Arkansas
June 2012
We have summited Mount Magazine, the high point in Arkansas, and we are on our way to Taum Sauk Mountain, the highest point in Missouri. We wind through the Uplands, the Ozark Plateau. Arkansas is nicknamed the “Natural State” because, before they began to build stuff, someone noticed that the area was quite fetching in a natural way. Or as the native Arkansans would say, “Rill perty.” Lots of wooded plain, clear lakes and oodles of happy animals: rabbit and squirrel, mink, armadillo, several of which we see sleeping, flat and motionless on the side of the road. In the many lakes and on the grills of every restaurant in this state are catfish. Although the legs of one frog landed on Lisa’s dinner plate one evening, most don’t.
We are on Arkansas Route 67, north of Little Rock. It’s hard to tell now, but there is melodic magic on this road. Born from poverty and a need to relieve themselves of the grind, locals built many little clubs along this thruway. Clubs: you know, juke joints, honky tonks, speakeasies. “Some [of these] establishments were small, rough country venues where farmers in bib overalls arrived on tractors, seeking evenings of excessive drinking, fighting, and flirtation,” says Don Jacobson in a 2009 article in the Beachwood Reporter.
Local performers we’ve never heard of played these places. But the one time Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash played together (other than their jam session with Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun Records in Memphis) was at the Texarkana Municipal Auditorium in Texarkana, Arkansas, right here on Route 67. Other performers in this famous road’s history include Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison, Fats Domino, Conway Twitty, Levon Helm and Ronnie Hawkins.
Jacobson writes, “Not too far from Memphis, where the rockabilly explosion was centered from 1955 to 1959 or so, Highway 67 boasted a swath of funky roadhouses and disreputable dives that appealed to the earliest crop of rockers, who piled into their Chevies and worked their way up and down this strip, leaving booze-fueled, pill-popping, duck-assed mayhem in their wakes.”
Jacobson wrote this as the Arkansas legislature was on the verge of officially designating this stretch of road through Jackson, Lawrence, Randolph and Clay counties with the apt and historic name of Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway 67.