From the first, Arkansas music mattered. You see it in fragments of cane
flutes, whistles older than Columbus. The oldest image of an Arkansas
musician
may be a man carrying a rattle on a Quapaw buffalo robe; the oldest
recorded Arkansas sound may be a 1928 string band from the Ozarks.
There's a crazy-quilt
variety—ballad singers side-by-side with bluesmen, rockers in
outrageous Spandex with pistol-toting cowgirls, zoot-suited jazzmen next
to grave-faced
gospel quartets. Listen to the Arkansas music—let it "send you back
to Arkansas."