Mountain View, Arkansas: Folk Music Capital of the World

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At some point in the deep, forgotten history of Mountain View, Ark., one of our 11 Great Places You’ve (Maybe) Never Heard Of, a handful of farmers came to town for market day and brought with them those crucial instruments of Ozark culture: a fiddle, a banjo and a guitar. With their town chores out of the way, they settled on the courthouse square in downtown Mountain View and picked out a few tunes. From this mythical beginning has blossomed what is arguably one of the world’s most fertile and well-attended jam sessions, with as many as 3,000 string players routinely descending on the square for all-night string band sessions.

“There’s a huge range of players involved,” says Jimmie Edwards, who works as a group sales manager at the Ozark Folk Center, a state park located in Mountain View. “We’ve got a young lady named Clancy who’s 10 years old and plays the fiddle, we’ve got one guy who’s 88 and plays the fiddle, and everything in between.”

These outdoor jams are typical of the cultural pride in Mountain View, a small town of about 3,000, situated in a valley in the northern Arkansas Ozark Mountains. But Ozark Mountain music is only one tradition preserved here. Thanks in part to the Center, Mountain View has grown into a hub of traditional folk craftspeople — candlemakers, soap makers, blacksmiths, fiber artists, woodworkers, herbalists and more — many of whom demonstrate their crafts at the center and belong to one of the handful of folk guilds in the region.

Edwards traces the flowering of traditional handcrafts to the 1960s and 1970s, when homesteaders in the area and learned the subsistence skills from their old-timer neighbors. Today, the Folk Center caters to tourists with a “living history” experience of traditional crafts — but more importantly for the community, it serves as an incubator for traditional crafts (and some cash income for artisans) through classes, seminars and school programs. “Our aim is to keep the culture alive,” Edwards says.

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