Bill Cooper
There is a hand polished walnut replica of an outsized Ozark wood tick hanging on his living room wall. That, in and of itself, speaks volumes about the unusual, one-of-a-kind, love affair, emotional attachment, and deep understanding of the Ozarks – its people and its places – that only Mitch Jayne has.
The first time I read one of Jayne’s stories, in the Missouri Conservationist, I read it again, and again, and again…….
I wondered who this outlandish scribe of the bowels of the Ozarks was. Why had I not read him before? It was as if he appeared like a ghost.
Then he disappeared – at least from the pages of the Missouri Conservationist. Seems the new Director of the Missouri Department of Conservation thought Jayne’s’ writings made fun of the Ozark hillbillies.
As Jayne put, “Nobody made more fun of the hillbillies than they themselves. The hill folks were an independent lot, quite capable of eking out a living where most people would flat starve. And in the process, they somehow created one of the most unique societies ever to exist on the face of the earth. And they certainly had a canny sense of humor about themselves and the lives they lived.”
Mitch Jayne perches in my mind as the most incredibly unique human being I have ever met. I do believe in ghosts. He may be one. Maybe it is the white pants, shoes, and turtleneck that he wears. His white hair adds a glowing aura to his being. Not spooky – just captivating.
Then there is his voice. Smooth, fluid, eloquent. Could fit into a choir of angels. He wouldn’t agree, though.
Born in Indiana in 1928, Jayne didn’t stay there long. “About 15 minutes,” he said. His family lived in Cahokia, Missouri near the Iowa line.
After a stint in the Navy, Jayne took advantage of the GI Bill to attend the State Teachers College in Kirksville. While there, he fell in love with the voice of lovely girl from Eminence who was attending school in Columbia. “I had never heard anyone talk the way she did. She used some unusual words with very different pronunciations. This girl was pretty, but the place she was from was beauuuutiful.”
“There are all manner of reasons to marry someone,” Jayne surmised. “And humans use up most of them. I think it was words I fell in love with enough to actually get married.”
Jayne had listened to the girl’s descriptions of rivers as clear as gin and blue springs one could sink a church in. She told of everyone’s musical talents, play parties and square dances. Everyone was neighborly, the old folks told stories, and everybody hunted wild game all the time and gigged fish at night. And moonshine whiskey still flowed.
Jayne aspired to move among those people, live the way they did, and maybe make a living writing wonderful stories about the adventures he discovered. Writing was his passion and words his path. He wanted to learn, firsthand, what all the words this girl used meant.
Jayne married, fulfilling part of his dream. Lady luck favored him. Soon he gained employment as a teacher of the Cross School in Dent County. His mother-in-law, Mae Deatherage, a former one-room school teacher, warned Jayne of the perils of the job. She warned of the lack of money, the politics of school boards who preferred to hire a relative, the extra work of building fires in the winter, and killing copperhead snakes in the summertime. She told of teaching country boys twice her size and being “mean with it,” as she said. She talked of rough Ozark families who “fit, shot and throwed hatchets, and blackguarded at the dinner-table.” She warned that those people could make a teacher’s life miserable. Jayne figured he could handle it, as long as they didn’t set fire to the school.
Jayne acquired the last schoolmaster position available. Superintendent Walter Jenkins explained the situation. “Now it’ back in the jillikins,” he warned, “and it’s a very poor deestrict. Not many chirren for scholars.”
“Lord, I didn’t care about that,” Jayne explained. “I’d already heard four old fashioned Ozark words in one sentence and made a mental note to jot them down the minute I got back to the car.”
Jayne’s own Ozark education began on the first day of school.
“After everyone took their seats,” Jayne began, “I pointed at one of the first graders, a little girl all dressed up for her first day of school in a clean pinafore, shiny pigtails, and shiny plastic shoes. I asked her if she’d tell me her name and when I was sure I had it right, Glenda Faye, I asked her what her folks names were and what her daddy did for a living. She knew her parents names fine, but when it came to occupation, she thought about it, and said, ‘He principally farms.’”
“Now that stunned me.” I had never heard many people use the word principally except school teachers, but here it was out of the mouth of a six year old who had, so far anyway, never spent a day in school.”
“But, this child wasn’t done with me. She’d gotten to where she trusted my motives, I guess, and thought I deserved more. “But when he ain’t farmin,’” she added, ‘he mostly sets on the porch and plays the fiddle to beguile the time.’”
“Beguile? Beguile the time? I couldn’t believe my ears. Except for poetry or Shakespeare, I’d never heard anyone use the word beguile in my 21 years and here was a child using it as comfortably as an Elizabethan courtier.”
