Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Brooks Blevins

Brooks Blevins Brooks Blevins was born November 28, 1969, in Batesville, Arkansas, and grew up forty miles away on the family farm in the rural community of Violet Hill. Descended from long lines of rural Ozarkers on both sides of his family, Blevins first took an interest in Ozark history as an undergraduate at Batesville’s Lyon College. He later earned the MA and PhD in history at Auburn University. Blevins is the author of five books and coeditor of another. His first book on the Ozarks, Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (Chapel Hill, 2002), was a groundbreaking work in the study of his native region. His most recent book is Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South (Urbana, 2012.) The selection that follows is taken from Blevins’s award-winning Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (Fayetteville, 2009.) qQ Jethro and Abner: An Arkansaw Counterculture Given the perseverance of the Arkansaw/Ozark image into the 1960s and beyond, it is fitting that the era’s (and perhaps twentieth-century America’s) most famous comic hillbilly characters came from the Ozarks and not Appalachia. The Beverly Hillbillies arrived on the popcultural scene in 1962, at the height of the folk revival and just five years removed from the beginning of the Little Rock crisis. Created by Paul Henning, The Beverly Hillbillies became the nation’s 19 most-watched television program within a few weeks of its debut. Although the 1960s never seriously challenged the 1930s for the title of “heyday of the hillbilly,” it wasn’t for lack of effort on Henning’s part. The Independence, Missouri, native almost single-handedly created a cornpone comedy empire with such long-running sitcoms as Petticoat Junction and Green Acres. But the undisputed anchor of his enterprise was the beloved and critically panned Hillbillies, whose eight seasons on CBS transported Americans from Camelot to the Nixon Whitehouse.1 Like fellow midwesterner Vance Randolph, Paul Henning had been fascinated with the backcountry people of the Ozarks since his childhood trips into southwestern Missouri. But instead of settling among them, “going native,” as Randolph had done, Henning used his impressions of hill people to craft comical characters for radio and television, and ultimately as sounding boards for social commentary . Although the two approached their subjects and expressed their philosophies in very different ways, Randolph and Henning shared a romantic appreciation for what they saw as genuine people free of the corrupting influences of a modern society consumed with vacuous materialism. American audiences had seen this sort of hillbillyflavored critique of shallow consumerism and snobbery before, from Bob Burns to the Weaver Brothers and Elviry and from Lil’ Abner to Ma and Pa Kettle. And it wasn’t difficult to recognize any of these past acts in the lineage of The Beverly Hillbillies. The storyline for the show was something that Steinbeck might have concocted had he been a vaudevillian instead of a fellow traveler in the Depression years, for in Henning’s universe the jalopy heading for California carried not the battered and luckless Joads but the Clampetts, a clan of naive and backward Ozarkers made filthy rich by the discovery of oil on their farm. As critics frothed to point out, each of the Clampetts represented a stock character in the rural humor stable: Granny, the straight-shooting and resourceful old woman who prefers traditional ways over the newfangled practices she finds in Beverly Hills; Elly May, the curvaceous young woman who looks like she just stepped out of an Al Capp strip but approaches life with the wide-eyed amazement and unsophistication of the nearest third-grader; and Jethro Bodine, a strapping youngster so clueless 20 Brooks Blevins that he makes Lil’ Abner look like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison. In the tradition of Jim Doggett, the Arkansas squatter (at least in his wilier incarnation), and Bob Burns’s “Arkansas Traveler,” Clampett patriarch Jed possesses the kind of horse sense that only a man close to nature and completely at home in his own skin can possess, the kind that gives him the edge over a more-educated and urbane but ill-intentioned adversary every time. By the end of each episode, Jed’s common sense, Granny’s pluck, and the Clampetts’ good-hearted integrity—with an ample dose of plain dumb luck—saves the...