May festivals celebrate crawdads, community
Norma Sims recalls transforming from a bank bookkeeper into the pipe-smoking Mammy Yoakum in May 1970 during the first “Home Folks Days” in Harrison, a retail-focused forerunner to the booths and tents of modern festivals.
Local business workers in Harrison decorated store fronts and dressed as characters from Al Capps’ famous comic strip, “Li’l Abner.” Employees of the winning business won a season pass to a recreational theme park that opened in 1968 at Marble Falls called Dogpatch USA.
“It was great fun,” says Sims, whose name is synonymous with tourism the past 36 years in Harrison and the Ozarks region. “We dressed up on Friday and wore those outfits all day, and if you worked on Saturday, you wore them again.”
By 1991, however, Dogpatch USA was in financial trouble and would close two years later. Many Harrison businesses wanted to get away from the Dogpatch themes of Home Folks (later Dogpatch) Days like Li’l Abner running from Daisy Mae.
Dr. Charles Adair provided a solution. As the Harrison School District superintendent and the 1991 Chamber of Commerce president, his committee introduced Crooked Creek Crawdad Days to feature the city’s famous Ozark stream where Adair caught crawdads as a boy. The festival eventually dropped Crooked Creek from the name but stayed downtown through 2019.
The 2026 Crawdad Days is set for May 7-9 at the Northwest Arkansas District Fairgrounds. The annual event shifted in 2022 to the fairgrounds for ample parking, more restrooms and secure indoor areas for some vendors.
“The biggest advantage is everything is in one location and not scattered,” says fairgrounds manager Allison Black. “We had a big turnout last year (about 7,000 people) to breathe new life into this event after COVID-19.”
Crawdad Days cancelled in 2020 and 2021 and, like most festivals, is still recovering from corporate sponsors dropping community outreach from their post-COVID budgets.
“We’re all in the same boat, trying to break even or have a little money left for repairs,” Black says. “We try to offer as much as we can for free as a service to the community.”
At Crawdad Days, that’s still a lot. The 2026 lineup includes a crawfish-eating contest for kids, pony and camel rides and an exotic petting zoo with porcupines, kangaroos and monkeys. Musical acts include Hunter Courville and Cajun Fever (zydeco, blues, swamp-pop and rock) and 7 South (country, Southern rock and red dirt). Carnival rides are available with the purchase of an arm band. The adult crawfish-eating contest, accredited beauty pageant for all ages and 5K race have entry fees.
In addition to Crawdad Days, the packed weekend in Harrison offers the Spring Chute Out, a ranch rodeo Friday night and full rodeo Saturday night with livestock provided by Rough Stock Unlimited of Gainesville, Missouri. Teams of cowboys sign up for ranch rodeo with events such as doctoring/sorting, wild cow milking, steer tripping, calf mugging and other common ranch work done on horseback.
“You don’t see a lot of ranch rodeos in Arkansas,” says Harrison Roundup Club president Mark Hanshaw. “This is our third year to use Rough Stock Unlimited and cross-promote with Crawdad Days, and I can see some real growth here for Friday and Saturday nights.”
Visit crawdaddays.net for more details.
Ozarks to the Delta
One week later (May 15-16) and 250 miles south of Harrison, Kattie Jordan and her four-person committee will kick off the Dermott Crawfish Festival Festival (tinyurl.com/DermottCrawfish), which dates to 1984.
“It takes 10 months to plan and sell this event,” says Jordan, a former music promoter entering her third year as president of the Dermott Crawfish Festival committee. “We had more than 3,000 people here last year from all over southeast Arkansas, almost 40 vendors selling crafts and food.”
Festivalgoers will dig their way through 2,000 pounds of crawfish, while listening to musical acts Nathaniel Kimble (blues), Barney’s Country Band, Nia Renee of “American Idol” fame and the Bass Rhythms and Grooves Band. Admission to the Dermott Crawfish Festival is free.