Matthew Moore: This is Ozarks at Large. We are coming up on Valentine’s Day for those who celebrate and even for those who don’t, it’s still coming up. And here to talk about some Ozarks history related to love is our Ozarks lover, Jared Phillips. Jared, thanks for coming in today.
Jared Phillips: Yeah. You bet.
Matthew Moore: OK, so what are we talking about today?
Jared Phillips: Well, we started talking about Vance Randolph a little bit last time. And so I thought for Valentine’s Day, we could dip back into Ozark folk magic or Ozark magic and folklore and just take a look at a few of the love charm kind of conversations or how do we know that a couple is going to stay together kind of stuff? So I pulled a few customs out, and then I also thought we might dip into Vance Randolph’s wife’s work, Mary Celestia Parler, who we have all of her stuff is available through the Special Collections on campus, and she has this amazing repository of folk music. It’s called the Ozark Folk Song Collection. And I have a couple of song recommendations for us as well.
Matthew Moore: Yes, I love it. OK, so start with Vance then.
Jared Phillips: Yeah. OK. Yeah. So what Vance, one of the things he does, he’s a folklorist. And so he goes around and he collects stories about all kinds of things, right? So we talked about some New Year’s customs last time. But he also talks about love magic, love potions and stuff, right? And so I’m sure many of us have seen any number of movies. Harry Potter is what comes to my mind with the ill-fated love charm. But there’s several, he’s got pages of these in his book as well, and in other books as well.
So one of the very first ones that I thought was kind of funny was there’s an old story that if a woman steals a hat band off of a man’s hat — you remember, I’m wearing a ball cap now, but most back in the early 20th century, everybody wore hats with a hat band on them — if you steal the hat band and wore it as a garter, then that was going to guarantee that that man would fall in love with you.
Matthew Moore: Huh.
Jared Phillips: Yeah. I don’t know why. I don’t know how it works. It’s either all a bunch of stories that he puts together, and there’s a few times where he tries to figure out what that has to do with anything. So he has one story about where young women are going out and they’re using locks of their hair to tie pawpaw branches together, or they’re using ribbons from their hair, sometimes a yellow ribbon from their hair, to tie pawpaw branches together. And he can’t get an answer as to why. What’s going on with this? And so he goes out and he’s not supposed to do this. This is bad juju, if you will. You’ll end up getting some kind of bad luck. But he’ll untie some of these and try, maybe there’s a charm inside or what? Nothing is there. And nobody in the community wants to tell him what’s going on.
And so there’s some mystery in some of these things. We just, he gets enough of these stories, it seems interesting. That’s a bit more about the what and less about the why. No one feels comfortable saying why we do this, but they’re comfortable letting it be known that it does happen, which is pretty common in a lot of our old stories. And that’s part of it, lends itself a little bit to helping us understand the mythology of the Ozarks, right? We get a lot of these what things, but little true understanding of the why we’re doing it.
So another one of my favorite ones is if you, so this one is another one for if women are looking for to try to find, and I have some for the guys here in just a second, but women would also often apparently hide turkey bones. I don’t know why. We don’t know why. Turkey bones in the room where she was visiting with her gentleman friend. And the idea was that if you hide those in there, that creates some sort of binding force, and he’s going to fall in love with you. And it goes even further than that. So sometimes if a young man finds turkey bones underneath the seat of his car or his wagon, then it seems like somebody’s trying to trick him and get a hold of him, because maybe a young woman that he’d given a ride to somewhere, whether or not they were courting or not, she’s trying to enchant him and bring him in. And so old-timers would give the young man a little bit of a hard time to see what’s going on.
Matthew Moore: Would the man know which woman left this? Is that, I mean, was there a bit of detective work that’s happening, or was it truly just like a this has been left for you. Now be on the lookout.
Jared Phillips: A little bit of both. It will depend. I guess it depends a little bit if the young man is around her, if he’s known among the ladies. But if he’s an upstanding young man, he minds his p’s and Q’s, he’s a figure of moral integrity, he may have to do a little detective work and try to figure, is somebody trying to catch him because he’s holding himself back in some way?
OK. Now, the men have their own efforts, right? Because they also are interested in getting partnered off. And so sometimes what men will do is take a wild gander, so a male goose, a wild gander foot, and grind it into a powder and then try to figure out a way to slip it into a young woman’s coffee. And then if she drinks that, then she is going to be in love with him and loyal to him. Now, cautionary. Please don’t put anything into people’s drinks without permission. This was an idea that if you do this, and I don’t know, because the idea here, we do know why on this one. Because the folklore then, and the kind of relatively common knowledge now, is that geese mate for life. And so if you’re able to get a young woman to drink from this powder, this male goose powder, then it’ll help you create a lasting relationship. And we have a way to test for lasting relationships. I’ll come back to that in just a minute.
