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I had the privilege of being directly involved in the planning and implementation of the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, an annual event that takes place on the National Mall in Washington, DC. With a history going back over fifty years, the festival is usually scheduled over a ten-day period roughly encompassing the last week in June and the first week of July. It is produced by the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and honors living cultural traditions while celebrating those who practice and sustain them. One of the programs selected for the 2023 festival was focused on the Ozarks, a region of the U.S. that is centered in southern Missouri and northwest Arkansas but also includes small portions of northeast Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, and extreme southwest Illinois.

I began working in 2019 for Missouri State University Libraries on a part time basis, assisting with projects sponsored by the Ozarks Studies Institute, an initiative of the Libraries. A fortunate turn of events led to the Smithsonian partnering with the Libraries for the Ozarks program of the 2023 festival, with the Dean of Libraries serving as a curator. The Dean offered me a full-time position eighteen months prior to the event to serve as an associate director for the university’s participation in the festival.

The Dean and I teamed up with another part-time employee of the Libraries who has written two books about the Ozarks and has extensive cultural knowledge of the region. Our trio served as the core planning committee for the university to collaborate with the festival organizers from the Smithsonian. One of the first jobs we tackled was coming up with a name for the program. After considerable deliberation, we decided on “The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region.” Our trio made numerous trips to visit with people and organizations throughout the region, in all five states, to spread the word and generate excitement about the festival. A small group of Ozarkers, including our planning trio, visited the National Mall in the summer of 2022 to get a clearer picture of how the event looks and works. We took two musical acts with us to perform as a preview of the 2023 Ozarks program.

Over the course of a year, we worked with the Smithsonian staff to identify key stakeholders from the Ozarks who could assist with fundraising, program content, identifying other curators and participants, and overall planning of the festival. We had Zoom meetings almost every week for over a year to hammer out all the details, and several festival organizers from the Smithsonian visited the Ozarks multiple times to get a better sense of the region and to meet with our team.

Using artists from the Ozarks and from the DC area, the larger planning team came up with design features for the festival that would reflect the natural beauty of the region. We had to decide on color schemes, fonts for signage, layout of the festival grounds, daily schedules of events, and a whole host of other elements. In early 2023 we began meeting with the festival logistics staff to work on structural and mechanical requirements for the site. We also met with interns and volunteers who are brought on each year to help the Smithsonian with festival participants’ needs regarding transportation, lodging, meals, and a wide variety of other accommodations. By the time June arrived, there were over 150 people involved in either planning or implementation. It is a massive effort.

The festival was open each day, June 29 through July 9 (with the exception of July 5), from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., followed by evening concerts most nights running from around 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. The Ozarks program site was situated under the trees on the south side of the Mall, just east of 14th Street SW. On the opposite north side of the Mall was the other program for the 2023 festival, which was called “Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S.” Each year the festival is open on Independence Day, where people gather by the hundreds of thousands along the corridors, paths, and grassy fields extending from the Potomac River all the way to the Capitol to await the spectacular fireworks display at dusk between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials. I don’t typically go out of my way to see firework displays, but the colorful explosions that serve as a backdrop for the imposing Washington Monument are mighty impressive.

The Ozarks program was divided into four major themes: celebrations and gatherings; stories, sounds, and show business; migrations, movements, and pathways; and connections to land and place. The site featured large-scale murals and a mountain-bike trail build, music jam sessions and performances, dance and plant-knowledge workshops, food and craft demonstrations, and curated discussions. The Ozarks program included multiple theaters. There was a theater for discussions and demonstrations of plant knowledge, one for cooking demonstrations, one called the “Pickin’ Porch” mostly for music during the day, and one called “The Front Porch” for panel discussions. Both festival programs shared a large main stage out in the middle of the Mall that was reserved for musical workshops and performances during the day and for the larger evening concerts.

The Ozarks program brought close to 60 musicians to the festival, which is a clear indication of how important musical traditions are to the culture of the region. There were at least eleven different ensembles of varying sizes, along with many individual musicians, specializing in several different genres including Native American music, traditional old time music, bluegrass, folk, country, gospel, and contemporary. Foodways, plant knowledge, arts, crafts, and storytelling were demonstrated by white Ozarkers but also by many other ethnic groups that call the Ozarks home, including Native Americans, African Americans, people of Hispanic and Latino heritage, Marshallese, Hmong, Khmer, and Syrian. Contrary to much of its history over the last 200 years, some of the “faces and facets” of the Ozarks show remarkable diversity in race, ethnicity, and culture.

