MATTHEW MOORE: We begin today's show in Missouri, Branson to be specific. For some Ozarkers, a trip to Branson is an annual tradition, whether it's going to Silver Dollar City, the outlet shops or seeing a variety show. There's no shortage of activities in the tourist town. But Branson hasn't always looked like this. Joanna Dee Das is the author of the book "Faith, Family and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America." Dee Das will be on the University of Arkansas campus on Wednesday to discuss her book and her research. We spoke last week over Zoom. She says the story of Branson as a destination begins with the book "The Shepherd of the Hills" by Harold Bell Wright.
JOANNA DEE DAS: Who had actually been born in New York and was preaching in Kansas, came down to the Branson area, even though the city of Branson had not yet been incorporated in 1907, and he fell in love with the area and wrote a novel called "The Shepherd of the Hills," set in that region. And it became a runaway bestseller by many accounts, the bestselling book of the 1910s after the Bible. He became kind of the first literary millionaire in U.S. history. And so tourists started coming to the region in search for inspirations for these characters. And it raises this interesting question that lives throughout the book, and I think it's actually relevant to people today: What happens when you're asked to perform a version of yourself? And many people in Branson, the Branson area, which was an economically impoverished region, were quite willing to say, oh yes, I was the inspiration for this character from the book. And I was this inspiration. And some people became so involved with the characters that they said, I am me, but I'm also Sammy Lane from "The Shepherd of the Hills," that they put it on their tombstones when they passed away, the name of the character that they felt they represented. And so the Branson region became very accustomed to performing a vision, a kind of fictionalized version of what Ozarks morality was, and that just became very intertwined with the identity. And so by the time you get to these stage shows and the kind of live entertainment business of Branson 50 years later, there's already been a decades-long practice of kind of performing the Ozarks hillbilly and rural virtue, rural Christian virtue for outsiders for 40 years. So that really was the foundation. And even though Branson has expanded tremendously beyond that, that question still lingers. And it's actually one that's relevant to many people today who make their income from social media. You make your income from performing a version of yourself. And where is the real and the performed self, and how does it blur? So it's actually kind of a relevant question still now, over 100 years later.
MOORE: There's really two main components of Branson that you kind of talk about here. When we think about this version that has become kind of what we know it now. And the way that I'll split it up here is we have this Silver Dollar City and we have the variety show components. Let's start here by talking about Silver Dollar City. And there's a specific character that really sticks out to me in your story, and it's Mary Herschend, who was, as you describe her in the book, brought there crying the entire ride down from Chicago. Doesn't seem like it was really her dream or her joy to be there. And in fact, her husband, whose idea it was to come there, never really makes it there.
DAS: Right. And she is a fascinating person. I'm so glad you brought her up. Yes. She was a housewife in the suburbs of Chicago, kind of living the American dream of the 1950s. And her husband comes up with this idea. They go on vacation to the Ozarks. They fall in love with this tourist destination, Marvel Cave. And the two sisters who run that cave are ready to retire. Hugo Herschend decides this would be a great business to run in our retirement. Let's go do it. So even though he's not retired, he stays back to keep working in Chicago. Mary and their two sons come down to start operating Marvel Cave, and it's very hard work. You know, they're the first place they live doesn't really have running water and modern amenities. But they grind and grind and expand the cave. And then together with this kind of carnival man from out of town, Russell Pearson, decide to build this Silver Dollar City, kind of an imitation village of a village that did once stand on those very grounds. And in the meantime, Hugo Herschend dies of a heart attack suddenly. So she's a widow. And the three of them, Mary and her sons, Jack and Pete, create this village that they think is just to entertain tourists as they wait their turn to go down into the cave. They don't charge any money. There's some craft items for sale, and it turns into the big draw that becomes what brings the tourists, and it expands. And performance becomes a very important part of it, because people don't just come to walk along the streets and see the buildings. They interact with the employees at Silver Dollar City who are dressed up as people from the 1880s, speak like they're from the 1880s, use tools that are from the 1880s and but really improvise and act and interact with the audiences or the tourists there to make them feel like they've stepped into the past. And that was a phrase that one of the most important employees, Lloyd Heller, used to describe both Shepherd of the Hills and Silver Dollar City, wanted to make people feel like they stepped into the past. And so that was a really big generator of tourism in the Branson area and of performance as many people became trained in how to kind of perform for tourists as employees or citizens, as they were called, of Silver Dollar City. And there was some influence from Disneyland. There was some influence from like Colonial Williamsburg that really kind of helped them to hone this idea of like what set Silver Dollar City apart.
MOORE: And for you as you think about, you know, perhaps this early iteration of Silver Dollar City, how did it find its way as distinguishing itself from these other theme parks or these other, you know, kind of ideas of like a city within a city?
DAS: That's a really great question. I think Silver Dollar City identifies itself as the middle ground. It's in the middle of America between Disneyland — there's no Disney World yet, so there's Disneyland on the West Coast, which is kind of pure fantasy built, you know, in the middle of California. And then Colonial Williamsburg, which is kind of a they portrayed as kind of a fussy historical recreation that's very concerned with historical facts and education and educating its visitors. And Silver Dollar City is kind of in the middle. They have no historians on staff. There's not an educational program. This is about entertainment, but it's not total fantasy because it is built on the grounds of an actual village that was there before. And so tourists can feel this sense of authenticity. So it kind of blends the performance-authenticity divide between a purely more educational place like Colonial Williamsburg and a more fantasyland like Disney. Of course it has elements of both of those and things like that. So that's how it really forged this unique middle path. And therefore it could also claim to kind of be the heart of America, which we now see a lot of, like the middle, Middle America as heartland America, and Silver Dollar City helped kind of with that idea.
