Thought I would post this, It is an answer from Roger Murrah, co writer of the song,
Thank you for your interest in our song.
As you rightly stated, my friend, Scott Anders, and I wrote "Ozark Mountain Jubilee." Scott comes from a Tennessee/Kentucky background and I was born and raised in Athens, Alabama, but have always had relatives living in Arkansas. We both now live in the Nashville area.
As we began writing the song (which is completely fictional - but, we believe, contains a lot of real and universal emotion), we had no preconceived idea of the location referenced in the lyrics. The location only began to develop when we wrote the line "Going so fast I can't stop"... If you'll notice the next line "I'm just a stone's throw from Little Rock" was actually written with the objective to rhyme "rock" with "stop". Then it made sense to us to let the region of the country referred to in the song be near there... thus the line "headin' for that Missouri line." One other post script... we also thought it was an area of the country that we had not heard a lot of songs written about.
We got the idea for "Frisco Silver Dollar line" out of a geographical book that I just happened to have in my office at the time. We didn't learn until later that it was a train-line in a park attraction. We just liked the way it sounded. Although the song is fictional, it never-the-less contains a lot of real emotion of the human dilemma and, of all the songs I've ever had a part in writing, it is probably my favorite.
By the way, it was not until many years after writing the song that I actually visited that area of Arkansas/Missouri, when I was invited on a rainbow trout fishing trip. Traveling through those beautiful hills was very surreal, fulfilling and gratifying to me.
Fortunately, this song has been discussed a lot through the years by songwriters and others who have just enjoyed listening to it and have identified with it for one reason or another.
The interesting thing about this is... regardless of the area of our country that a person may come from, those emotions are no less true and shared by people everywhere... it's the human experience.
As Paul Harvey used to say, "Now, you know the rest of the story."
Sincerely,
Roger Murrah
