Up South in the Ozarks

About

The Ozarks is a place that defies easy categorization. Sprawling across much of Missouri and Arkansas and smaller parts of Oklahoma and Kansas, it is caught on the margins of America’s larger cultural regions: part southern, part midwestern, and maybe even a little bit western. For generations Ozarkers have been more likely than most other Americans to live near or below the poverty line—a situation that has often subjected them to unflattering stereotypes. In short, the Ozarks has been a marginal place populated by marginalized people.

Historian Brooks Blevins has spent his life studying and writing about the people of his native regions—the South and the Ozarks. He has been in the vanguard of a new and vibrant Ozarks Studies movement that has worked to refract the stories of Ozarkers through a more realistic and less exotic lens. In Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, Blevins introduces us with humor and fairness to mostly unseen lives of the past and present: southern gospel singing schools and ballad collectors, migratory cotton pickers and backroad country storekeepers, fireworks peddlers and impoverished diarists.

Part historical and part journalistic, Blevins’s essays combine the scholarly sensibilities of a respected historian with the insights of someone raised in rural hill country. His stories of marginalized characters often defy stereotype. They entertain as much as they educate. And most of them originate in the same place Blevins does: up south in the Ozarks.

Author

Brooks Blevins is the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University. He published with the University of Illinois Press his capstone work—three volumes constituting the definitive history of the Ozarks. He is also the author or editor of ten other books, including Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State.

“Ozarks Preserving Ozarks” – A profile of Brooks Blevins at OzarksAlive.com.

Reviews

“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. … 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 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.”
—Kevin C. Motl, Journal of Southern History, May 2024

“This question of the South, and the Ozarks’ place within it, is just beneath the surface of every essay. … In the end, Brooks Blevins has done it again. … pulled together a lifetime’s work to give readers another way to engage with these hills many of us call home.”
—Jared Phillips, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Summer 2022

Praise

“This book is more than just a remarkable collection of Ozark arcana (although it is that). Its good writing, wry humor, and deep, sympathetic understanding should appeal to anyone interested in the larger South.”
—John Shelton Reed, author of Mixing It Up: A South-Watcher’s Miscellany

Contents

Introduction

One
The Ozarks and Dixie: Considering a Region’s Southernness

Two
Fireworking Down South

Three
The South According to Andy

Four
Where Everything New Is Old Again: Southern Gospel Singing Schools

Five
Against the Current: Landowners and the Fight for Ozarks Streams

Six
The Country Store: In Search of Mercantiles and Memories in the Ozarks

Seven
Rethinking the Scots-Irish Ozarks: Diversity and Demographics in Regional History

Eight
Revisiting Race Relations in the Upland South: LaCrosse, Arkansas

Nine
The Spruills: Who and Why?

Ten
Collectors of the Ozarks: Folklore and Regional Image

Eleven
The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins

Twelve
A Time Zone Away and a Generation Behind: Appalachia and the Ozarks

Thirteen
Back to the Land: Academe, the Agrarian Ideal, and a Sense of Place

Notes

Media

“Chronicling the Ozarks, from fireworks to country stores” – Ozarks at Large, KUAF

“Brooks Blevins on the Ozarks, Andy Griffith, and the South” (Southern Review of Books)

The Author’s Corner with Brooks R. Blevins (Current)