For the Love of Branson: Huckleberry Ozarks

Waking up this morning, I felt the first breeze of the coming Autumn season. There is something about the Fall that is inextricably linked to being raised in the Ozarks. You see, I was born in Tennessee and I’m extremely proud of that but I’ve lived in Branson since I was 3 months old, so there is no doubt what my true hometown is.

As a student of storytellers and great tales, I’ve always been fascinated by those legends that are connected to places in America. I think of a Kansas farm in connection to “The Wizard of Oz,” a New York Valley in connection to Sleepy Hollow and of course the State of Missouri in connection to the imagined world of Mark Twain’s Mississippi River. I always had my personal favorite stories and authors, but my Grandma Mel Tillis was forever enamored by the writer Samuel Clemons who went by the pen name, Mark Twain.

 It all started when I was 14 months old and first performed on a Branson stage with my grandpa. He grew up coming to Nashville trying to make it in the music business and when they were both in their early twenties, Granddaddy and songwriting legend Roger Miller joined Porter Wagoner’s band. Along with writing the Hobo’s National anthem “King of the Road”, Roger Miller also penned a musical completely based on the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn entitled “Big River.” And it was on that stage at the Mel Tillis theatre in Branson in the early ‘90s that we performed a rendition of Big River. Granddaddy played Huck Finn and I played “Huck Jr.”

Needless to say, this story and these characters have been connected to my life since childhood. In a grand twist of fate, the year my grandpa sold his theatre in the early 2000s I was cast as Huckleberry Finn in the 6th Grade Branson Middle School Musical. I arrived in this town playing Huck Jr. and made my curtain call on that Big River for our school play. Furthermore, my grandpa who took up painting towards the end of his career did a series of paintings called Huckleberry Summer, Huckleberry Spring, etc. where he equated the adolescence of those iconic characters with his childhood growing up on Lake Okeechobee in Florida.

I have always felt like I lived Mark Twain's Imaginarium, and I feel that in every square inch of the Ozarks and this glorious state. Whether that is on the drive to Springfield seeing the leaves change for the first time, standing on a creek at Wilson’s Creek Battlefield or even in the town of Hannibal itself where Twain set this entire story. For in the “Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy always dreamed of getting out of Kansas but in Huckleberry Finn, the entire narrative is a love letter to the State of Missouri. Granddaddy always quoted Mark Twain when he wrote his book “Actin’ Sheriff” that in the mornings, Twain would wake up and “just start lying,” however, in the world he created, it contains so many truths and I experience that every day in the Ozark Mountains.