The largest and most recognizable musical group that the Ozarks program sponsored played on the main stage for the July 4 evening concert. The Ozark Mountain Daredevils is a band that originated out of Springfield, Missouri, in 1972. The group had several hits in their early years including “Jackie Blue” and “If You Want to Get to Heaven.” The band has evolved over the decades, losing and replacing band members and even going into a type of semi-retirement in the early 21st century. In recent years the Daredevils have enjoyed a bit of a resurgence, appearing on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville on two occasions in 2023. They put on a hell of a show for the DC festival and for hundreds of people within earshot of the main stage that evening.

My primary job during the days of the festival was to occupy the Missouri State University Libraries table set up near the main entrance of the Ozarks program. With the help of one of our student workers, I was selling several books about the Ozarks and answering questions about the festival program and the region in general. I was surprised by how many festival visitors told us they were either from the Ozarks, had lived in the Ozarks, or had fond memories of visiting the region. Many of these folks have lived and worked in the DC area for years, and they were so happy to see the Ozarks featured on the National Mall. We could definitely detect a sense of pride in their voices when they talked about their connection to the region.

Perhaps the most enjoyable connection I made during the time of the festival was with the two guys representing mountain biking, one of the fastest-growing forms of recreation in the Ozarks, especially in northwest Arkansas and Missouri. Seth Gebel is a young entrepreneur who owns Backyard Trail Builds. He goes out into the forest armed with only hand tools and cuts down cedar trees, trimming them out to create bridges, ramps, and runs for biking trails. He designed and built a short, curved and banked track at the entrance to the Ozarks site at the festival. Dave Schulz works within a nonprofit organization to help community leaders in revitalizing their towns by developing bicycle-focused public parks and sustainable trail systems, preserving natural environments while drawing tourism from around the world. Both of these guys gave daily riding demonstrations on the track that Seth built for the festival.

The most magical moment for me came on the final evening of the festival in the dining room of the host hotel. A group of Ukranian vocalists from the Creative Encounters program stood up and began singing a traditional folk song in their native tongue. They were followed by several other individuals and groups from both programs, standing to sing and inviting others in the room to participate through responsive chanting, vocalizations, and clapping. As I witnessed what happened, I recognized that this festival offers us a snapshot of the best of humanity, the wonders we are capable of producing when we embrace our differences and come together to learn from each other.

I have written in previous posts about the fond memories I have of my maternal grandmother, who lived with us and was instrumental in raising my sister and me while both of our parents worked outside the home. She was a faithful Southern Baptist with hardcore Biblical beliefs that could tame the hounds of hell, not to mention her only grandson out of five grandchildren. At the same time, she had an almost raunchy sense of humor. Flatulence could easily be summoned at just the right moment to break the wind of monotony.

My grandmother had a sister who lived in our town in middle Georgia. They adored each other and shared many lovable and peculiar characteristics. My grandmother didn’t drive, but her sister did. They were ever mobile, always ready for trips to the grocery store, the mall, church events, the farmer’s market, or the countryside to see relatives who had remained outside the city limits where the family’s roots were firmly planted. They both carried oversized, patent leather purses (think an inexpensive version of the Queen Mother’s favorite accessory) that could carry a week’s provisions while also functioning as a weapon that would give even a Central Park mugger pause. Middle Georgia can be miserably hot and humid in the summer, almost necessitating short pants; however, these were two ladies who clearly had not abandoned the practice of wearing hosiery to cover bare legs. They compromised by pairing their shorts with low-heal pumps and knee-high hose – ever fashion-conscious.

The matriarchal sisters were proud masters of the kitchen and faced the challenge of every major meal with the skill and determination of a battlefield commander. It started with the shopping. They didn’t have to give too much thought about what to put in the grocery cart – that would be referred to as a “buggy” in the native tongue of Georgia – because there wasn’t a lot of money to spend, and we generally rotated through a menu of about 5-6 major courses. They procured the staples from the only grocery store in town worthy of their discriminating patronage: Piggly Wiggly. They supplemented the store’s imported produce with indigenous fruits and vegetables from the town’s sizeable farmer’s market, where shoppers could find all the home-grown favorites such as corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, collards, turnips, and of course, sweet onions that are still the pride and economic bedrock of a south Georgia village called Vidalia.

