Ernie Deane photos at Arkansas History

Subject: RE: Ernie Deane photos at Arkansas History
From: GUEST,Arkie
Date: 01 Apr 04 - 10:41 AM

There are series of courthouses, church houses, bridges, barns, great pictures of architecture of the time, as well as folk like Jimmy Driftwood, Glenn Ohrlin, Abbie & Absie Morrison and others from the Morrison clan, banjo player Bookmiller Shannon, May Kennedy McCord, and countless others. And some great signs, such as "There ain't hardly no business around here that ain't been went out after", "Happy eggs, Laid by Singing Hens" and a Mass Schedule that reads:
Winter      8 a.m. & 10 a.m.
Summer      7 a.m. & 9 a.m.
Duck Season 9 a.m. * 5 p.m.      

It is a wonderful site and it would be interesting to know of sites like this from other states or countries.

Subject: RE: Ernie Deane photos at Arkansas History
From: open mike
Date: 31 Mar 04 - 10:44 PM

great signs!

Subject: RE: Ernie Deane photos at Arkansas History
From: Art Thieme
Date: 31 Mar 04 - 09:51 PM

A grabd site Dale. Thanks, as always !!

Art

Subject: Ernie Deane photos at Arkansas History
From: GUEST,Dale
Date: 31 Mar 04 - 08:40 PM

In Art's thread about his fascinating collection of photos through the years, he mentions that I sent him several photos of Mountain View, AR musicians.

I can't claim any proprietary rights to the photos I sent Art. I kept meaning to tell him where I got them, but never got around to it.   So here it is.

They are just a few of the wonderful photos shot by the late Ernie Deane located at the Arkansas History Commission site, a division of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism.   

E. C. "Ernie" Deane (1911-1991) was an Arkansas native, journalist, soldier, teacher, folklorist and historian. He contributed to the preservation of our history and culture through his writings, through the inspiration he gave to his students, and by his fame as the original Arkansas Traveler newspaper columnist for which these negatives were made. Deane served as a member of the Arkansas History Commission 1974-1990.

NOW, how to get there. It is not the easiest site in the world to navigate. You almost have to know what you are looking for in order to find it. You can find a list of all photo collections available on this page http://www.ark-ives.com/photo/gallery/ Next, click on one of the search links, there are a couple on the page. The search page has an unfortunate habit of expiring and reverting to another page if you leave it open too long without using it, so I always start out at the ark-ives page (ark - ives ~~ ARKANSAS ARCHIVES, get it??) rather than the actual search page.

So say you want to find the picture of Jimmie and Neal Morris. Just enter jimmie driftwood in the search box, and you'll bring up 76 thumbnailed references, of which that photo should be #20. You could have searched for Neal Morris instead, but then you would have gotten just that one photo, which wouldn't have been as good an example.

Click on the blue Details button on the left of the thumbnail. When you get to the next page, click on the blue button labeled Catalogue Record, where you will find this information:

Negative taken for March 29, 1963, Arkansas Gazette article "Reporters Got Preview of Folk Festivals and Craft Show," B1:2. Jimmie Driftwood (1907-1998), standing, and his father, Neal Morris (sitting), 76, playing their guitars for the press on March 28, 1963. The press got a preview of what is to come at the first Arkansas Folk Festival at Blanchard Springs, Stone County, Arkansas. The actual festival was held 15 miles away at Mountain View, Stone County, on April 19-21, 1963.

Clicking on the thumbnail on this page will take you to the larger version in a new window. This is the one I sent Art.

Now if you don't care to know all that, then all you have to do is way back at the page with the first 20 of the 76 thumbnailed references, look carefully down in the lower right hand corner near thumbnail #20. You'll see a little bitty ol' piece of chain link. Click on that, and presto, you've got your Jimmie Driftwood & Neal Morris photo, but you won't get the identification paragraph I put in italics above.

So, how to use this to find other related pictures? On the Catalog Record page below the thumbnail and identification paragraph, you'll find a whole bunch of related links. Here are a few for example:

Conference subject:         Arkansas Folk Festival (1st : 1963 : Mountain View, Ark.)
Subject term:         Folk musicians--Arkansas--Mountain View.
Subject term:         Guitarists--Arkansas--Mountain View.

Clicking on those links will take you to a whole 'nother set of pictures, each with their own set of related links below. It won't take you long to get thoroughly lost.

Many of the photos are simply captioned as unidentified musicians. At the Ozark Folk Center (another Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism site, by the way) we are in the process of finding and identifying those photos which are either unidentified or only partially identified. We have already put names to a large percent of these. I do want to stress that this is for our own history of the local music, and not a project of the Arkansas History Commission.

OK, now that we have the search method out of the way, suppose you want to see the entire Deane collection instead, all 7,000 of them. Just type deane in the search box and you'll get them all, served up in groups of 20.

Music, crafts, old buildings, the closing of Fort Chaffee, signs along the roadside, a trip to Nuremberg, the Christmas parade in Eldorado, AR 1939, you name it, a lifetime in photography.

Here's a special treat. Type ecd1446 (no space) in the search box and see where it takes you. You'll be glad for the journey.