Where Misfits Fit

Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks

Thomas Michael Kersen

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496835444
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2021 Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award from Mid-South Sociological Association All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks have an enduring place in American culture. Studying the Ozarks offers the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or were at least relegated to the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and oftentimes counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks offers insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner. In Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks, Thomas Michael Kersen explores the people who made a home in the Ozarks and the ways they contributed to American popular culture. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Kersen argues the area attracts and even nurtures people and groups on the margins of the mainstream. These include UFO enthusiasts, cults, musical troupes, and back-to-the-land groups. Kersen examines how the Ozarks became a haven for creative, innovative, even nutty people to express themselves—a place where community could be reimagined in a variety of ways. It is in these communities that communitas, or a deep social connection, emerges. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a facet of the Ozarks, and Kersen often compares two or more cases to generate new insights and questions. Chapters examine real and imagined identity and highlight how the area has contributed to popular culture through analysis of the Eureka Springs energy vortex, fictional characters like Li'l Abner, cultic activity, environmentally minded communes, and the development of rockabilly music and near-communal rock bands such as Black Oak Arkansas.

The Ozarks

When my family and I moved to the Arkansas Ozarks in the late 1970s as part of the back-to-the-land movement, we had no idea what was in store for us. Everything and everyone were so different. I certainly had no idea what a tick was or whether people in Arkansas were referred to as Arkansawyers or Arkansans. Before leaving for the Ozarks, I didn’t even have a sense of what the South was except what little we learned about the region in school.

After years of minimizing my communal experience, I have come to realize that the Ozarks and the people who live there are something unique and worth studying. Some time has passed since I was a teenager, but I have found myself reflecting on those years in the hills. Part of that return to my past has manifested itself in a yearly gathering at the Ozark Symposium in West Plains, Missouri, that brings together artists, musicians, scholars, and others devoted to sharing the Ozark culture. I have been fortunate enough to participate in the symposium for a number of years, and much of this book is based on topics I have presented at those meetings.

All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks has an enduring place in American culture, in that they offer the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or at least on the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and often counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks is more than a regional study because it offers the student insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner.

In contemporary times, many scholars are devoted to studying the Ozarks, such as J. Blake Perkins, Brian Campbell, Josh Lockyear, and Jared Phillips. Perkins focuses his work on interregional conflict between the common Ozarkian, who tended to be progressive politically, and the local elites, who were more interested in bettering themselves. Campbell and Lockyear offer a detailed history of the various groups and organizations that emerged in the Ozarks in the 1970s and 1980s, which focused on sustainability, communalism, and other progressive ideals. Phillips ably describes the interesting amalgam of both hippy back-to-the-landers and native Ozarkers—something he terms “Hipbillies.” It is Phillips’s argument that old-time natives were able to find, in the back-to-the-landers, a way to perpetuate traditional cultural practices. Brooks Blevins has contributed greatly to providing a rich historical account of the region that weaves in many sociocultural threads. One major theme in Blevins’s work is that the Ozarks are really made up of two pieces, one piece real and lived, and the other based on myth and stereotypes. Thus, more scholars are focusing on the Ozarks, giving the region a breadth and depth of attention it deserves.

In 1930, sociology professor Walter Cralle of Southwest Missouri State University, gave a talk entitled “Is there an Ozarker?”¹ He argued that the region was too large and diverse to paint with a small brush. However, he did list some elements of Ozark culture he thought should be preserved in some fashion, the first of which was its distinctive language. Next, like other mountain cultures, the Ozarks has a great deal of superstition and folklore. Last, pastimes such as square dancing and traditional music are being “driven back into the hills, and [are] seldom found even in small communities, but usually only in more remote rural regions.”² He argued that the nonmaterial culture (e.g., ideas, customs, etc.) should be appreciated as much as the material culture (e.g., furniture, crafts). Ozark observers since then have fretted about the loss of traditional culture as modernity has made inroads into the Ozarks.

Geographically, the Ozarks make up an area located in the northern part of Arkansas and the southern to middle part of Missouri. Following geographer Milton Rafferty, the Arkansas Ozarks are bordered in the south by the River Valley region.³ In fact, the Ozark foothills begin in many of the northern parts of the River Valley counties of Arkansas. The Ozarks make up a sizable part of Missouri, where they are bordered in the southeast by Cape Girardeau and in the northeast by St. Louis. The Missouri Ozarks extends up through the central plateau and to the Missouri River, and they end when they meet Kansas City in the west. There even is a small part of the Ozarks in eastern Kansas and Oklahoma.

Figure 1.1 Ozarks Map.

