The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Volume 16 : Sports and Recreation

Shopping

In the South, shopping is not just about the acquisition of needed items like groceries and gasoline; it is a recreational sport in which some of the participants can be very competitive. Word of caution: do not attempt to take the last cashmere sweater off the rack at a half-off sale; if you do, you might find yourself minus a limb. Within southern culture, shopping is a form of recreation that crosses class and gender lines, allowing everyone an opportunity to participate. No matter the economic status or gender of the participants, there is always a recreational shopping opportunity available and, in the South, these opportunities are abundant.

Those in an economic position allowing them to spend with impunity can find much satisfaction with the shopping opportunities available in the South. Of course, there are the shops that cross all geographic boundaries such as high-end department and chain stores, but throughout the South the wealthy are more attracted to small boutiques specializing in a wide range of high-priced items, ranging from baby needs and lingerie to books and housewares. Within the artistically painted walls of these specialty shops lie hundreds of items that many would classify as “overpriced” or “pretentious,” but for many recreational shoppers who frequent these establishments, such qualities are precisely what attracts them. Recreational shoppers of the wealthy sort often find satisfaction in purchasing items that are not necessities at prices they know to be inflated. This satisfaction can be attributed to the simple knowledge the purchaser has that they do indeed possess the extra cash (or credit card) to purchase items that others cannot afford. For them, the purchase can represent something greater than merely handing over a debit card and receiving a monogrammed christening gown in exchange; it can tell them something about themselves, something they need to know. While helping to reassure consumers—and others—of their status in society, specialty boutiques offer those with unlimited funds the opportunity to dispose of it, a niche that boutiques, and their owners, are delighted to fill.

For the recreational shopper with a more modest income, there are myriad choices available in the South. Purchasing a single item from a high-end boutique can be quite satisfying, but many recreational shoppers of more modest means prefer quantity over quality. Enter outlet malls. Although not strictly limited to the South, these megacenters of bargains call to the southern recreational shopper with their promises of half-price china and two-for-one socks more so than other regions—a result of the increasingly overwhelming consumer culture that predominates the South. Southerners like “stuff.” They like to have their “stuff” on display in their homes, their driveways, and on their person. Outlet malls allow southerners to obtain “stuff” in great quantities on a single outing in a single location, explaining its unavoidable draw. The discussion of the quantity aspect of outlet malls is not to say that there are not high-end items available at outlet malls. Quite the contrary. Many high-end designers have stores in outlet malls where overstocks and slightly damaged merchandise are sent to be sold at varying degrees of lower price than those same items would be found in a traditional department store or specialty boutique, thus allowing recreational shoppers of limited means the opportunity to own and display luxury goods that they otherwise would not be able to afford.

Department stores have not only influenced the recreational culture of the consuming public but have also greatly influenced the recreational shopping potential of their employees. Many department stores offer an employee discount that allows employees to purchase goods that they otherwise might not be able to afford. Offering such a discount increases the stores profit margins as well as allowing the employee a chance to shop recreationally. Imagine the possibilities of working in a department store every day, seeing new items arrive, later go on sale, and then choosing just the right moment to make your purchase utilizing the employee discount. What better definition of recreational shopping can be found? For the employee the recreation begins weeks, perhaps months, in advance, watching an item as it moves through the store and eventually onto sale racks, and culminates with the purchase of the item. From this perspective, shopping is truly an important form of recreation for the employee of the department store.

Even though the tendency might be to classify recreational shopping as a singularly female pursuit, in the South this certainly is not the case. Not only do men routinely engage in recreational shopping through the aforementioned avenues, but they also participate in the consumer culture by shopping recreationally at stores designed to cater to a predominantly male customer base. Supersized outdoors stores, such as B.A.S.S. Pro Shop and Edwin Watts Golf, as well as smaller boutique-sized shops, such as independent hunting retailers, cater to a predominantly male clientele by offering items for the outdoorsman, the sportsman, and the athlete, among others. Such stores provide men with the opportunity to participate in the consumer culture typified by recreational shopping within parameters that men can define as separate from the recreational shopping spheres of women. Even though it is clear that certain stores and departments within stores cater to either a male or female clientele, it is also clear that both sexes have ample opportunity in the South to participate in recreational shopping.