Jayne discovered that day a tip of an iceberg that had underlaid the Ozarks for nearly 300 years. He continued to secretly jot down (so as not to embarrass the children) archaic words they flung around in their daily speech.
He wanted to give the very best education he could. Yet, he struggled with the knowledge that in so doing he would replace their obsolete but beautiful language with one that would serve them better in a modernizing world.
“I had to do something about words that would get them laughed at anywhere outside of the Ozarks. For example, their pronunciation of any word ending in st. To my students nests were nestes, posts were postes and floor joist were joistes. This odd addition of an extra ‘es’ sound was even added to wasps, which for some reason came out ‘wastes’ an desks, which came out ‘deskes’. These words were so natural they were hard to fix at school, because all the kid’s parents used them. I was introduced to one of the kid’s uncles at a school ‘doin’s’ whose name, he said was ‘Noey, after the feller that put all the beastes in the ark.”
One room school houses and the “Mother Tongue”, a form of Middle English speech, had little time remaining. Jayne taught until consolidation closed the doors of his second one-room school.
He continued to love and admire Ozarks people, and spent as much time among them as possible. From festivals and singins’ to deer camp fires, Jayne gathered the words of these wonderful people. Jayne wrote stories and dialogues for his well known radio program which aired from Salem. He eventually made it to Hollywood with the Dillards. He wrote material for Dick Clark Productions and appeared a number of times with his group as “The Darling Boys” on the Andy Griffith Show
Today, Mitch Jayne and his lovely wife, Dianna, reside in the heart of Eminence, right in the middle of the people they love most.
I sat and reminisced with Mitch on his front porch. He broke out a half-gallon jug of wine. “Smells good,” I commented.
“Don’t know if it is any good,” Jayne replied. “I just liked the picture on the side.”
He turned the bottle to display a colorful fox hound bounding across a field.
Seven hours and an empty wine bottle later, an old beagle yodeled up the hill. “I just love to hear that dog howl as he chases that rabbit. I listen to them about this time everyday. That old dog never will catch that rabbit, but he doesn’t seem to mind.”
Now, that is words with the bark on them.
Mitch Jayne’s fabulous book about the Ozarks and its people (A FIDDLER'S GHOST) can be ordered from Wildstone Media. http://www.wildstonemedia.com/.
There is a hand polished walnut replica of an outsized Ozark wood tick hanging on his living room wall. That, in and of itself, speaks volumes about the unusual, one-of-a-kind, love affair, emotional attachment, and deep understanding of the Ozarks – its people and its places – that only Mitch Jayne has.
The first time I read one of Jayne’s stories, in the Missouri Conservationist, I read it again, and again, and again…….
I wondered who this outlandish scribe of the bowels of the Ozarks was. Why had I not read him before? It was as if he appeared like a ghost.
Then he disappeared – at least from the pages of the Missouri Conservationist. Seems the new Director of the Missouri Department of Conservation thought Jayne’s’ writings made fun of the Ozark hillbillies.
As Jayne put, “Nobody made more fun of the hillbillies than they themselves. The hill folks were an independent lot, quite capable of eking out a living where most people would flat starve. And in the process, they somehow created one of the most unique societies ever to exist on the face of the earth. And they certainly had a canny sense of humor about themselves and the lives they lived.”
Mitch Jayne perches in my mind as the most incredibly unique human being I have ever met. I do believe in ghosts. He may be one. Maybe it is the white pants, shoes, and turtleneck that he wears. His white hair adds a glowing aura to his being. Not spooky – just captivating.
Then there is his voice. Smooth, fluid, eloquent. Could fit into a choir of angels. He wouldn’t agree, though.
Born in Indiana in 1928, Jayne didn’t stay there long. “About 15 minutes,” he said. His family lived in Cahokia, Missouri near the Iowa line.
After a stint in the Navy, Jayne took advantage of the GI Bill to attend the State Teachers College in Kirksville. While there, he fell in love with the voice of lovely girl from Eminence who was attending school in Columbia. “I had never heard anyone talk the way she did. She used some unusual words with very different pronunciations. This girl was pretty, but the place she was from was beauuuutiful.”
“There are all manner of reasons to marry someone,” Jayne surmised. “And humans use up most of them. I think it was words I fell in love with enough to actually get married.”
Jayne had listened to the girl’s descriptions of rivers as clear as gin and blue springs one could sink a church in. She told of everyone’s musical talents, play parties and square dances. Everyone was neighborly, the old folks told stories, and everybody hunted wild game all the time and gigged fish at night. And moonshine whiskey still flowed.