Because of the Ozark Mountains’ ruggedness and their people’s isolation, it was one of the last frontiers in the country. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner was one of the first scholars to study the frontier as a transformative space. His ideas are contested highly in academic circles, but I find his notions about mountains and culture interesting. He noted that over the course of American history, “From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard, a new order of Americanism arose.”⁴ The pioneers of the nineteenth century, and more recently the back-to-the-landers, left the comfort of civilization to strike out for somewhere new. They moved to the edge of mainstream society and were often marginalized. Once settled in the new region, these settlers found that they created something new and different.⁵

Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier was an in-between or liminal place between the coasts and the mountains. Anthropologist Victor Turner, among others, helped conceptualize liminality as a rite of passage phase characterized by ambiguity or a stage between a beginning and an ending.⁶ The concept of liminality has been extended beyond rites of passage to any situation in which there is an “in-between” space, such as the space between civilization and wilderness. The concept has even been used to analyze power in the urban landscape. Such was the case when sociologist Sharon Zukin studied the space between business and public areas in cities and the way power played into the mix.⁷ In the case of my research, I consider the Ozarks itself a liminal place; it is a “betwixt and between” region at the crossroads of various types of cultural heritages, and one in which isolation and independence spurred a diverging culture.

This “betwixt and between” state of the Ozarks often puts the region and its inhabitants in a situation of challenging normative structure of society at all levels. The region abounds with blurred boundaries such as southern/ nonsouthern, past/future, and individualistic/communalistic. It also attracts people who live on the margins of society, sometimes known as tricksters, or “edgemen” as Turner called them.⁸ Last, when looking at the Ozarks, one is confronted with the question of whether the region “live[s] with and in the nation as a whole” and how the nation regards the region.⁹

The liminal nature of the Ozarks fosters eccentricity and creativity. The Ozarks has also captured the imagination of people outside the region and motivated them to engage in alternative or countercultural activities. The region has lured all types of edgemen and women: folks that were part of counterculture groups, communards, cultists, and UFO enthusiasts. In addition to fringe groups, reporters, Hollywood personalities, and other key figures in popular culture have found the mythopoetic aspects of the region exciting to explore and exploit. Al Capp used Lil’ Abner’s Dogpatch, a mythic Ozarks, to explore social problems. Even real towns, such as Eureka Springs, have a long history as places many people believe possess a mystical energy vortex. To a greater extent than in other regions, some Americans sought an idealized version of the Ozarks to found communes and follow back-to-the-land practices.

Moving past previous research that discusses the Ozarks as a unique region, I argue that the Ozarks is a liminal region, or a “thin place.” They are a place that defies conventional categorization and often attracts creative, often marginal people. The Ozarks are where the sacred and paranormal worlds are close by. Such places, like the town of Eureka Springs, foster inclusiveness and creativity. This live-and-let-live attitude was attractive to communal folk who wanted to make their lives and the world a better place. It is also a region that appealed to the religious devout, LGBT individuals, alternative economic practitioners, and others as somewhere they could live more freely and openly than was the case in most other regions.

As it turns out, people can have “thin” personalities too, according to psychiatrist and author Ernest Hartman.¹⁰ Thin-boundary folks are more likely to experience nightmares but are also noted for greater creativity and flexibility in work, life, and love. They are more likely to consider themselves less as members of any particular group. In relationships, they become a part of their mate, even taking on their mannerisms in some cases. They are also more likely to express some paranormal belief or experience. In many ways, they are like Victor Turner’s liminars. Like tricksters, Hartman noted that a thin-boundary person “will often be seen as a bit unreliable—a critic, a rebel, ‘not a team player.’” In the following chapters, a number of thin-boundary characters will emerge.¹¹

Another facet of what makes the Ozarks liminal is that the region is filled with anomalies, contradictions, and paradoxes.¹² For reasons that are not entirely clear, the region is filled with paranormal phenomena or is conducive to such activity. UFOs, humming, spirits, and other events are heavily reported in the region. Some residents of Eureka Springs say all the paranormal activities are the result of unique qualities of the Ozark Mountains or its springs.

One example that taps into the contradictory nature of the Ozarks is that it is both inclusive and exclusive. On the one hand, there has been a long history of welcoming immigrants into the region, while on the other, the region’s treatment of African Americans and other minority groups has sullied its history. Although the Ozarks are famous for welcoming back-to-the-landers, the region has also attracted cults and militias based on an exclusive racial identity. Much of what is covered in this book has racial/ ethnic threads woven throughout.

