1960s Courthouse Hootenanny

Friday night Hootenanny at the Stone County Courthouse in the 1960s.

Harlie Dampf on the banjo.

This Ozark Folk Center 50th Anniversary Legacy Photo is sponsored by

Lea Rosa Marano, Jeanay Smith Price, and Stan Smith.

In loving memory of our devoted PaPa, Harlie Dampf

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The Stone County Courthouse Friday Night Hootenanny was part of the effort that eventually led to the creation of the Ozark Folk Center State Park. As we celebrate the Folk Center’s 50th Anniversary in 2023, we can give a hearty thank you to Dr. Brooks Blevins for his 2003 research and oral histories available at the Lyon College Regional Studies Center at https://home.lyon.edu/mslibrary/rcol/oralhistory.htm.

Mountain View’s folk music efforts were part of the wildly popular folk music movement that swept across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Jimmy Driftwood had won a Grammy Award in 1959 for his chart-topping song, The Battle of New Orleans. The Newport Folk Festival, in Rhode Island, begins in 1959 and Woodstock takes place in New York in 1969—all set against a backdrop of young people searching for alternative lifestyles, authenticity, and the lore of returning to the land.

Mountain View’s music culture was authentic and had been passed between generations. Dr. Blevins asks then State Representative, Eddie Walker, about folk music in a June 2003 interview and Walker responds:

Oh, yes. It’s been here all the time - square dances and all those things, those round dances and the fiddlers and the banjo pickers and the mandolin pickers and singers and so forth -

dancers - they’ve been here all the time, you know. That was the biggest pastime they had

back in those days.[i]

Walker goes on to describe taking John Opitz of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission to a music gathering,

So I took him to a little . . . Over here at the doctor’s office, in the reception room there - in

the waiting room - there was a group over there. There was about six or seven of them. Dr.

Hollister was over there - he was the doctor, and he provided the place to play music, and he

was a musician, him and his wife both were. He was a guitar picker and she was a singer.[ii]

Walker says that they soon needed more space, “…the county judge let us use the courtroom up here - and in six weeks we had the courtroom standing room only…”[iii]

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The Committee of One Hundred Tribute Wall recognizes contributions to the preservation of Ozark folk culture.

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If you would like to help preserve the folk culture of the Ozarks, consider a

donation to the Committee of One Hundred.

The Committee is made up entirely of volunteers so, except for transaction fees, all of your donation funds music, craft, or the herb gardens and, as a 501c3 entity

your donation is tax deductible!