My other favorite one for the boys is if they would get a turtle dove’s tongue and hide it somewhere in a young woman’s house or in her room, then that would make her fall in love with him and do whatever it is that he wanted her to do. And this even causes problems if there’s a match later on. If a young woman falls in love with somebody that her parents don’t approve of, and Vance has a story about this, the parents will be certain that somebody has bewitched their daughter. And there’s a story where a pair of parents turned the house upside down and sideways trying to find the turtle dove’s tongue, even though the girl’s like, it’s got nothing to do with it. I just love this guy.
But we have all these charms, right? And so the idea in this season of high emotional excitement is how do we pair off, how do we find love and stability or whatever as we go forward in life really keeps bringing us back to this idea of there are so many things we don’t understand, so let’s bring some meaning and some control to this. And this is just another way of doing that. Understanding love is something we’ve been trying to do for millennia. And the Ozarks, we aren’t any different than anybody else in that.
But one nice thing, though, is we don’t just try to make people fall in love with us. We try to predict the success or failure of a relationship. And I think in particular because of the apple-growing past that we had in the early 20th century, before we gave way to the poultry industry, one of the favorite ways to try to guess if a couple was going to stay together or not would you take a coal shovel, not like on a big locomotive, just for your woodstove, so a little shovel, and you put two apple seeds in the shovel relatively close together, and then you put it over the coals and you see what happens. Do the seeds move closer together? And if they do, the couple is going to be together for life. Either they just started to court or they just got married. Now we don’t have to worry about them. But if the seeds go apart, then the couple is soon to separate. So if anybody’s worried about the status of their relationship, with a grain of salt, of course, and some trepidation, get some apple seeds and find a fire and see what happens.
Matthew Moore: I love it. I love it. OK. You’ve got some. Speaking of people in love with one another, Vance’s wife has some things to share with us, too.
Jared Phillips: Yes. I cannot speak highly enough of this collection. Some other day we’ll talk a lot more about Miss Parler. But I wanted to grab a few love songs, or at least some songs that talk about love. And I should note a lot of the songs about love in the Ozark Folk Song Collection are sad songs. So we’re talking about lovers lost, people dying, all kinds of it can get a little bit emotional.
But two songs that I enjoyed that I thought I would bring to us. One is where Miss Parler herself will go and record it with Jimmy Driftwood, none other than the anchor of the early days of the Folk Center and kind of anchor of the folk movement in the United States in the mid-century. He’s got a lovely song called “Breast of Glass.”
The time draws near when you and I must part.
No one can know the grief and woe of my poor aching heart.
Nor what I’ve suffered for your sake. ’Tis you I love so dearly.
I wish that you could go with me. Or I could tarry.
I wish my breasts were made of glass. Wherein you might behold
your name engraved upon my heart. In letters lined with gold.
Your name is sacred to my heart. Believe me what I say.
You are the one that I love best. Until my dying day.
And then there’s another one that we can listen to. And it’s by a guy from over in the Beaver area. His name is Richie Welch, and this was actually recorded by one of Mary Celestia Parler’s students. She sends her students out to record a lot of stuff. And this one is more of a fun, upbeat song. Jimmy Driftwood’s song’s a little bit, I mean, it’s a good song, but it’s not as uplifting maybe as other ones. This one’s called “When You Feel Like You’re in Love.”
When you feel like you’re in love. Don’t just stand there.
When you see that moon above. Don’t just stand there.
The last dance and say gotta get that ring.
When you feel like you’re in love. Don’t just stand there.
Matthew Moore: Where can people find more of her music?
Jared Phillips: So the Ozark Folk Song Collection through the University of Arkansas Special Collections. And you can email them or you can just Google Ozark Folk Song Collection and it’ll bring it up. And there are literally hundreds and hundreds of these, like almost 900 songs just about love there. And so anybody who just wants to listen to the old-time music, this is a great place to do it. If you’re a folk artist and you’re looking for inspiration, or you want to work with some kind of here’s some of our roots, this is a great place to go to. I know a lot of people that go to the open mic at the folk school. They dip back into this stuff all the time, so it’s a fantastic resource.
Matthew Moore: I love it. Any traditions that you yourself keep up with? When we think of Ozark traditions, what are some ways that you and your lovely wife plan on celebrating?
Jared Phillips: Well, it always kind of depends. This year, because we’re farmers, we’re in the middle of thinking through some farm tasks. So over the Valentine’s weekend, we’re getting a new sheep herding dog. And so we’re going to celebrate Valentine’s this way. So yeah, that’s what we’re up to this year.
Matthew Moore: I love it. Whether or not you’re getting a sheepdog, you can celebrate this weekend, Valentine’s Day, similar to what Jared will be doing. Jared Phillips. Thank you, as always.
Jared Phillips: Anytime.
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