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HIGHBROWS, HILLBILLIES AND HELLFIRE

Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880-1930

Author: Steve Goodson

The University of Georgia Press

247 pages

Review by Jeff Calder

Contemporary accounts treat Atlanta not so much as a city as a psychosis. Citing an early derangement of purpose in this emerging Piedmont metropolis, various observers find Atlanta still searching for its identity in the present day, badly in need of the couch. The latest case study is Steve Goodson's Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire, a thorough examination of Atlanta's public entertainment during the period 1880-1930. Goodson, an associate professor at the State University of West Georgia, tackles the early urban scene as it begins to separate along class lines, each with different uses for leisure activity.

To Atlanta's new rich, entertainment had value primarily as an advertisement for commercial expansion. The task of the middle class press, like the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, was to serve the aspirations of the city's directorate, as well as to lampoon the disadvantaged. Meanwhile, Atlanta's poor had to manufacture their own fun and, in the process, Highbrows concludes, they create the only enduring culture that the city had during the period.

Atlanta's post-Civil War elite worked hard to impress Yankee investors. With the importation of the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1909, Goodson finds the city's leadership united "in the use of high culture as a tool with which to enhance Atlanta's reputation, fill the coffers of its merchants and consolidate the elites' own standing as a New South peerage."

Against this new "Cosmopolitanism," Old South currents pushed back with a combination of institutional racism and Evangelical restriction. Complaints were voiced about mixed-race touring troupes. One film was suppressed when its story-line involved miscegenation. There may have been little interest when the 1895 Cotton Exposition offered the "World's first commercially operated movie exhibition using modern equipment,” but, by 1915, the film

Birth of A Nation reeled in 19,000 Atlantans in its first week. The D.W. Griffith epic generated a hysterical response, and the revived Klan charged down Peachtree on horseback, blasting shotguns.

Atlanta's early theater withstood attacks by the clergy, one of whom called it "a moral cesspool." With the advent of film, spats with the city's holy men intensified over "the commercialization of the Sabbath," even as Sunday features attracted workers from area mill villages.

Challenging both sides of the above division, rural whites and blacks began to pour into Atlanta as the 19th Century came to a close. With a fondness for "Cheaper Amusements," their needs would not be denied. Nevertheless, the cops stiffened when it came to "coochie-coochie" and "the over brevity of costume." One of the infamous Dime Museums, "The Hall of Science," with its wax heads of murderers, was shuttered in 1909 despite protestations that the museum was "purely a scientific exhibition." The old-time fiddling conventions that began in 1913 were frenzied affairs that included live chickens on stage and, in one reporter's notation, a "peculiar white liquid which bore no evidence of acquaintance with a revenue stamp."

Stabilizing the more serious intention of Highbrows, Goodson presents a series of colorful characters, since forgotten. The young actor Scott Thornton was a tragicomic figure, either a "near genius" or a buffoon. In 1896, his staging of Richeleau ended prematurely when audience members pelted the players with produce and "long strings of red sausages." Yellowstone Kit, a puzzling medicine man, staged diverse spectacles in 1887 that were not unlike medieval fairs. Kit’s events found an enthusiastic reception among the city's black populace seeking diversion.

Yet, Atlanta's Negro community of the period had contradictions of its own. "Elite blacks," writes Goodson, "like their white counterparts, often used culture as a tool to enhance their status. [There was] an abiding tension between efforts to raise the lowly and a powerful desire to remain clearly distinguished from them." One influential Black spokesman denounced jazz, while, Remus to his Romulus, Joel Chandler Harris insisted that white men invented the banjo.

The heroes of Highbrows are Atlanta performers like Bessie Smith, Blind Willie McTell, and Cabbagetown's Fiddlin' John Carson, who, to Goodson, is one of the "pivotal figures in the cultural history of Atlanta." Carson’s success in 1923 began "the commercial history of country music." Atlanta attracted Northeastern record companies who shot in by rail and set up "contrived studios" to record artists of both races.

What established the city as a major force in American Popular Music was WSB, the first radio station in the South. WSB began broadcasting in 1922, and, for a few golden years, Atlanta's hillbilly, blues, jazz and classical artists could walk off the street and connect with a radio audience in all 48 states. When WSB became part of the NBC system in 1927, the city's native scene lost its national voice.

Goodson wisely ducks out as the Great Depression begins to sweep over the universe and reserves his parting shot for of the city's ruling elite: "The irony is that when Atlanta finally became the influential cultural center that its advocates had long promised it would be, there were no boosters about to trumpet the fact, or to profit from it, or in fact to feel anything other than embarrassment about their city's new claim to fame."

ADDENDUM

If Professor Goodson’s subject city has any defining characteristic, it is the amazing tendency to remake itself into the same thing every few years. Like the Metropoliton Opera at the beginning of the last Century, the Phillip Glass Festival is to be brought in primarily for its “image-making potential.” But to achieve that conscious wholeness which has been so elusive, Atlanta must repudiate the legacy of provincial insecurity described so persuasively in Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire. It must cultivate support behind indigenous artistic endeavor, “high” and “low,” for the contribution such activity makes to the city’s quality of life. Until then, Atlanta will be just another stop on somebody’s itinerary, and its truly unique artists and entertainers will be forced to fold their teepees, relocating out of despair to New York and Chicago, or, at the very least, the extremity of Athens.