Song · Story
The Tune You Weren’t Supposed to Play
Fiddling, competition, superstition, and the recurring figure of the supernatural musician in Ozark tradition.
Ozark folklore & traditional music
The Crooked Tune
Songs, stories, and strange traditions from the Ozarks — documented as living culture, listened to closely, and followed down the crooked paths where music, memory, belief, and place meet.
Featured from the field
The old stories are still moving.
Folklore is not scenery. Each piece begins with something specific — a tune, a person, a grave, a recording, a belief, a place — and follows the evidence outward.
Place
The Roads That End at Cemeteries
What family burial grounds reveal about settlement, kinship, and memory.
Story
Why Treasure Legends Need a Death
Buried money, murdered witnesses, and the rules of supernatural wealth.
Song
Three Ways to Remember “Pretty Polly”
A ballad changes because singers are not archives; they are participants.
Departments
Four ways into the region.
The Crooked Tune treats music, narrative, landscape, and custom as overlapping systems rather than separate curiosities.
Songs
Fiddle tunes, ballads, hymns, singers, musicians, dance music, instruments, and archival recordings.
Stories
Legends, memorates, ghosts, witchcraft, treasure lore, uncanny encounters, and supernatural belief.
Places
Springs, caves, cemeteries, roads, mills, towns, rivers, bluff shelters, and landscapes with long memories.
Ways
Folk medicine, vernacular religion, craft, foodways, seasonal practice, weather lore, and material culture.
A Crooked Tune audio project · In development
Black Walnut Radio
Old songs. Strange stories. Ozark frequencies. A future home for field recordings, musician interviews, narrated folklore, radio essays, and performances captured close to their source.
Enter the radio room →FIELDVOICESONGNIGHTARCHIVE
Pilot transmission
The Devil at the Dance
A proposed first episode tracing supernatural strangers through dance halls, fiddle contests, and oral tradition.
A literary series from The Crooked Tune
Ozark Nocturne
Long-form essays where folklore, music, landscape, memory, and darkness are allowed more room. Less report, more resonance — without surrendering specificity or scholarship.
“By the time the fiddling ended, fog had settled into the valley below the cemetery.”
Read the Nocturnes →