Matthew Moore: We’re reaching a point in January where it’s starting to get complicated to say happy new year to somebody, but Jared Phillips, I haven’t seen you in the new year.
Jared Phillips: Yep. That’s right.
Moore: So I’m going to take a moment here to say happy new year to you.
Phillips: Happy new year, Matthew.
Moore: We come on here pretty regularly to talk about Ozarks history — new, old, everything in between. You’ve got a new piece of Ozarks history you want to share with us.
Phillips: Yeah. This is reaching back into some folklore for us. Anytime we turn over the calendar, we in our house, like many other houses, start to think about these time-honored traditions for the new year. And so I got to thinking, maybe it’d be fun to talk about some of these old folklore traditions that we have and talk about some of our folklorists that help give us some of this record that we have today.
Moore: I like it. When I think about New Year’s traditions — these aren’t necessarily Ozark traditions, but new year traditions — certainly your black-eyed peas.
Phillips: Yeah, absolutely. We do that here.
Moore: You’ve got to have your cabbage, your greens of some sort sometimes.
Phillips: Yeah. It’s not necessarily Ozark, although it’s a little bit in, as we’ve talked about, in question.
Moore: And pork is something that I see a lot of too, that you’ve got to have your pork and your black-eyed peas.
Phillips: Yeah. We call that Hoppin’ John here. And I know other folks in the South do as well. In particular, not just any kind of pork — we put a hog jowl in it, that cheeky part, and we put that in with our black-eyed peas. And there you go.
Well, that’s not the only thing that we have here. Some of these stories, some of these are customs that we don’t really do anymore. Or even when they were recorded, it was like, “Well, that guy over there in that holler way back used to do it,” you know. And we know this from the work of people like — I’ve got right here my copy of Ozark Magic and Folklore. And so Vance Randolph, who was a professor here and kind of Mr. Ozarks, collected a bunch of these stories. And his wife, Mary Celestia Parler, collected a bunch of stories and folk songs that you can listen to through the UARK library’s Special Collections website for free, dedicated work of several different folks over the years. And then there are other people up in Missouri and out in Eureka Springs who collected a lot of these stories for us.
Some of my favorite customs had to do with the wind on New Year’s Day.
Moore: OK.
Phillips And this is one I didn’t know growing up. This is kind of a weird one for me. But apparently, if it’s windy on New Year’s Day, you’re going to have a very dry summer — especially when you’re thinking about the late 19th century and the early 20th century, when the Ozarks are still a very agricultural place. That’s a problem. You don’t want a windy New Year’s Day. I’m sorry — if there’s no wind on New Year’s Day, it’s going to be dry. Sorry, I misspoke. But if there’s a good breeze — not a crazy windstorm like a tornado — you’ll have enough rain for your crops. And if it’s super windy on New Year’s Day, it’s going to be bad. It’s going to be floody all the next fall. You’re going to have a terrible end of the summer. Everything is going to fall apart.
Moore: So the wind speed of one specific day determines your year?
Phillips: Determines the fortunes for the year. But there’s even more than that. Some of the old-timers would say the first 12 days of January determine the weather for each month of the year. So if Jan. 1 is a gray, cloudy day, all of January will be gray and cloudy. If it’s rainy, it’ll be a rainy month. If it’s sunny, it’ll be sunny. So they would say we could predict the weather.
Like a lot of these folk customs, it probably was that way once and then it worked, and people hung on to it or were just trying to make sense of an uncertain world before meteorological sciences and things like that.
Moore: When we’re talking about this, I can’t help but think about how superstitious this is. Do you tend to be pretty superstitious, or are you more like Michael Scott — just a little stitious?
Phillips: I’m probably more than a little stitious, but I’m not superstitious. Some of that is I’m a product of my place. One thing we’ve done before — we didn’t do it this year, our whole household was down with the flu over New Year’s — but one thing we’ve done before is a custom here in the Ozarks and across Appalachia. As Shrek reminded us, onions have layers, right? So you take an onion, you quarter it, and you get 12 big pieces. You put salt in each one. And depending on how dried up and curled that piece becomes determines whether that month is going to be dry or wet. We’ve done that before with mediocre success.
One thing I know some old-timers have done, and we’ve never done it — at least not consciously — is there’s a long-standing tradition in the Ozarks that on New Year’s Day you take nothing out of your house. Nothing. Or if you do, you have to immediately bring something back in. The reason is, if you take something out of your house and it’s not replaced, you open up your house to misfortune and woe all year long. Even to the point where if guests come to see you on New Year’s Day, they need to leave something behind — carry in a stick of firewood, leave behind a little pocketful of candy or something — so when they leave, the household is still at a net positive level.
