Title: Jamey's Markham Hill Walking Song

Jumpsuit Jamey, born Jamey Hall and raised in Stuttgart, AR, came to Fayetteville in 1976 to go to the University of Arkansas, and has mostly hung out here ever since. He is a local musician in a band called Jumpsuit Jamey & The Can’t Wait To Playboys. Their members are Jamey Hall, Mike Rickard, Matthew Rich, Keith Grimwood, JT Huff, and Lee Christianson. Their Facebook page description says: “We play honky-tonk country music by all your old favorites – Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Ray Price, and Ernest Tubb, to name but a few of our honky-tonk heroes – for the express purpose of doing 2-step couple dancing, just like ya Grandma and’em used to do. Country Western country dancing is FUN, and we want to get all y’all out, to start a New Wave of good-time country dance community. It’s impossible to describe with just words to the 20- and 30-somethings of today just how much fun 2-stepping around a big, crowded dance floor to real, honest-to-goodness, meat-on-your-bones country music is – so come out and let us show you!”

They have also played at events such as the annual World Championship Squirrel Cookoff in downtown Bentonville, the annual Cajun Jamboree to raise money for a single parent scholarship fund, and the Essential Music Festival to raise money for health and hygiene needs in rural communities.

Of course, our current health crisis is limiting the band right now, but they are looking forward to when things open up again.

Jamey told me that in the early 2000s, “I used to walk the Markham Hill trails all the time. I came up with the “Walking Song”, kind of a marching tune, to sing full-throated and in time as I marched along. I love that song, but it really needs to be sung in a flamboyantly animated way while marching along very purposefully, as if to war, to be fully appreciated. I got quite, um, demonstrative with it. I sing it with a whole lot more gusto when I’m taking big old 6’2” long and lanky hiking steps, like I often did on the beloved trails up there. I walked the big loops and the small loops together, usually more than once, sometimes when it was pitch black night, often stoned – lust-for-life kinda walking!”

Jamey sang his “Walking Song” for Julian and Jane Archer when he had dinner with them one night at their place. They, of course, really liked it. Julian Archer is the Pratt family descendant who continued the 110-year-old preservation of Markham Hill before the developer SREG got hold of it in 2016.

Below are the words to Jamey's song and a link to a recording of him singing it for me.

The (Markham Hill) Walking Song, by Jamey Hall

To stand like a man you must walk every day,
but walk with a manly intention.
Hold your head way up high, put a light in your eye
and embrace your imagination.

Throw your shoulders way back like a brave buccaneer,
Put springs in yo’ feets like a charioteer.
Be ready to POUNCE! With every last OUNCE!
And go bound through the woods like a deer.

Walk as cocky as your orders came directly from God
to march off to a righteous battle.
Swing your sword in the air, holler “Evil! Beware!”
Then shake it with a lusty rattle.

Let God’s strength and God’s courage make a fortress your heart.
Mix wisdom and compassion with an alchemist’s art.
Defending the weak, while justice you seek,
laughing unafraid in the dark.

Smile, be happy when the sunlight is all shining on you.
Then open up your soul and let the sun shine right through.
Extending a hand to your fellow man
Just like Unitarians do.

Jamey’s Markham Hill Walking Song:
http://www.ozarkia.net/mh/songs/MarkhamHillWalkingSong.mp3

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