2018 Events/Activities

At the Festival this year are several events/activities that you’ll want to be sure to see.

Descriptions are below, along with links to more detailed information pages.

Quilting with Cindy McLean

Cindy McLean, a member of the Southern Belle Grandmothers Club of West Plains, has been demonstrating traditional quilting techniques since 2006 at the Festival. Attendees are encouraged to try their hand at stitching, and then sign their “square.” Quilts from previous years are on display, so those who have participated in years past may find their signatures on them.

Fabric arts are a huge part of our history and heritage. McLean brings many examples of quilts, aprons, and other home-produced items that were such a huge part of the culture in years past. A visit to this exhibit is time well-spent.

Join her on the Mezzanine at the Civic Center from 3-7 p.m. both days at the Festival.

Treadle Sewing Machine Demonstration

This year, as an added feature, Judy Jo Protiva, co-owner of Peace Valley Poultry, will be demonstrating treadle sewing machine use on the mezzanine of the West Plains Civic Center from noon to 2 p.m. Friday and Saturday. JudyJo is a wife, mother, and grandmother, who started using treadle sewing machines in the early 1980s. It had been a dream of hers, and she was finally able to find a suitable machine.

Before she worked the kinks out of her beginning style, she started sewing pants for an exercise group. That, together with her delight in sewing for others and herself, put her learning into high gear. She only sewed for the group for a few months, but continued sewing on the treadle. Soon the wheel would hum as it rotated smoothly, the needle sewing creations.

A year or two later she sewed a tipi with her machine. She bought the canvas from a canvas company in Denver and sewed yards and yards of double seams, forming the fabric into a tipi cover. On the day she celebrated raising it, she met Jim Protiva, the man of her dreams, and they married 1½ years later.

JudyJo had always wanted to sew for her own children, and soon there were four children. Sometimes she would sew into the night to make the dresses and shirts for her family, a quicker process when it was quiet. Her oldest, Beth, remembers hearing the sound of the whirr of the treadle machine as she went to sleep. As these children grew up playing on and with the treadle, they developed a natural rhythm with it, until when they were old enough to sew, they could handle the machine efficiently.

To JudyJo, the treadle not only represents a means of productivity, but also a sense of nurturing and caring for others that is passed down through the generations. Come visit and learn more about these machines which are still used in many places today.

A treadle is a part of a machine which is operated by the foot to produce reciprocating or rotary motion in a machine such as a sewing machine, weaving loom, grinder, powering water pumps, or to turn wood lathes, to name a few. They allow human power of machinery without the need for electricity. Many of the early sewing machines were powered by a treadle mechanism. The treadle was operated by pressing down on it with a foot, or both feet, to cause a rocking movement. This movement spins a large wheel on the treadle frame, connected by a thin leather belt to smaller driving wheels on the sewing machine.

Quilt Show and Bed Turnings – Southern Belle Grandmothers Club

Book Signing with Howard Marshall

Fiddle historian and fiddler Howard Marshall will have copies of his new book and companion CD, “Fiddler’s Dream: Old-Time, Swing, and Bluegrass Fiddling in Twentieth-Century Missouri,” published by the University of Missouri Press, available for purchase and signing in the Civic Center Lobby on Friday, June 1, at 6 pm. The book signing is part of the events at the annual Old-Time Music, Ozark Heritage Festival.

The 24^th annual Old-Time Music, Ozark Heritage Festival will be held June 1 and 2, 2018, in historic downtown West Plains, including in and around the West Plains Civic Center. The two-day annual event in downtown West Plains, Mo., celebrates Ozarks music and culture. Admission to all festival events is free. Festival hours are 3-9 p.m. Friday, and noon-9 p.m. Saturday.

“Fiddler’s Dream covers the state of Missouri and includes bios and music by Ozark fiddlers such as Lonnie Robertson, Howe Teague, Roy Wooliver, Zed Tennis, Don Russell, Jim Orchard, Cecil Goforth, Warren Helton, and Roger Williams of West Plains. In this sequel to Howard Marshall’s earlier book on old-time fiddlers in Missouri, Play Me Something Quick and Devilish, the author uses oral history, archival photographs, and transcriptions of selected tunes to trace the evolution of traditional fiddle music in Missouri from the early 1920s to the abrupt changes in American society and traditional music in the 1960s. The book focuses on fiddle music in everyday life at music parties, dances, pie suppers, festivals, contests, and oprys. Marshall’s wealth of knowledge, gained through a lifetime of involvement in Missouri fiddle traditions, gives the book exceptional richness and depth.

Howard Wight Marshall is Professor Emeritus and former chairman of Art History and Archaeology, and former director of the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduate school, Dr. Marshall worked briefly as director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and then for several years as a curator and planner at a living history museum in Indiana and consulted for the Smithsonian Institution. He then was called to a position at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. While in Washington, he taught a night course in architectural history at George Washington University. Marshall left the Library of Congress after five years to teach at Kansas State University. In 1982, he returned to Columbia to establish the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center in the Graduate School at the University of Missouri, and to teach material culture, vernacular architecture, and historic preservation in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. After the closing of the Cultural Heritage Center in 1993 (due to a campus budget crisis), Marshall served as professor and department chair in Art History and Archaeology and took early retirement in 2000.
Dr. Marshall’s books include Buckaroos in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Paradise Valley, Nevada, Folk Architecture in Little Dixie: A Regional Culture in Missouri, Missouri Artist Jesse Howard, The German-American Experience in Missouri, Barns of Missouri: Storehouses of History, and Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri. Dr. Marshall’s latest book is Fiddler’s Dream: Old-Time, Swing, and Bluegrass Fiddling in Twentieth-Century Missouri, which continues the ethnography and discussion in Play Me Something Quick and Devilish.

Marshall plays the music he studies and writes about. He credits the memory of his grandfather, Wiley Marshall, a country schoolmaster and fiddler in Randolph County, with inspiring him to want to play the old dance tunes on the violin. Later, Marshall learned tunes and techniques from central Missouri fiddle legends such as Taylor McBaine, Jake Hockemeyer, Johnny Bruce, Nile Wilson, and Pete McMahan.