‘Big Smith’ brings Ozark music tradition to Wakarusa

Peter Lewis, food and entertainment writer for The City Wire, has interviewed several of the bands expected to play at the Wakarusa music festival north of Ozark. The festival is set to be held on Mulberry Mountain near Ozark, June 4-7.

During the next several days, The City Wire will post excerpts of Lewis’ interviews.

Lewis’ first interview is with Big Smith, a band from Springfield, Mo., composed of five cousins: Mark and Jody Bilyeu, Bill and Rik Thomas, and Jay Williamson. The newest member, fiddle player Molly Healey, brings the total to six creative individuals bound together by blood and harmony, according to the band’s Web site. (An audio file of the interview can be found at the bottom of this post.)

The band plays Noon to 12:45, June 5, on the main stage at Wakarusa.

Lewis: Where did you come up with the name, Big Smith?

JB: We had a clothing company that worked in Missouri for years and years that made overalls and work clothes called Big Smith. One night, early on, they were pressing us for a name and my brother had a Big Smith t-shirt on and Mike, the bass player, had a pair of Big Smith overalls on … so we just said our name was “Big Smith,” so that’s kinda how it started.

Lewis: Until recently, Big Smith was comprised solely of family members, correct?

JB: That’s right.

Lewis: You just added a female fiddle player …

JB: That’s right. She broke the gender and the gene barrier.

Lewis: Given the tenuous nature of band relationships, do you think the familial nature of your group helped avoid some of the problems that typically plague other groups?

JB: Yeah, absolutely. Being a family enterprise you have to find a way to get along and make up even when things get a little bit crunchy. We’re a pretty genial clan anyway. So, I think we’ve been strengthened by the fact that we’re family and we know we’re going to see each other at family get together regardless of what happens with the band …

Lewis: It has only been within the past few years that the band decided to give a music career a go full-time, right? You all had respectable and stable day jobs …

JB: Yeah, almost all of us had day jobs, I think. It’s been a couple years now since we started going full-time.

Lewis: Any regrets?

JB: No, no … It’s sort of a dream come true. It can get tight at times. Sometimes you, you know life gives you cause to rethink decisions, but we’ve never had much cause to rethink that. It’s been great to be able to focus on music. We’ve been very lucky.

Lewis: How often are you on the road? You all have families, if I’m not mistaken.

JB: Right. Everyone has a least a spouse at home and most of us have kids, so we have to balance family. Actually, music being our one job has made it a little bit easier to put in kid time during the off days … The good gigs are on the weekends, which gives us a two or three day on, four day off schedule for the most part.

Lewis: Your musical oeuvre is rooted in and based around traditional music of the Ozarks. It’s something that’s been passed down through the previous generations and now you are a torch-bearer of sorts. Do you find any pressure in that or does the joy of playing override everything else?

JB: One of the benefits of being inheritors of the Ozark tradition is it’s a pretty laid back scene and so there aren’t very many high-pressure Ozarkian tradition people there; more like happy and grateful it’s out there and they’re real supportive. We do take it very seriously, the fact that we’re representatives of this region, and we try to be good representatives, but it’s always been more of a pleasure than a pressure.

Lewis: I was recently in Austin, Texas for SXSW and caught a Bloodshot Records show with Ha Ha Tonka and they covered your “3 Speed 12 Inch Oscillating Fan” song. And prior to hearing that, it never entered my naïve head that you would be friends, much less swapping tunes … is there a lot of musical camaraderie in Springfield?

JB: Oh, yeah. It’s a pretty tight scene. Most of us, at least most of us who came up around the same time know everybody else and a lot of us have been in bands with other people. In the case of Ha Ha Tonka, my brother produced and mixed them back when they were Amsterband so we had a direct connection with them. It’s hard to name a band we don’t have at least one or two friends in in this area.

Lewis: Do you find the relatively small size of Springfield to be a positive in terms of fostering a camaraderie and brotherhood of musicians where the focus is more on the music as opposed to “making it?”

JB: Absolutely. That is one of the primary positives. There are drawbacks of course, but that’s one of the big upsides is having friends like those … a lot of whom branch out and make it in various respects and it’s fun to say you knew them when.

