Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Unreliable narrators of Newton County immortalized in collection of stories and songs
A short hike led to a deep dive into the Newton County community for Aaron Smith, but he’s the first to admit the truth isn’t always compelling.
“I’m an unreliable narrator,” Smith admits while discussing “The Legend of Sam Davis and Other Stories of Newton County, Arkansas,” his book and album set.
It became a community of stories, images and voices in what is the last album by Aaron Smith and the Coalbiters after the passing of member George Holcomb in February of this year. Holcomb worked on this album with both Smith and Ryan Gentry.
In life’s cyclical fashion, it is also the debut of Smith’s daughter Grae who contributes backup vocals on several songs. Also contributing music are a few descendants of the people at the center of the album.
Smith’s mother, artist Christina Smith, hand-painted maps that mark the stories and the characters geographically. Another artist, Dreama Phoenix, created colorful abstract cutouts to accompany the album’s 14 songs. There are also photos of different landmarks in Newton County and people who are immortalized in the songs.
In collecting the stories, Smith took a page from his pals, Donna and Kelly Mulhollan of Still on the Hill, who also collect folk tales from people and places of the Ozarks and weave them into songs and art.
In the forward to the book, Smith credits the Mulhollans for their guidance on the project.
“I think unquestionably there’s a tie. It wasn’t intentional, but we could not be more thrilled to see what Aaron did,” Kelly Mulhollan said.
Smith said they encouraged him to lean in as Newton County’s residents recalled and embellished stories about the natural landmarks and forgotten buildings. However, it all started with asking about what people knew about Sam Davis.
He took what he liked from every version, and wrote a collection of songs.
Then after he finished recording the project, he found the historical Sam Davis.
“I came across an actual historical paper from a teacher who’s a descendant of Sam, and who works at Jasper schools,” he said.
“It’s not a story anybody would write a song about, but we’re just not going to bother with historical Sam Davis. He is a nuisance and deserves to be forgotten.”
Smith was already a fan of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, so he loved unreliable narrators and knew how to spot someone who was looking for a good story rather than a factual one.
When asked how he spots an exaggerator, Smith smiles.
“Everybody is one — absolutely everyone,” he said with a burst of laughter during a podcast with the Mulhollans. “We take in data. We make it into something new. Even people in your own family have different versions of the same story.”
Smith points out how family members remember the same event differently and the ways our beliefs build our own “meta-narrative.” At the heart of it, though, people connect over the stories, not the facts.
“We’re not academic historians, we’re storytellers,” Kelly Mulhollans said. “It’s part of the storytelling process to improvise.”
“Embellish,” Donna Mulhollan emphasized.
“I love that element, though, when you realize that the person (who’s) been telling you the whole story can’t be trusted,” Smith said, adding that the reason for the lie or the embellishment leads you to learning more about the people. “When you’re asking why the narrator is lying to you [or] why would they say what they have to say, there’s a layer of meaning in that too.”
One of Smith’s favorite unreliable narrators came from his research into the Martain family and the books by Norman R. Martin (anglicized from Martain). For the family patriarch, Henry Martain, there are questions of whether or not the Frenchman had to relocate with his Cherokee wife and family when they were evicted from the Blue Ridge Mountains as part of the Trail of Tears.
Smith says the family historian contradicts himself.
“In some versions of the story, he’ll say that they couldn’t have stayed, in some he’ll say that only Henry could have stayed, but the family had to leave.”
Smith’s research shows that the whole family could have stayed in Georgia.
“I was really interested to read that and realize that Henry really identified with a tribe over the white people in the area” and chose to go with the tribe instead.
From the Martain family history is also the song of “Curly and Tom” whose actions are tied back to a landmark in Newton County.
“It's a pretty grisly story, it ends with a murder at Villines General Store,” Smith explained. “A lot of people have been there to see the Elk River. The Villines General Store (is) right there on the road.”
In the song, he relates most to the mother of the boys.
Despite Debbie's devotion to raising her sons well, nothing turns out as planned and she finds herself wondering where she went wrong. Smith said that he thinks many people would do the same.
“I think that Debbie Martin is a heroine too, kind of a broken one, but I still admire Debbie,” he said. “She's trying so hard. And what more could you ask for? We're all gonna make mistakes.”
But there are bright spots, like the stories of Granny Brisco, the midwife who was rumored to have delivered more than 1,000 babies.
“There are people who know that their grandparent was delivered by her, and it's a point of pride for those people,” Smith said. “It's really special to meet her descendants. They're really, really proud of her and they just light up when you talk to them.”
Beyond that, he says that he's fascinated by her scientific and medical understanding within the time too.
“She was the first person who figured out how to sulfur peaches,” he said. That leads to another story. “She had peaches when everybody's peaches were being eaten up by worms and word got out. Somebody tried to steal her peaches and she shot him with buckshot or salt in the rearend so and he went up to Harrison and [to get] doctored.
“Since she was the midwife, the doctor knew her well, so he wrote her a letter and told her to next time aim a little higher because he didn't want to pick all that out of that fella's rear end!”
The album both begins and ends with the mythical Sam Davis. The opening track gives the listener directions to Sam's Throne, a popular hiking spot and overlook on top of Mount Judea in Newton County, which is named for the wild man who was supposedly claimed to be tracking a tribe of Native Americans who kidnapped his sister.
Davis believed that God would lead him to save her, but he lost the trail in Newton County. Then the stories vary wildly.
“I related to Sam being a person of faith,” Smith explained. “I've had my own journey with that and my own struggles and had to come to terms with reality.
“When you really believe that God exists and God's gonna do something a certain way and it doesn't happen, it's pretty big. That's pretty jarring, so I really related to that part of the story — Sam is stuck in the middle of nowhere. God didn't do what he thought he would do, and he can't find his sister. [He] loses his mind and starts preaching off this bluff, and in my version of the story, blames the people [thinking] they won't tell him where his sister is and he does that for years.”
In every version of the story Smith collected, Davis eventually gets a farm, gets married and becomes wealthy, but kept climbing to the top of his throne to shout sermons of “hellfire and damnation” that some claimed to be able to hear from inside their houses.
“He just became famous for it,” Smith said. “At some point, after years had passed, he was hunting and he heard a voice calling for a lost cow in the woods. He followed the voice and it was his sister, so he was reunited with her. She had a family and was a part of a tribe and stayed there.”
This reveals the most likely truth: that even though he claimed his sister was kidnapped by a Native American tribe, she went with the Shawnee tribe willingly.
However, as long as people hike up to Sam's Throne, they'll keep asking, “Who is Sam?”
“I love that he became kind of larger than life,” Smith said. “He's a really broken hero.”
Monica Hooper is a features writer and podcast host for the NWA and River Valley Democrat-Gazette. She loves sharing stories about artists, dancers, music makers and all sorts of interesting folks. She can be reached at mhooper@nwaonline.com.