Wendy and I spent part of our Spring Break at the Holiday Island retirement community in Arkansas. More on that will come in a later post; this tale is about our trips through two different hollers on the way there and back and the harmonies that haunt me.

Southwestern Missouri is replete with ancestors of mine from my father’s side, and I have been vacationing there for a lifetime. The traditional route for my parents to get there from Oklahoma City was to follow Interstate 44 to Fairland and then head east on US 60 to Neosho, Missouri. From there we could take a variety of routes leading southeast to Cassville and on to our vacation cabin on Table Rock Lake. But we seldom if ever took the route I chose for this trip.

At Neosho I deviated from the usual options to take highway D past old Fort Crowder and follow it past Stella to intersect US 76 and follow it a few miles east where we could dive down into the hills and hollers southwest of Exeter, Missouri along highway U, seeking Thomas Hollow.

In the 1970s, my parents would drive south out of Exeter and turn west to drive into Thomas Hollow, where we would visit Bazil and Glee Duncan on their farm. I remember hunts held at their place, with many camping trailers, including my paternal grandparents from Independence, Kansas. Below is a clip from one such trip, shot by my father on standard 8mm film, so it is silent:

While my father’s film of the hunt camp are silent, my memories are filled with sounds. Certainly there were the bays of dogs on the hunt. But there were also sweet haunting harmonies from live music at some of the hunts.

I remember when the third iteration of The Foggy River Boys would sing at some hunts during the off-season for their show at Kimberling City and later Branson. Here is a look back at that group:

Years ago, I learned that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had been heavily influenced by the four-part harmonizing of The Four Freshmen:

My first exposure to live harmony singing had been The Happy Goodmans at one of their appearances in Oklahoma City:

Then that was reinforced by The Foggy River Boys at a hunt:

But what prompted my decision to return to Thomas Hollow was that recently I have been scanning old family photo albums, and I came across shots of over a dozen old barns in Thomas Hollow that we visited in 1973. I recognized a shot from a half-century ago of Bazil and Glee’s farmhouse, and then I saw it again as I started digitizing my father’s old home movies.

Bazil was a farmer and school bus driver who died in 1994 and Glee was a former schoolteacher who left us in 2000. I reckoned that their farmhouse was gone as well, but I wanted to see for myself, and the entire area is dotted with family history. But I hardly if ever had driven to Thomas Hollow, instead being chauffeured by my father, and my memories had faded after a half-century.

So my first attempt missed the mark, with me driving Wendy’s minivan past the turn for Thomas Hollow and instead leading us through Star Hollow to the south. It was still a fun drive, with us finally exiting near Washburn. I didn’t mention it to Wendy, but my paternal great-grandfather, who had been orphaned in the Civil War, once had a farm southwest of Washburn. He had a series of hill farms all over the area, moving so often that my grandfather once told my mother that his family had moved so often that the chickens would come up, lie down, and cross their legs to be tied for the next move.

My mother’s family moved 13 times in five years across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona when she was a teenager. So she retorted that they had moved so often that the chickens would come up, lie down, cross their legs to be tied, and they had the string in their bills. My grandfather really got a kick out of being one-upped by her.

If we had headed south to Seligman, we would have passed near to where my paternal grandmother was born in 1893. But we headed north to Cassville, where my paternal grandfather was born in 1892 in the Flat Creek valley at the southwest edge of town, in an old double log house which had once been a stagecoach stop along the wire road between Springfield, Missouri and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

My grandparents married in 1917, had two daughters, and moved to Dewey, Oklahoma in 1923, where my father and his younger sister were born. The family then moved to Grabham Station outside Independence, Kansas in 1936. My grandparents were married for over 68 years, a feat I cannot match since I didn’t get married until I was almost 50.

Anyway, having missed the hollow on our way to Arkansas, I decided to try again a few days later on our return to Oklahoma. I knew my memories would allow me to find it when approaching from the east.

We drove west from Cassville to Exeter, turning south on MM past Maplewood Cemetery, which is the resting place for a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, a great-grand-uncle, a grand-uncle and his wife, two grand-aunts and their husbands, and probably some other relatives of mine.

We then turned west on Farm Road 2190 and successfully traversed Thomas Hollow, where I readily located what was once Bazil and Glee’s farm. Their old farm house has been replaced with a new one. Now knowing where to look, I was able to use Google Earth to see that the farmhouse was replaced sometime between 1996 and 2003. But the fields where the trailers and tents once stood are still there, along with the deep woods where the dogs once ran.

I hid my emotions as we headed through the holler, haunted by voices that only I could hear. I heard Bazil laughing as my ten-year-old self told him a long joke about Datsun cars. The Datsun brand would be phased out a decade later, and Bazil was gone eight years after that. But his laughter will live on in me for awhile yet.

As for my haunting harmonies, by the early 2000s the Happy Goodmans were all gone and the Foggy River Boys had disbanded, but their euphonies live on via vinyl, magnetic tape, and digital technology…and in my heart.

Standin’ in the shadows
The man I used to be
Wanna go back
(Can’t go back, can’t go back)
Melodies awaken
Sorrows from their sleep
Wanna go back
(Can’t go back, can’t go back)