Wolverton Mountain

Wolverton Mountain” is a country music song and 1962 crossover hit that established Claude King’s career as an American country singer-songwriter. The song was a rewrite of the original version by Merle Kilgore, which was based on a real person named Clifton Clowers (Kilgore’s own uncle). Clowers lived on Woolverton Mountain (the spelling was changed for the song),  located north of Morrilton, Arkansas, some 50 miles (80 km) west of Little Rock. The song spent nine weeks at the top of the Billboard country chart in the United States in June and July 1962.  A giant crossover hit, “Wolverton Mountain” reached number six on the Billboard 100 pop chart and number three on the easy listening chart. The song’s storyline deals with the narrator’s desire for Clowers’ daughter and his intention to climb the titular mountain and marry her. It opens with the recounting of a legendary warning to the listener not to “go on Wolverton Mountain”, as its inhabitant Clifton Clowers, who is “handy with a gun and a knife”, poses a lethal threat to anyone who tries to approach his beautiful daughter, whose “tender lips are sweeter than honey”. If a stranger attempts to enter, Clowers is alerted by “the bears and the birds”. The narrator has decided to defy Clowers and climb the mountain despite the acknowledged danger. What will eventually happen to him is not revealed in the lyric, but the positive tone suggests optimism. Clifton T. Clowers was born on October 30, 1891, at Center Ridge, Arkansas, son of Thomas Jefferson Clowers and Mary Prince Clowers. In July 1919, he married Esther Bell. He was a veteran of World War I and a deacon in the Mountain View Baptist Church. He was immortalized by the success of “Wolverton Mountain”.   He lived most of his life on a small farm located on the northern edge of Woolverton Mountain. According to one of his grandchildren, Clowers wished that Kilgore had not suggested in the song that he threatened his daughter’s suitors with a gun and a knife, saying, “I never used those tools for that purpose, I just used them to hunt and whittle.”  On his 100th birthday Clowers was visited by both writers of the song, King and Kilgore. He died at the age of 102 on August 15, 1994, at his home in Clinton, Arkansas, and was buried at the Woolverton Mountain Cemetery.