Moore: Does that include don’t take out your trash?
Phillips: Don’t take out your trash. Don’t take out your ash bucket. Vance records a story of a young wife somewhere in the middle of the Ozarks who took out a bucket of ash and didn’t think to bring something back in, and she was in a state all day long, worried about the security of her home for the next year.
It’s not crazy — in a world that’s so uncertain, not really all that different than today, you’re looking for anything you can do to bring a little security.
Another common custom here in the Ozarks: it was traditional on New Year’s Day or New Year’s Eve to open up the front door, no matter the weather. Public health experts tell us in the wintertime, especially in modern homes that don’t breathe as well, open up whenever you can. Let your house breathe. But in the Ozarks, we coded that as if you open up the door on New Year’s Eve, you let all the bad luck from the previous year out. Then you make sure it’s closed. When you close it, hopefully the bad luck has left and all the new good luck for the new year has come in, and you trap that good luck in the house for the next year.
Moore: Is that something you practice?
Phillips: We do it mostly because New Year’s Day this year was decent weather, so we just opened it up because it was nice. I wasn’t even thinking about it. The kids were sick, and we were taking care of different things. Some of these are things we end up doing by happenstance, but they’ve worked their way into the folklore of the place.
Moore: And I imagine that’s how it becomes folklore and tradition in so many ways — it’s something you were already doing and you totemize it in a way.
Phillips: So many of the folk customs that we have — whether you call it superstition or tried-and-true knowledge — to a certain degree, it doesn’t matter. Every human being, every community, is looking for ways within their environmental and community context to explain how to live in the world. These are the ways we did it. We borrowed from Appalachia, we borrowed from African Americans, we borrowed from wherever, and we kind of made it our own. There are all these really lovely records of it.
Vance Randolph was one of them. There was also a delightful teacher out of Missouri named Ellen Gray Massey, who started as a high school teacher and then moved to Drury College. She collected the Bittersweet series, which is kind of like Foxfire, if you’re familiar with that. These are folk records — the story of us as Ozarkers before we had historians like me spending time in archives. When you read these things, it’s easy to think of them as a little silly. But I can envision my grandfather — he always carried a buckeye in his pocket for good luck.
Moore: Are there certain traditions in this world, you know, things that you are trying to implement in your own family, whether they are tried-and-true traditions that we have history of? Or are you trying to be a standard-bearer yourself of Ozark history, to say this is something we ought to be doing, and I’m going to do it myself?
Phillips: That’s a great question. My wife can trace her lineage back to the Scottish borderlands, like a lot of folks in the Ozarks and Appalachia. So she brings in a lot of Celtic customs into our end-of-year, beginning-of-year traditions. I also try, if I can help it, not to dig a hole in the wrong phase of the moon. Enough old-timers have said that’s probably a good way to do it, and I figure they’ve been doing it longer than I have.
Moore: Yeah. I’m not a psychologist, I don’t claim to be, but I can’t help but think that the reason we have so many of these traditions, Ozarks or otherwise, is because there’s so little that we ourselves are in control of. Being able to control this one element of your life traditionally gives you a bit of power.
Phillips: I think so, yeah. Yeah. It’s an attempt to understand and control your environment, and also a way to care for each other. There are stories about women in childbirth — people placing an axe under the bed so it would cut the pain. Or, you know, there’s all these stories like, well, if you’re trying to help a kid through dealing that’s dealing with nightmares, put a knife under the pillow because that knife will scare away the bad dreams, right?
Because those Ozarkers, like a lot of, you know, kind of tight-knit communities, we put a lot of stock in dreams. You know, we pay, we pay attention to them. And a lot of us believe that, that in some measure, at least, dreams are telling us something about the world around us or what’s coming. And so the scary ones, especially if you’re a little kid, like, you want something to protect you, right?
Moore: Yeah, I love that. You’re going to come back soon. Do you have something in mind for February?
Phillips: Well, coming in February, we haven’t talked about love potions in a while, you know, in this, in this deal. And I figure we could do a little bit of, a little bit of more folklore. But also we could talk about Miss Parlor and some of her, her, her play-party songs and her work as a as a chief documenter of Ozark history.
Moore: That sounds great, Jared. As always, thanks for your time.
Phillips: You bet.
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