Ozark Mountains

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn the Ozarks, the Pandemic Threatens a Fragile Musical TraditionThe older fiddlers and rhythm guitar players don’t rely on sheet music, so their weekly jam sessions — now on hiatus — are critical to passing their technique to the next generation.Gordon McCann in October quit making the hourlong trek from his home in Springfield, Mo., to the McClurg jam because he got “spooked” by the virus.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York TimesFeb. 3, 2021Updated 11:00 a.m. ET‘Old Indiana,’ from the album ‘The Way I Heard It’The tune was popular in the 1930s and ’40s in the southern Missouri Ozarks.McCLURG, Mo. — In an abandoned general store along a nearly deserted country road, Alvie Dooms, 90, and Gordon McCann, 89, played rhythm guitar. Nearly a dozen more musicians, many of them also older adults, joined in on fiddle, mandolin, banjo and upright bass. Their tunes had names like “Last Train Home,” “Pig Ankle Rag” and “Arkansas Traveler.”The old-time dance music — merry and sweet, or slower and wistful — evoked the lively jigs and reels of the Scots-Irish pioneers who settled in these rugged hills generations ago. A precursor to bluegrass, their sound was unique to this particular corner of Missouri.The McClurg jam, as the Monday night music and potluck fest was known, endured for decades, the last gathering of its kind in the rural Ozarks. But the coronavirus pandemic has silenced the instruments, at least temporarily. And the suspension has led to worry: What will become of this singular musical tradition?The McClurg jam, as the Monday night music and potluck fest was known, endured for decades, the last gathering of its kind in the rural Ozarks.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York TimesAlvie Dooms holds a rare fiddle at his home in rural Ava, Mo. A longtime member of the McClurg jam, Mr. Dooms owns hundreds of instruments that he fixes and collects.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times“Because it’s ear music, it’s a little bit fragile,” said Howard Marshall, 76, a retired professor at the University of Missouri and a fiddler himself. “I’m not playing it exactly like the next chap will play it.”In other words, the McClurg old-time fiddlers and banjo players have mostly learned the tunes by listening to one another rather than reading from sheet music, passing the tradition from one generation to the next. Many of the musicians who know the songs best are growing old and, for now at least, have been sidelined.“I’m one of the younger ones, and I’m 74,” said Steve Assenmacher, a bass player who lives just up the hill from the McClurg Store and acts as its caretaker.In normal years, the store, still crammed with faded boxes of bras and women’s pumps left from a generation ago when the business shut down, is revived once a week for the jam. Musicians stream into McClurg, about 240 miles southwest of St. Louis, on Monday nights, performing for friends and spouses. They play sitting in a circle, stealing glances at Mr. Dooms’s callused fingers to gauge where his rhythm guitar might go next.Behind them, wives of the mostly male musicians and a handful of regulars snack on pot roast, quiche and pies. Occasionally, someone rises to their feet to dance.Sometimes called “mountain music,” the old-time genre has survived hundreds of years because of gatherings like the one in McClurg. Here, sheet music is referred to as “chicken scratches,” and formally trained musicians are at grave risk of being reviewed as “stiff.” Children with an aptitude for music have, for generations, picked up a family instrument and played along, rather than taking formal lessons.“I’m one of the younger ones, and I’m 74,” said Steve Assenmacher, a bass player who lives just up the hill from the McClurg Store and acts as its caretaker.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York TimesMcClurg, a crossroads more than a town, is home to a particular strain of old-time music that is not played in precisely the same way anywhere else.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York TimesMr. Dooms can still recall shivering in the back of a wagon as a boy, as his parents drove through the Ozark hills after dance parties, a fiddler’s music reverberating through his head to the rhythm of a horse’s feet striking dirt.“That was back when they had dances in people’s houses,” Mr. Dooms said. “You know, they’d move the furniture all out in a couple of rooms. The musician would sit in the doorway between them and they could dance in both rooms.”The Coronavirus Outbreak More