OHR Presents: Nick Shoulders

This week, Ozark original, singer-songwriter, yodeler, multi-instrumentalist and one man band Nick Shoulders recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas. Also, interviews with this interesting musical multi-tasker. Nick Shoulders is originally from Fayetteville, Arkansas but now divides his time between Fayetteville and New Orleans. Nick blends his unique brand of Arkansas honkabilly with Slim Whitman-style quivering country ballads. While simultaneously playing drums and guitar, Nick performs old-time country and honky tonk music that features whistling, yodeling, mouth trumpet, kazoo, and more. “Wielding a high yodel and whistle crafted from a lifetime chasing lizards through the Ozark hills, Nick combines his family's deep ties to southern traditional music with years singing to empty street corners to create this hybridized form of raucous country music: born of some dark holler and bred to be stomped into the New Orleans dance floors it now calls home. Since 2014, Nick has periodically traveled for months at a time, living out of his van-house with his trusty 130-pound dog Moose while busking as a one-man band all over the U.S.” - https://nickshoulders.bandcamp.com In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1978 archival recording of Ozark original Mike Sutter performing the blues song “Jimmy Bell,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives. Writer, musician, and traditional dancer Aubrey Atwater discusses the tradition of jump rope and hand clapping rhymes and songs in folk music with musical examples and her own cultivated insight. In this segment, we visit playgrounds to hear children jump rope and play hand-clapping games, eavesdropping on their rhymes and chants, many of which are derived from old folk songs, tales and current events. We even learn how some of these songs have made their ways into modern popular music.