Every year, the Missouri Folks Arts Program, a collaboration of the University of Missouri and Missouri Arts Council, awards Living Traditions Fellowships to recognize the QUOTE “the artistic excellence and exceptional lifetime achievement of living traditional artists and community scholars.”
2025’s recipients include two Ozarkers. Marideth Sisco, musician, storyteller and Ozarks Public Radio contributor, and Bo Brown, fellow musician, but perhaps more well known for his work developing and teaching the skill of foraging.
Brown says he grew up foraging on a small scale with his mom and got into playing rock music before drifting towards bluegrass.
He was working as a musician in the 70s when he got into backpacking and primitive skills. He spent time in the 80s doing songbird research and immersing himself further into nature. He says he and his collaborator Don Brink started teaching wilderness survival skills in 1993. Then, he said, they started getting more requests specifically for foraging classes. "And that's kind of developed, little by little along the years,” Brown explained. “And then I guess it would have been 2018. Falcon guides reached out to me and asked if I'd author the book Foraging the Ozarks for their series. So, I did that, and that's what really broke open the whole world of foraging stuff.”
Brown says even after years of teaching survival skills and foraging, and now after writing two books on the subject, he was still surprised by the award. Brown and Sisco both received their Living Traditions Fellowship awards at the Oldtime Music, Ozarks Heritage Festival in West Plains in October.
“It was a lot of fun. It was very awkward being in a room of people, having somebody standing up there talking about you for a half an hour. I've Never, never experienced that before.”
This isn’t Brown’s first time in the spotlight though. He and Sisco were also part of an Ozarks themed 2023 Smithsonian Folkways festival in Washington, D.C. Brown says that experience opened his eyes to all of the folk traditions of the region.
“That really blew me away, he said “how much cultural things have been going on in the Ozarks, you know that I didn't know about, of all different types of cultures, not just, you know, not just the old white hillbillies doing their thing, but finding out that there's Marshallese people that had a whole little community, there's Mexican curandero communities down in Arkansas that do plant healing, ceremonial plant healing stuff. And, you know, there's the Cherokee just a little bit further west of us. They're still practicing their traditions.”
He said more could be done to celebrate that culture in the Ozarks.
As a part of the award, Brown also recently spoke with Ozarks Alive’s Kaitlyn McConnel to produce an oral history of his work; that will be available soon.