Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, legendary Grammy nominated Bethesda, Maryland progressive bluegrass super-group The Seldom Scene recorded live at the Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas.  Also, interviews with this enduring and enigmatic group of bluegrass pioneers.

For almost fifty years, The Seldom Scene has been a staple of the American bluegrass landscape.  Their innovative approach to this traditional genre has brought bluegrass music to an ever widening audience.  While paying homage to the genre with traditional instrumentation & harmony singing, The Seldom Scene cleverly apply a fresh coat of bluegrass bent to seemingly any kind of song they choose.  Along with traditional bluegrass songs, rock, country, pop, and even classical music are reimagined into fresh masterpieces.

Although the lineup of The Seldom Scene has changed slightly over the decades, the sound and spirit of the group has endured.  Today, they are Dudley Connell on guitar, Lou Reid manning mandolin & guitar, Ron Stewart taking on banjo & fiddle, Fred Travers on dobro, and Ronnie Simpkins holding up the bottom end on bass.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1983 archival recording of Ozark original Bob Atchison performing the traditional fiddle tune “Bull at the Wagon,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

Writer, musician, and traditional dancer Aubrey Atwater presents “Ballads That End Well,” proving that folk ballads don’t always end with a grizzly horrifying death.

Sound Beat episodes for the month of July 2021.

"How easily happiness begins by dicing onions.” So said the poet William Matthews. How easy is it to find happiness? Maybe just as simple as dicing onions, cleaning your room, taking a walk, or listening to a good story. We hope you find some happiness on today’s episode. Our first story is “Onions,” by Cindy Rivka Marshall, a story of a girl finding her way in the world with the help of a bag of onions. You’ll hear “Half Chick” by Tim Lowry, the story of a strange little chicken, and “An Old Rodeo Clown,” by Donna Ingham, a memory she loves to tell about her father. We’ll wrap it all up with “Colorin Colorado,” a story that a father uses to comfort his son, told by Pam Faro. It’s all coming up today on the Apple Seed!

Mask debates, a rush for a vaccine, and closed schools--not much has changed in the years since the 1890 and 1918 influenza epidemics. Tom Ewing takes us back to historical outbreaks to see what we can learn about today’s Covid-19 pandemic. And: There’s been a lot of coverage about the challenges of distributing the Covid-19 vaccine. How do we get it to distant areas? How do we use a whole vial before it expires? What about the special refrigerators needed to keep it cold enough? But these problems seem minor compared to the very first vaccine distribution in the early 1800s. Historian Allyson Poska shares the story of 29 orphan boys who crossed the Atlantic Ocean as live incubators for the smallpox vaccine and what lessons we can learn from this early campaign. 

Later in the show: Navigating social lives in the time of Covid can be awkward. How do you tell your friends, ”No, I won’t be joining you at that restaurant, but yes, we can take a walk in the park together” without having to explain or excuse? Carrie Dolan says we need to get better at communicating our personal risk levels during the pandemic or we won’t be able to stop it. Plus: Like most users, Jeanine Guidry clicked through Pinterest for gardening tips and decorating ideas. But she also found a surprising abundance of vaccine conspiracy theories. Guidry studied the social media platform’s role in the anti-vaccination movement, and now she’s looking at the spread of COVID-19 misinformation online.