Mountain music

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ark. -- The musicians start ambling toward the town square, carrying their guitars, fiddles and dulcimers as the sun dips below the brilliantly colored trees that blanket the Ozark Mountains.

Their audience carts lawn chairs and picnic blankets, everyone aiming for a spot close to the Stone County Courthouse.

The town bills itself as the "Folk Music Capital of the World" with daily impromptu jam sessions on the courthouse lawn. There's no set time, no set bill and no set lists.

Some musicians are locals. Been playing on the square since they can remember. Others have heard about the routine and travel from all parts to join them.

Some play solo, others in gatherings of five or more. If musicians tire of one bunch, they'll join another. Listeners mosey from one group to another until they find what they like. It's a different scene from the staged concerts offered at the nearby Ozark Folk Center.

The musicians play for up to 1,000 folks some nights. But they don't set up facing the crowds. Instead they face one another, debate what to play next and check if everyone knows the song. The dulcimer players weave lists of songs between the strings on their instruments.

Children sit at their feet, eating single-dip ice cream cones and watching the quick movements of the musician's fingers. Clip-clops from tourists taking horse-and-buggy rides sound down the road.

The impromptu performances took root when folks in the isolated community of 2,900 gathered to pick guitars on their front porches. Now the area's Ozark valleys boast bed-and-breakfasts, quaint shops and several music theaters, like "John Taylor's Laid Back Pickin,'" "Cash's White River Hoedown" and a barn named for Jimmy Driftwood, the town's famous son.

Visitors come through summer and into the fall to hear the tunes and watch the green hillsides change to vivid yellows, oranges and reds that peak in the last half of October. They'll trek to the town in October for the Arkansas Beanfest and Championship Outhouse Races and again in mid-November for the Mountain View Bluegrass Weekend.

Locals are quick to clarify that they play folk, not country, music. Folk music is the original Southern mountain music. Country music, they explain, is what you hear on the radio.

Skip Sapp leans back in his lawn chair, picking at his guitar. "What's the use to deny you've been living a lie, so why should we try anymore?" he sings.

"Did you write that one?" someone yells from the courtyard after he finishes. "That was pretty good." Sapp grins, never answering her question.

Sapp has been playing in Mountain View for 12 years. He wears a camouflage hat, a long drooping white mustache that curls under at his shoulders and a leather guitar strap proclaiming him the "Cajon Hillbilly."

He started playing electric bass guitar in a Texas dance hall band in 1960, but quit to retire in nearby Guion.

"I got tired of dodging bullets and bottles," he said, spitting tobacco over his shoulder. "Down there we were getting paid to play and that's a job and I don't like jobs. I came here and decided to play for me."

Standing in the crowd around Sapp, Gene Reed and his wife Faye said they came from Decatur, Texas, for a second time this summer to catch the Mountain View music.

"It's just a slow pace," Gene Reed said. "You just don't hear music like this. I think everybody up here can play something."

Barb Brown drove down from Bell City, Mo., with her own lawn chair. She stayed in a bed-and-breakfast across from the square.

"I've never seen anything like this before," Brown said. "When they finish with one group they just sit down and play with another one. It takes you back to the way your ancestors used to get their entertainment."

Other women in the audience use copies of the weekly Stone County Leader to fan mosquitoes away from their faces. The men sit back with their cowboy hats on their knees. Some of the notes are off but nobody seems to notice.

Sam Turpin of Jonesboro travels the two hours to Mountain View a handful of times every year to play on the square. He said he wants to retire here.

"You see one Christmas parade, you've seen every one of them," he said, guitar on his knee. "This is different time and again."

Turpin lectures on local lore and about Driftwood, who has a street named after him in town. Driftwood wrote the ballad, "The Battle of New Orleans."

Turpin picks it out on his guitar, asking, "Have you ever heard a song that goes, 'In 1814 we took a little trip...?"' Everyone sitting around him recognizes the lyrics.

They finish the verse, "...down with Colonel Jackson, down the mighty Mississip'."

Two guitarists from Texas hear him across the lawn and pull up chairs to finish the song with him. They're strangers, but talk with Turpin like friends.

The performers are glad the crowds enjoy the tunes, but most musicians say they play for the joy of playing.

"If somebody enjoys it, that's icing on the cake," Sapp said. "It's relaxed here. No pressure. No drunks. It's good clean family entertainment."