Jayne aspired to move among those people, live the way they did, and maybe make a living writing wonderful stories about the adventures he discovered. Writing was his passion and words his path. He wanted to learn, firsthand, what all the words this girl used meant.
Jayne married, fulfilling part of his dream. Lady luck favored him. Soon he gained employment as a teacher of the Cross School in Dent County. His mother-in-law, Mae Deatherage, a former one-room school teacher, warned Jayne of the perils of the job. She warned of the lack of money, the politics of school boards who preferred to hire a relative, the extra work of building fires in the winter, and killing copperhead snakes in the summertime. She told of teaching country boys twice her size and being “mean with it,” as she said. She talked of rough Ozark families who “fit, shot and throwed hatchets, and blackguarded at the dinner-table.” She warned that those people could make a teacher’s life miserable. Jayne figured he could handle it, as long as they didn’t set fire to the school.
Jayne acquired the last schoolmaster position available. Superintendent Walter Jenkins explained the situation. “Now it’ back in the jillikins,” he warned, “and it’s a very poor deestrict. Not many chirren for scholars.”
“Lord, I didn’t care about that,” Jayne explained. “I’d already heard four old fashioned Ozark words in one sentence and made a mental note to jot them down the minute I got back to the car.”
Jayne’s own Ozark education began on the first day of school.
“After everyone took their seats,” Jayne began, “I pointed at one of the first graders, a little girl all dressed up for her first day of school in a clean pinafore, shiny pigtails, and shiny plastic shoes. I asked her if she’d tell me her name and when I was sure I had it right, Glenda Faye, I asked her what her folks names were and what her daddy did for a living. She knew her parents names fine, but when it came to occupation, she thought about it, and said, ‘He principally farms.’”
“Now that stunned me.” I had never heard many people use the word principally except school teachers, but here it was out of the mouth of a six year old who had, so far anyway, never spent a day in school.”
“But, this child wasn’t done with me. She’d gotten to where she trusted my motives, I guess, and thought I deserved more. “But when he ain’t farmin,’” she added, ‘he mostly sets on the porch and plays the fiddle to beguile the time.’”
“Beguile? Beguile the time? I couldn’t believe my ears. Except for poetry or Shakespeare, I’d never heard anyone use the word beguile in my 21 years and here was a child using it as comfortably as an Elizabethan courtier.”
Jayne discovered that day a tip of an iceberg that had underlaid the Ozarks for nearly 300 years. He continued to secretly jot down (so as not to embarrass the children) archaic words they flung around in their daily speech.
He wanted to give the very best education he could. Yet, he struggled with the knowledge that in so doing he would replace their obsolete but beautiful language with one that would serve them better in a modernizing world.
“I had to do something about words that would get them laughed at anywhere outside of the Ozarks. For example, their pronunciation of any word ending in st. To my students nests were nestes, posts were postes and floor joist were joistes. This odd addition of an extra ‘es’ sound was even added to wasps, which for some reason came out ‘wastes’ an desks, which came out ‘deskes’. These words were so natural they were hard to fix at school, because all the kid’s parents used them. I was introduced to one of the kid’s uncles at a school ‘doin’s’ whose name, he said was ‘Noey, after the feller that put all the beastes in the ark.”
One room school houses and the “Mother Tongue”, a form of Middle English speech, had little time remaining. Jayne taught until consolidation closed the doors of his second one-room school.
He continued to love and admire Ozarks people, and spent as much time among them as possible. From festivals and singins’ to deer camp fires, Jayne gathered the words of these wonderful people. Jayne wrote stories and dialogues for his well known radio program which aired from Salem. He eventually made it to Hollywood with the Dillards. He wrote material for Dick Clark Productions and appeared a number of times with his group as “The Darling Boys” on the Andy Griffith Show
Today, Mitch Jayne and his lovely wife, Dianna, reside in the heart of Eminence, right in the middle of the people they love most.
I sat and reminisced with Mitch on his front porch. He broke out a half-gallon jug of wine. “Smells good,” I commented.
“Don’t know if it is any good,” Jayne replied. “I just liked the picture on the side.”
He turned the bottle to display a colorful fox hound bounding across a field.
Seven hours and an empty wine bottle later, an old beagle yodeled up the hill. “I just love to hear that dog howl as he chases that rabbit. I listen to them about this time everyday. That old dog never will catch that rabbit, but he doesn’t seem to mind.”
Now, that is words with the bark on them.
Mitch Jayne’s fabulous book about the Ozarks and its people (A FIDDLER'S GHOST) can be ordered from Wildstone Media. http://www.wildstonemedia.com/.
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