Rhythms of the River: A Buffalo National River Anniversary Performance

Kelly and Donna Mulhollan of Still on the Hill will join Roy and Aviva Pilgrim in the performance.

Please come enjoy the “Rhythms of the River” as part of the 50-year anniversary of the Buffalo National River. This celebration of traditional and new music, instruments and dance of the Ozarks will take place at the School House meeting rooms in Gilbert, Arkansas, on Saturday, July 30, at 2-3:30 p.m. The hour and a half program is free and open to the public.

The concert will explore two very different ways of honoring our Ozark traditions. Roy and Aviva Pilgrim of the Ozark Highballers are superb practitioners of music as it existed along the Buffalo River a hundred years ago. Their performance will be punctuated with demonstrations of traditional dance and commentary on the luthier craft (artisan guitar making).

Kelly and Donna Mulhollan of Still on the Hill will revisit their collection of original Buffalo River story songs entitled “Still a River,” first released in 2016. While the music is new, it is also well anchored in the Ozark musical traditions of old.

Professor Bob Cochran, director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies, organized the program with Joshua Youngblood, rare books librarian and head of the University Libraries Special Collections Instruction and Outreach Unit. This event is part of The Digital Buffalo project, which has been sponsored by the U of A Chancellor’s Innovation Fund and is organized by Youngblood and Trish Starks, director of the U of A Humanities Center.

Future events are planned at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History and other community spaces. News on upcoming events, as well as videos of past events and a developing library of digital documents from the Ozark Society, is available at the project website: https://digitalbuffalo.uark.edu/.

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.