Lewis: I was curious about the DVD that came out several years ago called Homemade Hillbilly Jam that was heavily focused on your family and fellow band members. There was a quote about that film by Steve Dalton of the London Times who noted that the film was “a portrait of dying musical traditions … quirky insight into an America that most Americans would barely recognize.” Do you think there is truth in that? Do you think the music is dying or do you think that, perhaps, Mr. Dalton only knows a certain slice of America and that there are many out there who would recognize that portion of America?

JB: Yeah … I don’t know. The movie was made by a German crew. I’ve tried a few times to step outside the way I view the film and see how other people would other people would take it, people from other cultures, people from Europe … and that’s just really difficult for me to say. I guess I always think everybody thinks of this region in terms of stereotypes. If that guy means we break the stereotypes, then I think he’s probably right. I think a lot of people are wrong about who lives around here and what they’re interested and what kind of people they are, so it’s really hard for me to say. In terms of it being whether the music is dying … I think the lifestyle of subsistence farming, having a few head of cattle and a strip of farm that feeds your family and makes you a little bit of cash, I think that’s dying. I like to think that we’re carrying on a part of that musical tradition, so that it’s not dying.

Lewis: I hate to pigeonhole people, but you play a very particular genre of music. Do you fear a homogenization of American culture where the idiosyncrasies of the Ozarks or Western North Carolina or wherever it may be are losing strength, so to speak?

JB: I do think that the fact that we’re all more interconnected and that the world is flattening is going to have an impact on culture. And some of those pockets that we’ve depended on in the past for producing interesting music are going to disappear. I try to be philosophical about it and say that there are new sorts of pockets that are going to produce interesting music based on something other than the region you are from. There’s the flat earth, but there’s also the long tail. What the long tail means is that a very small group of people who are interested in a thing can keep it afloat. And sometimes I wonder if the people who are interested in preserving Hill music, which could be Ozarkians, but it could also be, like case of hill music in the 60s and 70s, Jewish guys from New York who do the most work in preserving hill music. Or the Coen brothers, speaking of Jewish guys, what they did for old-timey music when they put out “Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?” was phenomenal. So I have hope that the pocket of people who are passionate about this music are going to find each other no matter where they live. It might be that there are a few dozen from Japan and a few dozen from the East Coast and a few dozen people from the Moon someday are going to help keep those traditions alive.

Lewis: I suppose that the technology we have these days, though it might homogenize the mass culture, makes it easier for those folks that want to keep something alive to keep it alive, which I guess is a silver lining in the situation.

JB: Right. I’m hopeful that there will be those kinds of things. And also, the technology for preserving things is better these days, although I think culture preserves things in a more meaningful way than technology does. So, I think there are bright sides to it.

Lewis: Do you guys have any records scheduled to be released, have you all been recording any new material? What’s the schedule for the next year?

JB: We are working really hard. We’ve got most of the tracking done on our next CD and we’ve got probably a half a dozen or more tracks written for the CD after that. With the pressures of family and things it’s hard some time to find the time to get those things going being on the road and everything but it’s moving along really steadily. We’re happy with the work we’ve been doing on that.

Lewis: Do you all have a pretty big tour schedule lined up for the summer besides Wakarusa?

JB: We’re making a trip out to Colorado and one up to Chicago. These days we have to see how gas prices and hotels are going to affect us, but it looks real good for us to get out to some pretty far flung places this year. Those are the ones on the books right now.

Lewis: By all accounts you’ve got a lot of rabid fans in this area. I see a lot of stickers on cars driving around places like Fayetteville and up in the Ozarks in general. Has that carried over into other places like Chicago or Colorado?

JB: Colorado is an excellent example of how that has carried over. In some cases it’s the actual individuals themselves who move out to Colorado. There seems to be a real direct Southwest Missouri, Northwest Arkansas to middle Colorado connection. We get people out there singing our songs and wearing our t-shirts that we’ve either never seen or haven’t seen in five or ten years. It’s been really great.

Lewis: I was curious if you guys had a name for these rabid fans. Is there a cute little moniker you have like “Parrotheads” or “Deadheads” or whatever else…?

JB: (laughs) You know what, we need one. No, as far as I know there is no such name.

Lewis: So you don’t call them “Big Heads” then, I guess?

JB: (laughs) I guess that has negative implications so, no not yet.