This week, a special road trip episode. OHR visits Rogers, Arkansas’ Railyard Live Concert Series featuring Southwest Missouri based experimental post-oldtime neo-folk duo The Spooklights recorded live at Railyard Park in Rogers.

Rogers, Arkansas’ Railyard Live Concert Series began in 2021. Held on the city’s Butterfield Stage next to Railyard Park in historic downtown Rogers, it features live concerts every weekend throughout the Spring, Summer, and Fall. All of the Railyard Live events are either free to the public or at very low cost of admission. The concert series features a wide array of musical styles and interests designed to appeal to the diverse population of Rogers and invite them to experience the newly revitalized Railyard Entertainment District. The Ozark Folk Center State Park and the City of Rogers, Arkansas partnered to bring Ozark Highlands Radio to capture a little slice of this modern Ozark culture.

“Banjos and beats. Slide guitar and synth. Strange lights flickering in the woods. The Spooklights are what happens when Ozark tradition collides with homemade electronic wizardry. Ben Miller and Pat Kay — stalwarts of Midwest mountain music — soldered their roots to circuitry, creating a jangle-stomp time machine to explore hillbilly music from another dimension. Part folklore, part science fiction, their sound is familiar and otherworldly all at once: ancient, yet from some distant future.

Banjos and synthesizers... Dulcimers and wubs... Strange flashing lights... Unexplained phenomena... The Spooklights is a collaboration that is not what anyone would have expected from these two renowned torchbearers of Ozark mountain music tradition heretofore. It's certainly not what they expected when they traded keys to one another's bunker of busted toys and forlorn experiments during the lockdown of a global pandemic. 

From a pile of spare parts and fringe ideas, these industrious cobblers of homemade gear soldered a few choice wires between Electronic Music and their trademark "Ozark Stomp Grass" producing a jangle-stomp time-machine to vessel their most bizarre implements and soundscapes. In it, they have embarked on a journey exploring hillbilly music from a distant future. Hop on in, y'all. It’s only weird the first time.

Where does the name come from? What is the Spooklight? The Spooklight (also called the Hornet Spooklight, Hollis Light and Joplin Spooklight) is a paranormal light enigma near Route 66 southwest of Joplin, MO along a farm road called E 50, colloquially known as ‘Spooklight Road.’”

- https://stompgrass.com/the-spooklights

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, OHR producer Jeff Glover offers a 1974 archival recording of the legendary songwriter and Ozark original, Jimmy Driftwood, performing one of his more unusual songs, “The Lonesome Ape,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

In his segment “Back in the Hills,” author, professor and historian Dr. Brooks Blevins discusses some notable early song collectors in Springfield, Missouri.