Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins by Brooks Blevins (review)

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• Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins by Brooks Blevins
• Kevin C. Motl

Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins. By Brooks Blevins. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. Pp. [viii], 260. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-220-7.)

Brooks Blevins, Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, delivers a savory anthology of essays on the Ozarks highlands—a region of mountains and plateaus extending from northwest Arkansas into southern Missouri and northeast Oklahoma—and its people in Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins. Of the thirteen chapters, six are new, while the remainder are republished material with modest revisions. Each chapter aspires to render the once-invisible visible. After all, as Blevins laments in a later chapter, Appalachia has a better publicist, and thus a lens into the world of the Ozarks comes only after a “generational lag,” if at all (p. 220). Indeed, sustained scholarly inquiry into the folkways of the Ozarks people is a relatively recent development, and arguably the most authoritative work on the region to date comes from Blevins himself.

As Blevins’s examination unfolds, the reader is treated to glimpses into the defiant and often dangerous world of seasonal fireworks sales; the resurrection of shape note gospel singing schools; the lingering presence of the clapboard country stores serving sparsely populated hollers; and the ongoing crusade of folklore collectors to construct a definitive inventory of American mountain ballads. These insightful vignettes are seasoned generously with humor born of Blevins’s own life experiences with the very phenomena described therein.

The lighthearted excursions offer an antidote to more sober considerations of race relations and racial violence in the region; the ethically suspect means by which Ozarks waterways—most notably, the celebrated Buffalo River—were expropriated by government to establish the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, and the economic hardships endemic to the region that, over generations, left many rural Ozarkers clinging to subsistence by their fingernails. These erudite treatments engage directly with the relevant scholarly literature and draw meaningful and occasionally revisionist conclusions.

Blevins’s ambition to discern the relative “southernness” of Ozarks culture serves as a key subtext in this volume (p. 7). Several chapters explore either explicit or implicit comparisons between the upland and lowland South. The futile attempts by locals to resist federal power in claiming Ozarks waterways for recreational and conservation purposes highlight a strain of deep distrust toward government. The generational efforts to scratch a life from unforgiving land, exemplified here by the copious diaries of Minnie Atteberry, illuminate the rugged individualist archetype often at the epicenter of regional identity. The appeal of The Andy Griffith Show as an avatar for idealized southern living reveals a straining effort to stay anchored in a romanticized and largely mythological past. In the end, Blevins diagnoses the land of his upbringing as indeed southern, but not before arguing convincingly that the concept itself remains stubbornly fluid and evanescent.

Whimsical and incisive in equal measure, Blevins blends the storytelling gifts of the folklorist with the keen lens of social science analysis. He purports not to caricature the people of his homeland but instead to complicate them [End Page 461] through historical, sociological, economic, and anthropological scrutiny. The text is fairly haunted with the author’s memories and profound love for the places and people that define both his upbringing and his professional life and is all the richer and more engaging for it. The net effect of this journey on the reader is the deconstruction of stereotypes through the introduction of complexity, and thus Blevins’s aim with this collection strikes true. As both a companion to his three-volume historical treatment of the region (A History of the Ozarks [Urbana, 2018–2021]) and an accessible and enjoyable gateway into the world of the Ozarks, Up South in the Ozarks offers a valuable contribution to academic and lay audiences alike.

Kevin C. Motl Ouachita Baptist University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...