OHR Presents: Best of the West

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas. In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region. In this week’s special episode, OHR heads west. The Western United States encompasses a plethora of great musical traditions. We’ve saddled up a superb sampling of Western American music performed by various traditional artists recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas. Featured on this episode are The Jason Roberts Band, The Purple Hulls, Don Edwards, The Western Flyers, Dom Flemons, Frank Fairfield & Zac Sokolow, The Quebe Sisters, and Riders in the Sky. Let’s ride! In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1976 archival recording of Ozark original and our very own Dave Smith performing the song “The Happy Sunny Side of Life” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives. In his segment “Back in the Hills,” writer, professor, and historian Dr. Brooks Blevins investigates historic outlaws of the Ozarks. Many famous outlaws including Bonnie & Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd have hidden out in the Ozarks. Brooks guides us through this cult of criminality, recounting details of some of the nation’s most notorious crooks’ Ozark experiences in part one of this series called “Public Enemy.”