Alcohol in any form has long been a bone of contention in Ozark life, some claiming it's God's gift to mankind and others, that it is Satan's temptation. What we do know is that alcohol has been around ever since nature invented fermentation and isn't likely to go away.

One of the oldest Ozark jokes deals with a moonshiner whose religious customers in a little town would never drink his product unless for medicinal purposes, such as treating snake bite. Because of this, he always carried a snake along with his jars of moonshine, "in case the town snake was worn out."

This tongue-in-cheek attitude about the drinking of alcohol is illustrated again in the one where a preacher asks a maiden lady in his flock if she would rather make her elderberry wine or have eternal life and she says, "Eternal life a'doin what? What I'm best at is makin' elderberry wine."

This joke takes a lot of forms, such as the one where a dying man leaves his death bed to creep downstairs, lured by the aroma of a jar of moonshine his wife has left open on a sideboard. He crawls the last few yards and is taking a sip, when his wife slaps him away from the jar, saying; "Now you leave that alone, Herbert, that's for the wake!"

I think the story that best describes the Scotch-Irish heritage of Ozark people is the one about the old man who always orders three glasses of beer at his local tavern and drinks alternately at each one. The bartender asks why, and the old man tells him that he has two brothers, one in Dublin and the other in Belfast, and they had agreed to drink this way in memory of their times together. "I sip at each glass," he said, "and it's as if we all were together, as in the old days."

The bartender is touched, and always remembers to serve his customer three glasses of beer. He is, therefore, alarmed when one day his old man only orders two beers.

"I'm sorry for your loss," he tells the old fellow, sadly. "Oh, it's not a death in the family," says the old man. "It's just my wife and me have joined the Baptist Church and I don't drink any more. But I hasten to say it ain't affected my brothers one bit!"