each April at Pikeville, Kentucky, is a mountaineer rustic’s Mardi Gras. From thirty states, 100,000 Shriners come to the town of 8,000 in the heart of coal country and the epicenter of the McCoy/Hatfield feud to yet again prove that fraternal organization’s unique capacity for public spectacle. They do as well raise money for a children’s hospital.

The dress code at this event has not been handicapped by previous portrayals of mountaineers. As the postcard shows, the outfits look to be as inspired by 1950s local television kiddy show clowns as Li’l Abner or Snuffy Smith. Jugs and old, hopefully inoperable, long guns are popular, and restore a modicum of hillbilly authenticity. An invented folky dialect is spoken by the imported revelers.

In Hillbillyland professor J. W. Williamson called the Shriners’ gathering “an extraordinary and instituionalized example of hillbilly role playing.” Dr. Williamson found analogies in the behavior of an European archetype. “Like the fool or the village idiot, the American hillbilly clown is an impudent mirror held up in front of us—both a reflection of and a window into something rarely glimpsed, the native deep and sable face of this creature we still are.”

Postcard 1970s. Criticism by the sensitive and denouncements of the politically correct have not dampened these goofy hillbilly reenactors as their mission is to raise money for crippled children.

Except for the Kentucky Derby, it’s that state’s largest cultural event. Of course, there are plenty of letters to the editor suggesting this gathering degrades the dignity of Appalachian residents. That hasn’t stopped the normally hyper-sensitive to controversy Coca-Cola company from annually issuing collectible commemorative soft drink products (opposite page).

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

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Branding the Ozarks, Small Towns

TRADE CENTERS – PART 2

October 20, 2014 • 0 Comments

Civic Theater, Osceola, St. Clair County (click to enlarge)

The Ozark-prairie border economy is dependent on agriculture. As with much of rural America, the decline of family farms has left under-utilized retail spaces. Country stores in hamlets and crossroads have been affected the most. Transactions are still made around courthouse squares. With paint and plastic signs, the nineteenth-century buildings in Osceola are open for business. The art moderne movie house across the square isn’t a victim of hard times on the farm—single screen theatres are obsolete everywhere. Perhaps the grandest structure of the region is the Opry House at Greenfield. Drama, Comedy, and Opera are not only boldly stamped on the ornate cornice, plays are still performed by local thespians on the 128-year old upstairs stage.

Businesses, Greenfield, Dade County (click to enlarge)

Towns strung along the Burlington Northern Railroad—Golden City, Lockwood, and Greenfield—have their fair share of empty commercial buildings but also some glimmer of life. Bustled they haven’t for years, but one can get a tank of gas and a good plate lunch. Some of their architectural heritage has been kept up, like the 1903 Block Building on Lockwood’s Main Street which is now a furniture store.

Before the War Between the States, Osceola thrived as the head of steamboat navigation on the Osage River. In 1861 radical Kansas Senator/Union General James Henry Lane and his Red Leg army looted and torched the county seat of St. Clair County, displacing 2,500 citizens. Railroads reached Osceola in the 1880s and it grew back to half its pre-war size. Today the railroads are gone, Highway 13 bypasses it and Truman Lake proved to be of small economic benefit. Many of the commercial buildings around the courthouse square are vacant, but well maintained, awaiting a return of prosperity from a yet unknown windfall. The 2000 population was 835.

Osceola, St. Clair County (click to enlarge)

Brick and mortar, wood and tin casualties of market wars and change are everywhere in America. Wounded buildings conspicuously accumulate in rural settings where there is no urban renewal or subsidized gentrification. No, Crystal, these old walls don’t talk. They do reflect light in such a way that an expressive photograph can be taken. Some of these images are, I believe, worth looking at more than once. Some of these places I’ve returned to two, three, four times hoping for inspiration and a Turner-watercolor sky.

For gallery of Leland Payton’s photographs of trade centers, click on any image.

Opry House, Greenfield, Dade County

Lockwood, Dade County

House and water tower, Greenfield, Dade County

Osceola, St. Clair County

Civic Theater, Osceola, St. Clair County

Closed store, Dadeville, Dade County

Café, Dadeville, Dade County

For more about the Ozark Prairie Border and to buy a print copy, click on the cover.

To buy a PDF of Ozark-Prairie Border click here

Branding the Ozarks, Small Towns

TRADE CENTERS – PART 1

October 17, 2014 • 0 Comments

1915 bank, Vista, St. Clair County. That there are so many defunct bank buildings in small towns gives one pause. (click to enlarge)

A going business has a sign that tells you what it is. Unless the architecture is unusual, I’d need to get paid to take a picture. Should the venture close and still have its signage, the words become sufficiently ambiguous to trigger my modernist sensibilities. Such a statement of the transitory character of trade gets my attention. If nature is working to reclaim the site and make it habitable for birds, bats, wasps, mice, spiders and snakes, the wreckage almost certainly would be worth half a dozen exposures. I’m in recovery from Romanticism but obviously I’ve lapsed.

Coming upon a weather-beaten abandoned farmhouse brings up feelings more traditional than modern. Evaluating the pictorial potential of a busted commercial enterprise, I am not pulled into any whirlpools of mythic agrarian memory. The back story of a bypassed gas station or grocery store is melodrama not tragedy. Lost family farms are too often the end of a way of life. Retailers may suffer setbacks but usually live on to sell another day—at a better location.

Jerico Springs, Cedar County (click to enlarge)

At Jerico Springs the collection of closed businesses has the dramatic look of a film set. The name of the town sounds like a movie title. Its dozen derelict buildings could be the backdrop for an existential drama. My photos might be better in black and white. Pointing my lens west, I frame a park with old trees, greenish grass (even in this drought) and a rock bandstand. The spring water, once believed to have curative benefits, trickles into a basin, staining the concrete burnt sienna. Jerico Springs the unscripted, unmade movie should have, if not a Hollywood ending, a hopeful last act.

I returned and shot an alternate, more upbeat conclusion to the Jericho Springs story. On a crisp September morn, with some tinges of pink in a blue sky, I redid the broken block of buildings and the rock rubble bandstand. As the movie industry knows, aging actors need the most flattering lighting.

Park, Eldorado Springs, Cedar County (click to enlarge)

Eldorado Springs, sixteen miles north, has ensconced its mineralized spring outlet in an elaborate stonework setting. Architecture themed on unscientific belief can produce good results. Rivaling for a time Eureka Springs, Arkansas as a health spa, this small town still uses the park as a community gathering place. Located at the edge of the prairie plain, Eldorado lacks the “semi-alpine” setting of the famous Arkansas tourist attraction.

Although the spas ultimately failed, the region continued to court recreationalists. Truman and Stockton lakes have attracted fishermen and boaters, but few family vacationers. Branson is 100 miles south with clearer reservoirs, forested hills, accessibility to population centers and a heritage of aggressive promotion and development. Turkey and deer hunting in the Ozark-prairie border are good. Guys with shotguns and rifles unfortunately don’t leave a lot of money behind.

For gallery of Leland Payton’s photographs of trade centers, click on any image.