People in the Ozarks have long told humorous vignettes that make sense of triumph and tragedy, relay family and local history, and of course entertain. Benjamin G. Rader’s memoir offers a loving portrait of the Ozarks of his youth, where his grandfather midwifed babies and his great uncle Jerry Rader laughed so hard at one of his own stories that he choked to death on a pork chop. As he reveals the Ozarks of the 1930s through 1950s, Rader dispels the myths of the region’s people as isolated and sharing a single set of values and behaviors. He also takes readers inside the life of the extended Rader family and its neighborhoods, each of which drew on storytelling to strengthen resolve in lives roiled by change, economic depression, and the shift of daily life from the country to the city. An alluring blend of remembering and reflection, When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes provides a vivid portrait of a fading time.

Winner of the Missouri History Book Award, from the State Historical Society of Missouri Winner of the Arkansiana Award, from the Arkansas Library Association Geologic forces raised the Ozarks. Myth enshrouds these hills. Human beings shaped them and were shaped by them. The Ozarks reflect the epic tableau of the American people—the native Osage and would-be colonial conquerors, the determined settlers and on-the-make speculators, the endless labors of hardscrabble farmers and capitalism of visionary entrepreneurs. The Old Ozarks is the first volume of a monumental three-part history of the region and its inhabitants. Brooks Blevins begins in deep prehistory, charting how these highlands of granite, dolomite, and limestone came to exist. From there he turns to the political and economic motivations behind the eagerness of many peoples to possess the Ozarks. Blevins places these early proto-Ozarkers within the context of larger American history and the economic, social, and political forces that drove it forward. But he also tells the varied and colorful human stories that fill the region's storied past—and contribute to the powerful myths and misunderstandings that even today distort our views of the Ozarks' places and people. A sweeping history in the grand tradition, A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1: The Old Ozarks is essential reading for anyone who cares about the highland heart of America.

"Some of the best folklore and Grimm scholars from Europe and the U.S. combined to give an excellent overview of the scholarly research and current critical thought regarding Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and their hugely popular Grimm's Fairy Tales. . . . The book is directed to the general educated public and is very readable." -- Choice

”You’re either buried with your crystals or your shotgun.” That laconic comment captures the hippies-versus-hicks conflict that divides, and in some ways defines, modern-day homesteaders. It also reveals that back to-the-landers, though they may seek lives off the grid, remain connected to the most pressing questions confronting the United States today. Jason Strange shows where homesteaders fit, and don't fit, within contemporary America. Blending history with personal stories, Strange visits pig roasts and bohemian work parties to find people engaged in a lifestyle that offers challenge and fulfillment for those in search of virtues like self-employment, frugality, contact with nature, and escape from the mainstream. He also lays bare the vast differences in education and opportunity that leave some homesteaders dispossessed while charting the tensions that arise when people seek refuge from the ills of modern society—only to find themselves indelibly marked by the system they dreamed of escaping.

Bean Blossom, Indiana is home to the annual Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, founded in 1967 by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. Here, Adler discusses the development of bluegrass music, the many personalities involved in the bluegrass music scene, the interplay of local, regional, and national interests, and more.

My Life in San Juan Pueblo is a rich, rewarding, and uplifting collection of personal and cultural stories from a master of her craft. Esther Martinez's tales brim with entertaining characters that embody her Native American Tewa culture and its wisdom about respect, kindness, and positive attitudes.

In 1929, in a remote county of the Arkansas Ozarks, the gruesome murder of harmonica-playing drifter Connie Franklin and the brutal rape of his teenaged fiancée captured the attention of a nation on the cusp of the Great Depression. National press from coast to coast ran stories of the sensational exploits of night-riding moonshiners, powerful "Barons of the Hills," and a world of feudal oppression in the isolation of the rugged Ozarks. The ensuing arrest of five local men for both crimes and the confusion and superstition surrounding the trial and conviction gave Stone County a dubious and short-lived notoriety. Closely examining how the story and its regional setting were interpreted by the media, Brooks Blevins recounts the gripping events of the murder investigation and trial, where a man claiming to be the murder victim--the "Ghost" of the Ozarks--appeared to testify. Local conditions in Stone County, which had no electricity and only one long-distance telephone line, frustrated the dozen or more reporters who found their way to the rural Ozarks, and the developments following the arrests often prompted reporters' caricatures of the region: accusations of imposture and insanity, revelations of hidden pasts and assumed names, and threats of widespread violence. Locating the past squarely within the major currents of American history, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South paints a convincing backdrop to a story that, more than 80 years later, remains riddled with mystery.

In The Sound of the Dove, Beverly Bush Patterson explores one of the oldest traditions of American religious folksong, a national heritage of great beauty and dignity that remains vital in the lives and worship of predestinarian Primitive Baptists in the southern mountains. This unaccompanied and frequently unharmonized congregational singing challenges our assumptions about creativity, aesthetics, meaning, and identity. Patterson's revealing study incorporates interviews, field observations, historical research, song transcriptions, and musical analysis. She uses seventeenth-century English documents to trace historical antecedents of Primitive Baptist singing and to frame her discussion of religious belief and gender roles as they intersect with singing. One chapter is devoted to the role of women in this church.

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

This volume offers the first theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology in English. Michael A. Uzendoski and Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy present and analyze lowland Quichua speakers in the Napo province of Ecuador through narratives, songs, curing chants, and other oral performances, so readers may come to understand and appreciate Quichua aesthetic expression. Guiding readers into Quichua ways of thinking and being--in which language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape--Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy weave exacting translations into an interpretive argument with theoretical implications for understanding oral traditions, literacy, new technologies, and language. A companion websiteoffers photos, audio files, and videos of original performances illustrates the beauty and complexity of Amazonian Quichua poetic expressions.