Like all good commanding officers, the sisters would gather the troops, or in this case family members, to assist in the initial steps of the culinary campaign: shucking corn, snapping beans, hulling peas and butter beans, etc. At our house, my mother and sister were quite adept at these essential tasks. I am several years younger than my sister, and although I occasionally attempted to work on the peas and beans, if for no other reason than to be included, I was extremely slow and lost interest quickly. My grandmother took care of the most complicated and dangerous preparatory chores, such as wielding a sharp butcher knife to split the ears of corn on the cob, shear off the kernels, and magically mix them with ingredients to create the best creamed corn I have ever tasted. By the time she finished, her glasses and a good portion of her face and gray hair were speckled with little pasty globs of mutilated corn. She took no prisoners.

Many young boys approaching adolescence from my generation spent considerable time outdoors riding their bikes, playing in the yard, and finding ways to burn off energy. I was a skinny, short kid with long fingers and toes, shaded by the “shadow of forgotten ancestors” with all due credit to the late Carl Sagan. Summoning my recessive hominid genes, I was comfortable climbing small trees. It was fun. In our back yard, we had a small grove of plum and pear trees, and the ripened fruits of summer provided another incentive to defy gravity among the limbs and leaves.

With their keen awareness of all available resources and opportunities, my grandmother and great aunt wasted no time putting my arboreal dexterity to practical use. They both loved peaches. My great aunt had the telltale yellow-orange peach stain permanently emblazoned on the front of practically every blouse she owned. My father was unsuccessful in cultivating this fruit tree in our yard. The grocery store, roadside stands, and the farmer’s market had plenty of peaches available, but the freshest and sweetest ones were still attached to trees and ripened to perfection in several large orchards just a few miles away in the surrounding counties. When I was coming along, Georgia truly lived up to its nickname as the Peach State. Visitors to the peach farms could get the greatest value and the best fruit by picking their own.

Always on the lookout for a bargain, the savvy sisters drafted me to “help” them pick a bushel of peaches at one of the farms. We lit out for the territory in my great aunt’s Chrysler sedan. All the windows were rolled down to welcome in the thick, steamy air typical of a summer in Georgia. Wearing stringy cutoff jeans, my legs stuck to the vinyl back seat like chewing gum on hot pavement. We arrived at the farm wasting no time, marching toward the orchard with the singular mission of finding the most delectable peaches in the southeast. When the ladies identified just the right tree, its branches encumbered with fruit almost to the breaking point, they dropped their peck baskets to the ground and turned their sweet, smiling faces toward me.

“Son, if we point to the ones we want, can you get up in there alright and pick them?” My great aunt almost always called me “son.” Peach trees in a mature orchard are typically 8-12 feet tall, but they are trimmed and trained to have four or five major branches off the trunk a few feet from the ground. These branches project outward and upward from the trunk and support the many smaller branches that bear the fruit each season. So, you can climb into the cradle of the large feeder branches without too much difficulty, but then you must reach from that position to pick the fruit, which can get a bit precarious. Even a scrawny kid weighing 90 pounds soaked in summer sweat could easily snap a tree branch laboring under several pounds of peaches. Doing so would not only cause damage to the tree and ruin a peck of peaches, but it would likely send the tree climber crashing to the ground with scratches and bruises or a punctured eye.

“Sure,” I said with foolish enthusiasm induced by my pre-teen confidence. I vaguely remember taking my shoes off to improve my footing. Again, I embraced my primate taxonomy. I weaseled my way between the feeder branches, and carefully stepped up into the tree’s cradle. The analogy of “low hanging fruit” was not in my lexicon in the early 1970s, but even if it had been, the sisters would have promptly dismissed any suggestion of the kind. They had already set their sights on loftier specimens. After surveying the entire canopy, they began pointing at succulent globes just beyond my reach. Through unnatural contortions and absurd acrobatics that had been unnecessary for any of my previous adventures, I was reasonably successful in satisfying their quest for a bountiful bushel of goodness while managing to escape serious injury or banishment from the property.

My grandmother must have been pleased enough with my aerial harvesting abilities. More than once she sent me scampering up our trees at home to procure what she judged to be the best pears for making preserves that our family and relatives savored throughout the year. If the nuclear holocaust we all feared during those years had materialized, I would be forever grateful to my grandmother and her sister for preparing me to survive in the new stone age as a hunter-gatherer. They loved me more than I could have imagined. They were the sweetest Georgia peaches of all.

If You Want My Opinion

Here it is!

The Ozarks in DC: 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

If You Want the Best Fruit, You Gotta Climb Some Trees