Black Oak Arkansas: Street Party (Atco)

H.L. MENCKEN once wrote that he could toss an egg out the window of a Pullman car anywhere in America and splatter a yokel. It's not recorded whether Mencken ever took a train through Black Oak, Arkansas, but if he had, undoubtedly he could have exhausted a dozen eggs in no time. Nobody's fool, however, Mencken balanced his universal dismissal of the American booboisie with an ardent championship of yokelborn novelists like Sinclair Lewis, who were obviously best equipped to dissect and expose the foibles of their native regions.