Mountain Sprout: Long Time Comin’

Eureka Springs, Arkansas is an idyllic place located in Carroll County in the northwest corner of the state, sitting in the edge of the Ozark Mountains proper. It is an amazing island of hippie love and egalitarian acceptance stuck, like a sore toe in the middle of an evangelical and white supremacist desert where poisonous snakes are still handled in worship of the tooth fairy. That said, the area has its share of free spirits, the acoustic quintet Mountain Sprout, foremost among them.

Fair warning to the weak-of-heart: any band playing original song titles like "Shittin' in the Woods," "Screw the Government" and "Douche that Thing for Me" cannot be expected to be exactly socially acceptable, much less house broken. Mountain Sprout has been a fixture in the alt-Americana arena for the past 20 years. There newest offering (their eighth), Long Time Comin', continues in the band's gleefully irreverent tradition of providing the real-life soundtrack of the 21st Century Ozarks. Think of a good-spirited Winter's Bone (Roadside Attractions, 2010).

The music? Well, this is how-down music. Not anything as cultured as bluegrass. This is barn dance music about guns, drugs, women and fighting—sometimes in a single song. The boys can turn a set of lyrics, take "Year of Never" for example (this being one of the more acceptable lyrics to post in a publication):

"Well, in the year of never / in the jolly month of none / when grapes grow from the willow / that's when I'll turn in my gun.".

But Mountain Sprout is much more than pretty poets, Grayson Klauber plays a nuclear claw-hammer banjo to accompany his lilting mountain twang and guitarist Ratliff Dean Thiebaud can flat flat-pick his way around a hoe-down jig. This is music of insolent celebration, freedom, and hedonistic joy. May the Sprouts produce much more.

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