Ozark Highlands Radio

This week, acoustic ragtime and early jazz quintet the Lovestruck Balladeers recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park. Also, interviews with this fascinating group’s fearless leader, Jake Sanders. “The Lovestruck Balladeers enchant audiences with their masterful performances and inspired repertoire of ragtime, jazz and beautiful songs from around the world. They might whip out a lost melody from a forgotten mandolin folio or they might play a Mexican waltz. They might push into a renegade rearrangement of a swing standard or get down with a country rag. They are the five scorpion sons of a West Virginia dance hall, a Little Italy tourist attraction and a Oaxacan birthday party. Together or on their own paths, this stellar band of traveling musicians has traversed the country and the globe, carrying traditional styles into modern times. The versatile quintet features twin fiddles, clarinet, guitars, a mandolin trio, upright bass, banjo, piano and vocal harmonies. Their repertoire is a rare repository of American and international music seldom heard beyond the walls of low-lit dance halls at the edge of the known world. Hailing from across the United States and Canada, The Lovestruck Balladeers are: Jake Sanders, Aaron Jonah Lewis, Dennis Lichtman, Sean Cronin and Dalton Ridenhour.” https://www.lovestruckballadeers.com/ In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, OHR producer Jeff Glover offers a 1981 archival recording of Ozark originals Tommy Simmons & Dean Hinesley performing the song “Sinking Creek,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives. In his segment “Back in the Hills,” writer, professor, and historian Dr. Brooks Blevins investigates the history of “big fellers” and tall tales in the Ozarks. You’ve heard of Paul Bunyan, the legendary giant lumberjack, but have you heard of Blinky Bluejohn of the Ozarks? Brooks fills us in on this Ozark original “big feller.”