Ozarkian Folk Chronicles - Your Podcast About the Ozarks

By Ozarkian Folk ChroniclesMusic History Music History

Ozarkian Folk Chronicles - Your Podcast About the Ozarks episodes

October 29, 2025 Episode 93: A Halloween Horror Story--The Vampire Within
Missouri's Old Lead Belt vampire--Orlin Eaton (maybe)--was accused of leaving his grave and poisoning children. While the historical record concerning Orlin was sketchy, the historical context is not: World War I was raging in Europe, child mortality was on the rise in the mining camps, Hungarian immigrants in the Lead Belt were held in suspicion, and the miners needed someone to blame. Out of the subsequent riots emerged a folktale with roots in the blood libel of the Middle Ages, and the Chronicles digs deep to show the continuing relevance of such stories to our own time. History, folklore, and ethnology converge in this episode with disturbing implications for us all.
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1 hr 6 min
October 22, 2025 Episode 92: The music of Nick and Captain Sibley
Nick Sibley is a highly regarded jingle writer--think O, O, O, O'Reilly . . . auto parts!--and musician who currently is playing back up with Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Captain Sibley, Nick's son, spent his eighteenth year touring with Tony Orlando--Captain plays bass--and now with Lee Greenwood. The Chronicles unites father and son in this special episode featuring the original music of Nick and Captain Sibley. Ozarks music is alive and well, and these gentlemen are the proof! This is a special episode we know you'll enjoy!
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1 hr 7 min
October 15, 2025 Episode 91: From Russian tyranny to the Ozarks hills, Dr. Mara Cohen Ioannides recalls the tragic story of a nearly forgotten Jewish community
In her book Yellow Jack and Turpentine, Mara Cohen traces the travels and travails of a group of Jewish refugees from Odessa, Russia, to the port city of Hamburg, Germany, to New York City and eventually to the banks of the White River near Newport, Arkansas. The group set out with the intention of becoming a farming community only to find an inhospitable land of poor soil, a flooding river, and disease bearing mosquitoes that would eventually defeat their experiment. "Yellow jack" was the idiom for yellow fever, and turpentine was the ostensible cure, but perseverance characterized their settlement in the Ozarks. Mara's story is one you're sure to enjoy!
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1 hr 10 min
October 08, 2025 Episode 90: Killer Carl and Mayhem in Taney County: Tammy Morton and Angel Wolf Return to the Chronicles!
In this episode, our own Madams of Murder, Tammy Morton and Angel Wolf, return to tell the outrageous story of Carl Wood. Carl once bragged that he had killed eleven men in the course of his life, and Tammy and Angel convey two of his most public and spectacular killings, one of which took place in a church in Protem, Missouri. Charming, vicious, and elusive, Carl never served time for murder, and he ended his life dying of natural causes in his home in Springfield. Nevertheless, he left a wake of bodies behind him and people who still mourn some eighty years later because justice, they believe, was never served. Another thoroughly documented and carefully told story from Tammy and Angel. You don't want to miss it!
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53 min
October 01, 2025 Episode 89: Waiting for the End of the World: The Incoming Kingdom Missionary Unit
The fourth episode in our series, Movements on the Margins, examines the establishment of a cult on the banks of the Buffalo in the early 1920s. John Battenfield, a charismatic preacher and scholar of Hebrew and Greek, moved with a group of his followers to Gilbert, Arkansas, to prepare for a worldwide war between Catholics and Protestants. In short order, they built a community with stores, forges, a church, and perhaps most important, a printing press. When the war failed to materialize, Battenfield tried to a raise a girl from the dead. When that failed to materialize, he had a nervous breakdown, and in 1925 he left for a sanatorium in New York. But the story doesn't end there. In a downward spiral of increasingly bizarre behavior, the group sputtered along until it finally disbanded in 1930. Join the Chronicles for another quirky story about a Movement on the Margins.
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52 min
September 24, 2025 Episode 88: The First Lady of the Ozarks, Kaitlyn McConnell, is on the Chronicles!
Kaitlyn McConnell has given her life to preserving the culture and stories of the Ozarks. Her focus is not simply on the past: She is also concerned with the activities and lives of Ozarkers today. Her passion has taken her all over the Ozarks, and in this episode, you'll learn more about Kaitlyn and her online project, Ozarks Alive! We hope you'll join us for this very special episode of the Ozarkian Folk Chronicles.

And don't forget our new addendum: Stories about the Storytellers. This segment introduces Deacon Frank Hembree, fiddler, float fishing guide, and contributor of the title story to Vance's notorious collection of bawdy tales, Pissing in the Snow. You can read about Frank Hembree in "Mildred, Quit Hollering," the final, posthumous collection of folktales by the inimitable Vance Randolph.
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1 hr 7 min
September 17, 2025 Episode 87: Ozarks Icon Phyllis Speer: Ready and Loaded for Bear!
Join the Chronicles for a delightful conversation with Phyllis Speer as she talks about her adventures hosting the wild game cooking show, Cooking on the Wildside, with John Philpot; hunting and fishing the beautiful Arkansas Ozarks; and the pleasure (and ethics) of cooking what you kill. Spend an hour with Phyllis, and you'll see why her show ran on the Arkansas Educational Television Network for eighteen years. You'll also find out how bear and bobcat taste--and how eating crow can be more than a cliche. You don't want to miss this special episode of the Ozarkian Folk Chronicles!
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1 hr 15 min
September 10, 2025 Episode 86: Arming for Armageddon: Vincent Anderson and the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord
Vincent Anderson joins the OFC for our third in the series, Ozarks Movements on the Margins, to recall for us one of the most notorious cults ever planted in these hills, the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord. From the earliest days of Ellison and Noble to the invasion of the compound in 1985, Anderson guides us through the history and aberrant theology of a compound in northern Arkansas that was obsessed with race, eschatology, and a supposed mission to defeat the enemies of God. A scarlet thread of hatred and end times speculation runs through many of these cults, but none exemplifies that thread more clearly than the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord.
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1 hr 25 min
September 03, 2025 Episode 85: From Coven to Christianity: The True Story of a Contemporary Ozarks Witch
The Movements on the Margins series continues with Kimberly, a former Wicca witch who recalls her experiences with the occult. Kimberly not only talks about the attraction of magic and the community that revolves around the practice of witchcraft, but she also recounts the events in her life that led to her conversion to Christianity. Kimberly's journey from darkness to light is unforgettable and a story that you will find inspiring in the end.
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1 hr 11 min
August 27, 2025 Episode 84: Ozarks Religious Movements on the Margins: A Conversation with Dr. John Schmalzbauer
Most Ozarkers are familiar with Gerald L.K. Smith, the founder of the Sacred Projects, e.g., The Great Passion Play and the Christ of the Ozarks, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, but Dr. John Schmalzbauer, the Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies at Missouri State University, takes us behind the veil to unpack Smith's more heterodox and toxic doctrines. From "British Israelism" to the "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel" to Smith's strident anti-Semitism, John initiates us into the topsy-turvy world of offbeat Ozarks religions. We hope you'll join us for a wild and wooly ride through our new series, "Movements on the Margins: A Survey of Profane, Profound, and Preposterous Religious Groups in the Ozarks."
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50 min

About Ozarkian Folk Chronicles - Your Podcast About the Ozarks

From the publisher's feed

Come with us as we dive head first into the titillating tales of Ozarkian folklore and discuss the origins and obscurities of these stories. From Curtis Copeland and Hayden Head, this is Ozarkian…