Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins

by Brooks Blevins

The Ozarks is a place that defies easy categorization. Sprawling across much of Missouri and Arkansas and smaller parts of Oklahoma and Kansas, it is caught on the margins of America’s larger cultural part southern, part midwestern, and maybe even a little bit western. For generations Ozarkers have been more likely than most other Americans to live near or below the poverty line—a situation that has often subjected them to unflattering stereotypes. In short, the Ozarks has been a marginal place populated by marginalized people.

 

Historian Brooks Blevins has spent his life studying and writing about the people of his native regions—the South and the Ozarks. He has been in the vanguard of a new and vibrant Ozarks Studies movement that has worked to refract the stories of Ozarkers through a more realistic and less exotic lens. In Up South in the Dispatches from the Margins, Blevins introduces us with humor and fairness to mostly unseen lives of the past and southern gospel singing schools and ballad collectors, migratory cotton pickers and backroad country storekeepers, fireworks peddlers and impoverished diarists.

 

Part historical and part journalistic, Blevins’s essays combine the scholarly sensibilities of a respected historian with the insights of someone raised in rural hill country. His stories of marginalized characters often defy stereotype. They entertain as much as they educate. And most of them originate in the same place Blevins up south in the Ozarks.     

Genres: History

268 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2022

About the author

Brooks Blevins is the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University.

Reviews

[Craig Amason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have stated it before, but it bears repeating. Brooks Blevins is a first rate scholar, writer, and professor. Missouri State University is fortunate to have him on the faculty with a named chair in Ozarks studies. This collection of essays addresses a pertinent question about the geographical and cultural boundaries of the Ozarks region primarily located in southern Missouri and norther Arkansas. Blevins examines the Ozarks in the context of a larger, perhaps better defined region: the South. With well documented research, he makes the case for why the Ozarks is linked to the South in so many ways while also having its separate identity.

Blevins by no means ascribes to the exceptionalism argument when it comes to the Ozarks. He doesn't buy into the notion espoused by many Ozarkers that past isolation and a particular heritage necessarily make the region unique. This position applies to the popular opinion that the Scots-Irish dominated the early settlement of the Ozarks. He also offers plenty of evidence to support the argument that the rural lifestyle, traditions, customs, music, and other regional hallmarks can be found in other parts of the country, namely Appalachia and certain regions of the Deep South.

The beauty of Blevins's work is how he moves effortlessly from serous academic study to a much more relaxed, conversational style of narrative that is very reminiscent of columnists such as Rick Bragg of Southern Living fame. Blevins definitely jumped up the respectability ladder by several rungs in my estimation just mentioning Flannery O'Connor (my favorite author) in a delightful and often hilarious piece on fireworks sales and what the popularity of such incendiaries tells us about the folks who buy them and set them off.

Blevins is an unapologetic fan of The Andy Griffith Show and devotes an entire chapter to his nostalgic appreciation of the TV series. But he also uses the characters and the plots to explain the values and nuances of rural life in both the eastern and midwestern regions of the Upland South. It is a fascinating and entertaining piece of writing. This collection of essays is completely approachable and a fine cross-sectional view of a part of the country that has been home to the author his whole life. His love for the Ozarks shines brightly on every page.

[Sarah Neidhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this. Each essay takes you into a different aspect of Ozark life, some fairly academic, others more personal or obscure, although they are all touched with just enough personal reflection to make the subject come alive and are never boring. Like with John McPhee's writing, I found myself suddenly interested in things I didn't think I was interested in. I particularly loved the chapter on Minnie Atteberry and the final one about sense of place. And Blevins is a beautiful writer!

[Phillip Howerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Packed with insights, love, and humor. Anyone who plans to write anything about the Ozarks should read this book before they put a word on a page. Blevins has breathed new life into the essay form and new life into how we think about the Ozarks.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll forever be thinking and considering Blevins words and perspective. I to was born & raised in the Ozarks. In my case Madison County Arkansas and I started by life in 1979. AN ACUTE SENSE OF PLACE will forever now be a theorem or consolidating explanation of understanding for me.