Charley Sandage’s Arkansas

Charley Sandage closes his eyes, concentrates and begins to sing one of his songs. I’m sitting in the study of the home Sandage shares with his wife Vicki and looking out at what might be the best view in Arkansas. I’ve visited dozens of beautiful vantage points in this state, but this tops them all.

To reach Sandage’s place, you take Arkansas 9 north out of Mountain View, cross the White River at Sylamore into Izard County and then turn down a gravel road. You’re greeted with a view to the north of the blue waters of the White River and the stillgreen hardwood forests of the Ozarks. On a clear day, one can see almost to Mammoth Spring on the Missouri border.

Though he has become an expert on the Ozarks, its people, music and culture, Sandage wasn’t raised here. Like me, he grew up near the banks of the Ouachita River in southwest Arkansas. I was raised about a block from the river in Arkadelphia. Sandage came of age upstream in the Hot Spring County community of Donaldson.

I consider Sandage an Arkansas treasure. I’ve been aware of his songwriting for years and ask him how it started.

“I formed a band when I was a teenager,” says Sandage, who graduated from high school in 1960. “I began writing songs for the band, but I was known for forgetting the lyrics even though I had written them.”

Sandage was into folk music and rockabilly at an early age. He describes his work these days as “acoustic Americana.”

“Dad worked for a farmers’ union in Little Rock for a couple of years, and then we went to my aunt’s place near Modesto, Calif., for several months so my mom and dad could work in a turkey-processing plant and gather enough cash to buy one of the two little grocery stores back in Donaldson,” Sandage says. “When I was 14 or 15, my dad bought out his siblings and we landed on the old family farm, building a small house for my grandparents and moving into the house where my dad spent most of his growing-up years.”

Sandage attended what’s now Henderson State University at Arkadelphia, served two years of active duty as an Army intelligence officer, taught a year in the Glen Rose School District and then obtained a master’s degree in speech from the University of Arkansas in 1968. He coached the debate team at Henderson for a time and then went back to Fayetteville to earn his doctorate in college administration.

In an interview with historian Brooks Blevins, Sandage said: “With my impeccable timing, I took a degree in college administration at the exact moment in the early 1970s when there was a collapse of small private colleges across the country. When I began the program, there were openings of all kinds. Two years later, there weren’t any. I remember talking to a fellow up in Montana, a college president who said: ‘A few months ago, I would have been delighted to get an application from an ABD, which stood for all but dissertation. Now, I have 20 applications from experienced deans.’”

Sandage had interned for Carl Whillock, a UA vice president who later would be president of Arkansas State University and serve for 16 years as head of the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. Whillock was a political insider and got Sandage a job as an assistant to Bill Henderson, who oversaw state parks.

In 1968, Rep. Wilbur D. Mills from Arkansas, a congressional powerhouse, obtained $2.5 million in grants to build a facility at Mountain View that would focus on Ozarks heritage. Advanced Projects Corp. of New York won a contract to build and operate the center. Construction began in 1971. By spring of 1972, the company was out of money.

The state decided to take over. Construction was completed at a cost of $3.4 million, and the Ozark Folk Center opened in May 1973. Prior to the opening, Sandage was sent by Henderson to Mountain View. He was one of the first two state employees on the grounds.

It didn’t take Sandage long to learn that there were various factions in Stone County, and they loved to fight. The most vehement disputes were between those who loved musician Jimmy Driftwood and those who hated him.

“Being in an institution that was for the preservation and interpretation of the traditional culture combined a lot of the elements I was looking for,” Sandage told Blevins. “I could be involved in the administration of an institution but one with a specific emphasis on the kinds of things I had really started to care about.”

Sandage’s title was program director when the Ozark Folk Center opened. He later resigned when he found himself on the outs with Driftwood. He continued to live near Mountain View and write music while working for the Northcentral Arkansas Development Council in Batesville.

After living in Mountain View for three years, Sandage was hired as a principal in the Elkins School District. He later was a principal at Mena before getting a job at Arkansas State University-Beebe as the chief academic officer. Sandage says he “took a wild hair” and produced a country music show at the Mid-America Amphitheater in Hot Springs for a couple of years before spending a decade at the Arkansas Educational Television Network in Conway.

“During all those years, I was restless to find out where home would finally be,” Sandage says. “Vicki kept urging me to come back up here to the Mountain View area, and we finally did in 1996.”

The move to the mountains allowed Sandage to concentrate on his songwriting while his wife turned this rocky Ozark hillside into a garden filled with flowers, hummingbirds and butterflies.