A major paradox found in the Ozarks centers on the way modernity affects individuals, communities, and the region as a whole. Modernity was one of the foremost topics on which founding sociologists focused in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. German sociologist Max Weber believed that modernity would lead to a more bureaucratic, rational world in which individual aspirations would replace those of communities.¹³ The work of Weber and others offered some way of explaining the sense of disconnection that led people to leave urban life’s amenities and comforts for a more austere, but often more community-oriented life in the Ozarks. Modernity changes the way we regard ourselves and what it means to be an American, whether southerner or otherwise. Modernity was not an insignificant worry for leaders and scholars of the region as they believed that the modern world and its values were usurping traditions, folklore, and other facets of Ozark life that so many people find enchanting. Television, movies, and other types of popular culture have a part in spreading modernity, which often is contrasted with rural life for comedic effect, such as when urbanites move to the country, as in Green Acres, or country folks settle in the city, as in The Beverly Hillbillies.

Ever-changing values and the rise of technology and mass culture have influenced what we think about community. More isolated communities, as well as communities of the past, were tight-knit and centered on family and close friends who tended to interact in personal, face-to-face encounters. Many people were drawn to the Ozarks to be a part of such communities. On the other hand, modern life has forced people to share more of their lives with people outside their family and friends. Often, modern life becomes too predictable, pecuniary, and bureaucratic. To borrow a term from anthropologist Victor Turner, modernity is too structural.¹⁴ Thus, all sorts of groups and people marginalized by mainstream society left the cities for the Ozarks and other rural areas of America because they found modern life hollow and unsatisfying. They set out to find a more authentic life filled with closer connections with family and friends, something akin to Josiah Royce’s beloved community, but what Turner called communitas. Societies and cultures are held together to norms, traditions, laws, and other structural binds. Communitas, on the other hand, is “spontaneous, immediate, and concrete.” It is what seekers to the region wished to create in a variety of ways.¹⁵

In the pages to follow, I use my sociological imagination as a scaffolding for the narrative about the Ozarks, modernity, and popular culture. Part of the sociological imagination depends on exploring the cultural and historical contexts that have shaped the lives of a number of different groups that have called the Ozarks home. To meet the challenge of such a narrative, I agree with Flannery O’Connor, who wrote, “There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.”¹⁶ In some ways, numbers and equations offer a sense of authority and completeness of a more rationalized, structured world. In graduate school, my studies in demography presented the story as a concise equation of births, deaths, and migration that seemed to work well—and they do to some extent. The same is also true of other quantitative research. However, this book is not just about facts, observations, and statistics, but is more about exploring complex and more qualitative concepts such as communitas and liminality through sources such as folklore, legends, oral histories, and other cultural artifacts.

Time is important in both structural and liminal terms. In many cases, important biographical facts spread over one’s life become linear and compressed. Modern life is hard to understand without reference to a matter-of-fact regard to time such as clocks, schedules, and calendars. On the other hand, Ozark author Ken Carey wrote of the liminal side of time that “powerful experiences of being wholly attentive to the present moment have a curious link with one another that can sometimes make events a decade apart seem separated by no more than a few moments.”¹⁷ My teenage years, living as a back-to-the-lander, seem like yesterday. However, our memories are patchy and, in some cases, reinforced to follow scripts to fill in doubtful areas. Thus, using diverse sources corrects some of these issues.

Much of the popular culture that has influenced my life deeply was that of the 1960s and 1970s. More than my perceptions about this particular period in American history, much of the literature that looks at modern American culture treats the 1960s as a major turning point. Music critic and former Rolling Stones editor Anthony Decurtis suggested that the “lessons” of the 1960s were

the belief that we are not simply individuals but part of a larger culture that requires our most earnest efforts and ideas; the conviction that the worlds within and outside ourselves are subject to transformation, that our actions can shape the future, that what we choose to do matters deeply; the insistence that America has a place for our best selves, and to the degree that it doesn’t, it must be changed; the notion that music can help formulate a vision toward which we can aspire.¹⁸

Most of these “lessons” focus on change and change agents; often, people I refer to as liminars. They work on the margins, have thin boundaries, and are creative. The stories told in this book highlight these people and events that shaped Ozarkian culture, and in some instances, the way Ozarkian culture helped shape American culture.

For example, what led people to make the important decision to leave a city and move to an isolated area such as the Ozarks? Alternatively, what would inspire a person to create a new identity and faith that others will follow? Using interviews, newspapers, official documents, and other sources, these stories offer a range of meanings and inflection points.¹⁹

I used various sources researching this book. For example, I interviewed people, conducted field research, analyzed survey data other researchers gathered, and reviewed various documents, such as newspaper articles, government reports, and other materials. Such a mixed-method approach brought me closer to what I think is the story for each chapter and allowed me to focus more on deeper descriptions that helped me describe the various social processes that undergird each of the stories.²⁰ A mixed-method, interpretive approach makes me a participant who is more “connected” with the subject matter because I can identify more information about topics, associations, and processes.²¹ Comparing case studies, as Howard Becker noted: “if you find it, whatever it is, in one place, you’ll find some version of. It in other places like it too. Maybe not going by the same name, or dealing with exactly the same problem, but similar enough to let you know where to look, what to look for to understa...