There is a long history of interest in the folk culture of the Ozarks. Early scholarship cast it as a folk region, and more recent attention has focused on clarifying some of the assumptions and stereotypes inherent both within early scholarship and in popular culture. The region encompasses areas of northwestern Arkansas, southern Missouri, and adjacent sections in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois that are often included within the region. We have a wide variety of folklore scholarship, literary works, and musical and artistic representations of life in the region. Mountain View, Arkansas, supports the Ozark Folk Center State Park, and the region was recently featured at the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This new book by the historian Benjamin Rader adds to the literature through his reminiscences about his life in Shannon County and Howell County in southcentral Missouri. Rader was born in this region in 1935, but he spent most of his career as a history professor in Lincoln, Nebraska. He compiled his recollections of family stories and personal experience narratives in this engaging volume of stories. The book highlights his extensive connections to the region, and it can be read as a bit of a homecoming as it brings closure to his memorable scholarly career.
Rader organized his book into four sections that connect his life history to the region’s history. The first section deals with history from both sides of his family prior to his birth and ends in his early adulthood. The second section includes accounts of life in the region from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Section III features memories of his life in the region following World War II into the late 1950s. A small final section, titled “Are We in the Ozarks Now?”, brings the book to a close. The ambiguity in the title is a reference to the geographical ambiguities that create challenges in defining the region as well as raise questions about whether or not the region has maintained its distinctiveness in contemporary times. There are excellent accounts of the region’s social history, and Rader shares first-person accounts of his engagement with Ozark folk culture. His accounts and reflections on their wider significance can be further explored through additional scholarship that he and other writers have published. In this respect, the book can serve as a fine introduction to salient elements of the region’s history and culture.
When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes stands on its own, though, as it is enjoyable to read. Some of the overall vignettes as well as specific details are really funny. Rader has a droll sense of humor that often spins around understated commentary and occasionally erupts into outlandish recollections. In this respect, Rader is putting into print some of the aesthetic sensibilities of the region’s storytellers. Some of the best tellers in the region display a wry wit that often turns on the artistry of artfully stretching the truth in telling a tale. This blending of aesthetic values is perhaps most evident when raconteurs play with outsiders’ conventional, even stereotypical, ideas about the region’s inhabitants. Although Rader does not recast family folklore as tall tales, his prose does evoke a bit of a tongue-in-cheek narration that adds a rich texture to his writing. He remembers and relates taken-for-granted details of everyday experience and then presents them with as a narrative sensibility that subtly proclaims “You-all ain’t gonna believe this.” The tone works well. He uses it to emphasize exotic elements of the folk culture, while calling attention to the appeal of using artistic license to craft finely told tales.
Readers will find a wealth of folklore in this book’s vignettes. Along with personal experience narratives, memorates, legends, and other verbal genres, Rader also gives readers descriptions of traditional beliefs, medical practices, agricultural traditions, and material folk culture. He writes of the folklore from his first-person perspectives, and the direct connections provide a vibrant animation to his narrative. This style of writing is a creative way to blur boundaries between the academic scholar and the keeper of local tradition. He effectively uses a style of writing that evokes qualities of verbal artistry while also giving readers academic perspectives that enrich our understanding of what he is presenting. Crafting his documentation of family folklore and personal experience narratives as written vignettes also effectively challenges differences between scholarly and creative writing. This new book balances his own personal memories within a wider context of scholarship in history and folklore. Reading the book with this distinction in mind animates his written prose, giving readers the chance to imagine a series of engaging storytelling sessions with a witty raconteur.
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[Review length: 772 words • Review posted on October 4, 2024]