Big Muddy Speaker Series presents:

Steve H. Johnson, former director of the Missouri River Communities Network (MRCN) of Columbia, Missouri will provide a brief history of this non-profit organization and the projects the organization is working on currently. The organization, which began by connecting people to the Missouri River and Missouri River communities to each other, has evolved into an organizer of community and learning gardens across the state of Missouri.

Steve will provide a discussion and video clips from the “Missouri River Folk History Project”, a project MRCN completed in 2005 that interviewed and filmed 40 individuals who grew up or spent their lives living or working on the Missouri River. The 70 hours of video-taped interviews are housed in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the State Historical Society of Missouri on the campus of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

These oral histories, which were conducted by Meredith Ludwig, include Royal Tate, a retired Missouri River boat captain; poet and musician Bob Dyer; Fred Oerly whose family owned and operated the Overton General Store; Lucy Coleman, who as a child grew up on a Missouri River island near Boone County; and three Native Americans of the Lower Brule Lakota Tribe whose reservation is adjacent to the Missouri River in South Dakota.

After the completion of this project, Ludwig wove some of these stories into a musical composed with Cathy Barton called "Gumbo Bottoms".