Joe Hilderbrand was a talented young man that met with unfortunate circumstances and fled to the hollows and the hills of Pope County rather than go back to prison. To this day, some say that he didn’t do what he was accused and convicted of.
Multiple Ozark ballads about Joe and his sweetheart, Frances, were subsequently written.
- Joe Hildebrand, as sung by Boyce Davis, Lincoln, Arkansas on January 13, 1968. “Boyce said he wrote his song and I remember reading and hearing about Joe Hildebrand. Boyce said the bold bandit Queen was Joe’s 16 year old pregnant neice. He always got a kick out of that line.”
- Foothills of the Ozarks, as sung by Glen Orhlin, Mountain View, Arkansas on October 7, 1969
- The Legend of the Ozarks, as sung by Ollie Gilbert, Mountain View, Arkansas on October 26, 1971
- Joe Hilderbrand, as sung by Richard Brothers, Fayetteville, Arkansas on January 1, 1974
Two that mentioned location certainly got it wrong. One has it in Polk County, which is the Oachitas, not the Ozarks. Another mentioned Coke County, which Arkansas doesn’t have, though Texas does.
Locals in General StoreThe Outlaw of the Ozarks
excerpt from About You,
December 25, 2018
December 25, 2018
Joseph Lytle Hilderbrand was not your usual Arkansas criminal. Sixty years ago, Hilderbrand was transported to the Tucker State Prison Farm in Jefferson County to serve a three-year sentence. He’d been convicted of kidnapping and robbing a tourist couple traveling down Scenic Highway 7 in the Ozark National Forest in 1958. After hijacking the young Midwestern honeymooners at the Rotary Ann rest stop, Hilderbrand allegedly had them drive him down the mountain to Fort Douglas, where he tied them to trees before disappearing into the woods with their cash — a total of $1.02.
Hilderbrand had already accumulated a minor record by age 20, serving time in the Faulkner County jail for forgery. A skinny prisoner, Hilderbrand somehow managed to slip between the bars of his cell on the top floor of the courthouse, climb out a window, drop into the bushes below and make his way home.
Home was the Bullfrog Valley area of Pope County, a short distance west of Dover, where Hilderbrand was born in 1935. He was well known in the community, and many felt he’d been wrongly charged and convicted in the incident involving the tourists. He felt that way as well. While sitting in the courtroom anxiously awaiting the jury’s recommendation on sentencing, he asked a deputy why it was taking so long. The man replied, in jest, that they were deciding whether to give him life or hang him. Not realizing he was the victim of a terribly bad joke, Hilderbrand leaped from his chair and bolted for the door but was caught before he could flee from the courthouse.
Moments earlier, the jury had agreed to a three-year suspended sentence, but instead gave him a three-year confinement because of his attempted escape.
The Birth of Ozark Ballads
Life,
November 14, 1960
Joe’s mother, wife and father trudge home along a ridge near Big Piney Valley after searching all day for their Joe and his sweetheartOver in the Ozarks, where songs and legends grow thick as pokeweed, two new ballads are being sung this fall about Joe Hilderbrand and his mountain sweetheart. Snatches from the songs are printed on this page, and even while they were being composed on Ozark guitars, Joe and his girl were being pursued day and night by airplanes, jeeps and blood-bounds in one of Arkansas’ biggest manhunts.
Joe’s troubles started small. In 1958 he robbed a tourist couple of a dollar and two cents on a highway near his home at Chigger Hollow. Sent to jail for three years, Joe became a model prisoner, even repaired the state electric chair. Last January he was granted a three-day furlough to see his father, who had had a paralytic stroke. His father got well but Joe took a notion to skip jail. He hid in mountain caves and did a bit of pilfering. The Ozark people began to think of Joe as a hero like Robin Hood, and even the state troopers did not bother him too much because they felt he was not really a bad man.
But this fall when Joe, who is 24, was joined by 18-year old Frances Standridge, who is a niece of Joe’s 47-year-old wife, he was faced with a kidnaping charge brought by the girl’s father. The troopers closed in, and the balladmakers sang, “Run, Joe, run.”
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Joe, Wife, and Kin
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BALLAD HERO Joe Hilderbrand before he went to jail had done stint in a reform school. His greatest fun was working on old jalopies with his dad.
Though Joe was a married man, there was nothing sneaky about his running off with young Frances Standridge. The couple walked straight up to Ola, who is Joe’s wife and Francis’ aunt, and told her point-blank they planned “to be away for five years together.” Then they walked into the hills. But that was not the end of Ola’s troubles. The police had a theory that Joe would surrender if they put pressure on his family.
So they charged Ola and Joe’s father with helping an escaped criminal and locked them in jail. This struck their Ozark neighbors as a dirty trick so two friends put up $1,000 bail and got Ola and the old man out.
When Joe and his girl took off, thefts began to occur in the hills where they roamed. But what made the mountain folks angrier than the stealing was the fact that the police, during lulls in their search, broke up illegal stills and confiscated rivers of first-class moonshine.
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JOE’S WIFE Ola (right)stands beside her sister, Osie, and her mother Nacy Jane (lower left), 80-year-old matriarch of the large Standridge clan.
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JOE’S PARENTS, Lytle and Bertha, kept vigil by cabin. Police thought Joe was hiding in the cellar and tossed tear gas bombs in. According to local lore, Joe was under floor with face buried in wet grain bags and fooled the law.
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JOE’S PURSUERS swarmed through the mountains. These two patrolmen carry guns and walkie-talkie which linked them with searchers in other areas. They hid in various spots along road waiting for Joe and Frances to come along..
As the manhunt grew more intense, Joe stole eight cars, wrecked some, and jumped from one to another. He and Frances slept in woods that crawled with copperheads and rattlers. “But them snakes didn’t bother usuns none,” said Frances. Meanwhile, Joe’s father drove all over in his rattletrap car, stirring up sympathy for his son and begging police not to shoot him. Walking along a creek, Joe and Frances were spotted at last by an airplane observer, who figured where they would be at nightfall and directed their capture. Together they were rushed into Little Rock and locked up. Nobody knows the fate of the lovers, but future ballads will record it one way or the other: “The mean ole troopers kept them apart, and broke the lovers’ bleeding hearts”, or more happily, “Now Frances waits at his cabin door and Joe didn’t have to run no more.”
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TATTERED JOE, after police flushed him, was sent back to the prison farm to serve out the remaining two years of his sentence. He still may be tried for thefts.
WRETCHED FRANCES, who says she still loves Joe, was back to her family on $1,000 bail. She faces larceny charges for helping Joe steal a car.