In so many small towns, Wal-Mart (another southern store) has become the main retail outlet and therefore the heart of recreational shopping. Like a mall, Wal-Mart has everything under one roof. Shoppers begin arriving before 8:00 A.M. and buy a biscuit and coffee at whichever café is allowed to share that space (once exclusively the domain of McDonald’s, now Subway dominates that market). Women meet friends, men meet friends; they wander, shop, talk, take a coffee break, wander and shop some more, then have lunch where they had breakfast or at a nearby restaurant. It is a community experience.

Throughout the South recreational shoppers have many opportunities to engage in their favorite hobby. From high-end boutiques to outlet malls to department stores, the southern shoppers have the opportunity to find virtually any consumer good they desire at a wide range of prices. For many, the draw of recreational shopping is the hunt—the hunt for the desired good at the lowest price available. In the South, recreational shoppers have more than enough opportunity to indulge their favorite pastime. Whether enjoying shopping on a budget or spending without regard to financial restriction, the recreational shopper in the South is engaging in an incredibly popular pastime available to members of all races, classes, and genders.

ERIN JONES SCHMIDT

University of Alabama

Marianne Conroy, Social Text (Spring 1998); Kuan-Pin Chiang and Ruby Roy Dholakia, Journal of Consumer Psychology 13:1–2 (2003); Pasi Falk and Colin B. Campbell, eds., The Shopping Experience (1997); Robert Prus and Lorne Dawson, Canadian Journal of Sociology (Spring 1991); Edward M. Tauber, Journal of Marketing (October 1972); Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (2004).

Soccer

Within the past 30 years, soccer, which for generations had been eclipsed in popularity within the South by the dominant sports of football, basketball, and baseball, has emerged as an increasingly popular sport. Formally organized in England during the early 19th century, soccer (or football, as it is known outside of the United States) spread dramatically across the globe in the following century, becoming the world’s most popular team-based sport by 1950. In the United States, however, soccer was slow in gaining popularity, owing partially to the game’s late entry into the national sporting culture and lingering perceptions of American isolationism. Within the South, the game’s popularity was even slower in developing. With few European, Asian, or Latin American immigrants arriving to the southeastern states between 1850 and 1950, the growth of soccer was markedly slower in the South than the North or West, where the game thrived in urban immigrant enclaves.

Soccer first established a foothold in the urban South, where amateur leagues began to organize small tournaments in the 1920s and 1930s. By the late 1950s several universities were fielding men’s teams, including Duke, Emory, and the University of North Carolina, which competed against one another in regional conferences. The formation of the North American Soccer League (NASL) in 1968 further boosted the game’s popularity, especially when the Atlanta Chiefs became a leading team in the early 1970s. But it was only with the post-1970 “Sunbelt” boom in suburban development that soccer began to grow at an explosive rate, and it was here that the game attained its enduring reputation as a youth sport. For thousands of northern and western white-collar professionals who moved to the suburbs of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, soccer was a game they had played as children, a safer alternative to the often-bloody game of football. In affluent suburban communities across the Southeast in the 1980s and 1990s, therefore, soccer would quickly grow to challenge the old trinity of baseball, basketball, and football, and by the turn of the 21st century tens of thousands of southern children were playing regularly in intramural, school-sponsored, and private soccer leagues.

While the expansion of soccer as a suburban youth sport was successful in introducing the game to a wide new audience, equally dramatic was the soccer boom that has accompanied the South’s recent surge in immigration. After a century of relative homogeneity in its white and black population, the Southeast since 1980 has attracted a diverse new wave of immigrants, most notably from Mexico and Central America, China, South Korea, and various West African nations. This unprecedented demographic transformation has wrought tremendous cultural change, and the growth of immigrant soccer leagues is a prominent example. Especially for Latin American immigrants, whose reverence and dedication to the game is legendary, participation in Latino soccer leagues in urban, suburban, and rural settings has become a crucial avenue of recreation, community formation, and even career networking in their newest home.