MOORE: I'm speaking with Joanna Dee Das, the author of "Faith, Family and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America." The other element of your book that we really focus a lot on is the variety shows. And there are some core tenets that you lay out throughout the book. And we'll kind of go through these quickly and maybe you can talk about some of the ones that most stand out to you, and I'll do the same. Obviously the first element of a variety show is that it's variety, that it's a lot of different things at once. It's not one specific thing. Familiarity, affordability, a clean comedy that it's safe for the family. There's elements of drag that are involved in variety shows. There's audience interaction that happens in this capacity, too, and there's explicit merchandising. There's intermissions within the show. There are calls to action within the shows that happen to say, if you liked this happening here, go to the merch table and go buy it yourself. For you, what was maybe surprising or what was maybe the thing that stuck out the most to you personally when we think about these core tenets?
DAS: Well, first of all, when I saw the amount of variety, meaning almost no songs are sung into their full three and a half or four minutes. People sing 60 seconds or 90 seconds of a song. So the variety is much faster-paced than I had expected. And again, I relate it to today. I say variety is the early TikTok. Like our attention spans as humans are naturally short. And so variety entertainers picked up on that early. I also was just very impressed in Branson when I went to see shows live, the amount of audience interaction and that that is a big part of how Branson shows promote themselves as family-friendly and as places that kind of build community, which is a goal that theater all over the world says that it has, to build community. But Branson performers have done that very well through how much audience interaction they have. One thing that was surprising to me when I first started attending Branson shows again was that performers would come out at intermission in their costumes. And in theater, you traditionally have this idea of what's called the fourth wall, that the world on stage is separate from the world offstage, and you don't want to break character because then you'll shatter the illusion of the world on stage you're creating. And Branson entertainers said, no, no, we are real people. We're the same people on stage and off, which of course is not true. They're performing, but it creates a sense of community and egalitarianism. I'm not too big for my britches. I'm not too famous to come down and greet you. And so this was a really interesting aspect of Branson shows because I've, you know, you see people in the theater greet people on the stage door afterwards, after they've changed out of their costumes. They've washed the makeup off their face. They've broken out of character. But to see people greeting and interacting with the audiences during intermission was a unique thing for me, and I thought was really interesting.
MOORE: The book is called "Faith, Family and Flag," and I think as we sit here in 2026, we are in the second administration of Donald Trump. And these sort of ideals that have been a bit implicit within the things that happen at Branson, whether it's thinking about patriotism in a very specific way, thinking about Christianity and its relationship to America in a very specific way, and thinking about what constitutes something as family-friendly, that often when we look at performances that happen in Branson, it tends to be faith-based or patriotic. And best case scenario, it's both. How have we seen a change or a shift in the way that Branson portrays itself through this idea of faith and family and flag?
DAS: Well, I think there's a bit of a tension now in Branson between differing interpretations of how to move forward with those ideas. That for some people, faith, family and flag are pre-political ideas, that they're universal values that all people share. You know, one person who wrote about Branson in 2010 said, you know, these are universal values of all people. And I've talked to people in Branson to this day who really do believe that and do feel that these are ideas that could be welcoming to a wide variety of people. Then there are others who understand, know and understand that this set of the three Fs, faith, family and flag, or faith, family and freedom, are aligned with the conservative political movement in America and embraced almost exclusively or used almost exclusively by conservative political candidates. And some people are perfectly fine with leaning into that meaning of faith, family and flag. And in fact, this year's most recent marketing campaign for Branson really establishes it as a town based on faith, family and flag, and has shifted its marketing from trying to market to people who like certain activities, such as boating or fishing or seeing a show, to people who match its core values. So that perhaps signals people who are already comfortable with identifying themselves as seeing faith, family and flag as part of either their personal identity or their political identity. So it gets kind of tricky because as a tourist destination, sometimes you want to try to welcome all people and sometimes you try to find a marketing niche. And whether faith, family and flag is a genuinely held belief, a marketing brand, a political brand, sometimes those lines can get fuzzy. And so I think of Branson as a really interesting place to think about these questions. It makes it a tricky place to write about, because you want to be fair to the different people who interpret that phrase different ways. So it can be very subtle, which is hard to do sometimes in our current culture, to try to be subtle and nuanced and allow for differing opinions and interpretations.
MOORE: When you think 20, 25 years from now, do you think Branson looks as similar to what it looks like now? Do you imagine there will be a large shift in how the especially the entertainment elements of Branson looks?
DAS: I think it will continue to shift. It is a living, dynamic place. And I think, you know, one strong kind of hypothesis that many in Branson shares that it will shift away from stage shows and more to kind of experiences, whether that be attractions like riding a Ferris wheel or these kind of immersive pseudo-theatrical experiences like the Titanic Museum. And as we talked about with immersive theater across the country becoming more popular, so I could see it shifting in that way. I do think the kind of core of live performance will remain a part of Branson. But yeah, I'm a better historian than I am a predictor of the future.
MOORE: Joanna Dee Das is the author of "Faith, Family and Flag." She will be at the University of Arkansas on Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 4:30 in Gearhart Hall, Room 26, to talk more about her book and research. We spoke over Zoom last week.
