MOUNTAIN VIEW, ARK. – Timing is everything for Charley Sandage, its tick clicking words, moments and melodies into place in the storyteller’s mind.
Some of those sentiments are created pen in hand. Others are shared via the strum of a guitar and voice in song. And both of those storytelling avenues intersect with Mountain View, Arkansas, a small town in the eastern Ozarks that became a magnet for folk — both people and traditions — decades ago amid a national appetite for the tune of a simpler time.
That perfect timing seemingly set the stage for Charley, then a young graduate student in education, to step into town in the early 1970s. Amid tunes from fiddles, guitars, banjos, mountain dulcimers and more that began to attract visitors to the small Stone County town for public pickings, he heard a family band perform the folk standard “Bright Morning Star.”…