If you spend enough time around Boonslick history circles, you’ll eventually hear someone mention “songtelling” — and then have to explain what that means, because Bob Dyer more or less invented the word to describe what he did. He wasn’t quite a folk singer, wasn’t quite a historian, and wasn’t quite a poet. He was some warm blend of all three, and for decades he used that blend to keep mid-Missouri’s river history alive for people who would never crack open a textbook about it.
From the Classroom to the River
Dyer was born in Boonville on May 22, 1939, and never really left it behind, even when life took him elsewhere. He earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English at the University of Missouri, then spent 15 years teaching before he walked away from academia to chase something harder to pin down: preserving the history and culture of the region through performance rather than lecture, according to the Columbia Missourian.
What he landed on was songtelling — his own term for weaving verse, traditional folk melody, and straight storytelling into a single performance. He wrote and performed pieces on Lewis and Clark’s expedition up the Missouri River, on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, on the region’s Native American history, and on the floods that have repeatedly reshaped life along the water here. Two of his books came out of that work: “Oracle of the Turtle,” built around Chinese hexagrams, and “Rising Waters,” an anthology of poems and stories about the catastrophic 1993 Mississippi and Missouri River floods (Columbia Missourian).
The Big Muddy Folk Festival
Dyer didn’t just perform Boonslick history — he helped build the institution that keeps introducing new audiences to it. He co-organized the Big Muddy Folk Festival in Boonville, and fellow festival organizer Dave Para credited him as instrumental from the very beginning, shaping both the artistic direction and the performances themselves in the festival’s early years (Columbia Missourian). More than three decades later, the festival is still going, still drawing musicians from across the region to Boonville every fall — Dyer’s fingerprints are still on it, even if a lot of festival-goers today never got to see him take the stage himself.
What He Left Behind
Dyer died on April 11, 2007, at 67. The tribute that followed says something about how deeply his songtelling had landed with the people who heard it: his longtime friends, the folk musicians Cathy Barton and Dave Para, coordinated a full tribute album, “The Wandering Fool: The Songs of Bob Dyer Sung in Tribute by His Friends,” released the following year. Fellow musician Lee Ruth put it simply afterward — anyone who came from this part of the world could identify with his music (Columbia Missourian).
That’s really the throughline of Dyer’s whole career: he wasn’t writing for a national audience or chasing a wider stage. He was writing for the people who already lived here, walked these river bluffs, and wanted their own history handed back to them in a form that stuck. For a Rocheport reader, that makes him worth knowing even two decades on — the next time you’re at the Big Muddy Folk Festival or humming something about the river without quite knowing why, there’s a decent chance the trail leads back to the Bard of Boonville.
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