Such change has not been without conflict or controversy, however, and many Latino newcomers have encountered hostility and resentment from native southerners, in which public recreational spaces often became a key arena of contention. As immigrant soccer leagues grew in popularity and began to compete with traditional southern sports for the use of public space, unsympathetic city and county governments during the 1990s and 2000s initiated campaigns to restrict immigrant access to public parks, and signs proclaiming “NO SOCCER ALLOWED / NO PERMITE EL FÚTBOL” appeared on football fields and baseball diamonds across the South, in both small towns and large cities. For Latin American residents, this symbolic attack on their culture and belonging has engendered considerable bitterness and protest, and while negotiation and compromise have led to solutions in some communities, the conflict over immigrant culture and public space continues to plague much of the South.

It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that soccer became a popular sport among southern schoolchildren, but the game has been a collegiate sport in the South since the 1950s. (Photograph by Bill Mathews, courtesy of Judson College, Marion, Ala.)

The growth of soccer, therefore, has become symbolic of the enormous transformation of the South since the civil rights movement. Suburban youth teams and Latino immigrant leagues, while playing the same sport, are clearly the products of different phenomena, yet each represents an important trend in recent social and demographic change.

TORE OLSSON

University of Georgia

Marie Price and Courtney Whitworth, Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places, ed. Daniel Arreola (2004); Rory Miller and Liz Crolley, eds., Football in the Americas: Futbol, Futebol, Soccer (2007); Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism in Sport (2001).

Square Dancing

Square dancing has long been a part of the traditional culture of the rural South. Square dances, for groups of four or more couples, have their roots in popular European social dances of the 18th and 19th centuries (French cotillions and quadrilles, English country dances, and Scots-Irish reels); they also show the influence of African American and Native American dances. The earliest detailed account of southern square dancing comes from English folk music and dance scholar Cecil Sharp, who—with his colleague Maud Karpeles—observed dances at several locations in eastern Kentucky in 1917. Sharp interpreted these rural southern dances (which he called “The Running Set”) as survivals of 17th-century English country dances. He mistakenly believed that these old dances had remained intact and unchanged for many generations and that the remoteness of the mountains had kept them free from the contaminating influences of modernity. The southern square dance, however, is a distinctly American dance form, one that did not exist until the 19th century when European social dances merged with elements of African American and Native American dances in the America South.

Before the 20th century, dancing was a common recreation in Anglo-American, African American, and Native American communities. Square dances often accompanied such community work gatherings as corn shuckings, molasses makings, and barn raisings; they also occurred at weddings and other festive occasions, particularly during the Christmas season. Most often held in private homes, such dances also took place in barns, taverns, or even outdoors on the bare ground. By the 1930s, square dances had lost their association with work parties and special occasions and had become public events serving a wider region and held in large community halls on a regular basis throughout the year. While these public dances are now relatively rare, they still happen in some rural communities, with dancers of all ages sometimes traveling several hours to attend on Friday or Saturday nights.

Although the name “square dance” implies a square formation for four couples, southern square dances are often done with any number of couples in a big circle set. Today, the four-couple square is more common in northern West Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri, while the big circle is the dominant form elsewhere. Southern square dances are characterized by visiting couple figures (where each couple takes a turn leading the figure); a verse-chorus structure (such that the visiting couple figure performed by two couples alternates with a chorus or ending figure involving all of the couples); the presence of distinctive southern dance figures (such as “Bird in the Cage”); fast paced music; and improvisational dance calling that guides the dancers through the figures.

The practice of dance calling appears to have emerged in African American communities in the early 19th century as a way to lead dancers who were not trained in the formal figures of French cotillions and quadrilles through the dances. The first documented dance caller was an African American musician at a formal New Orleans ball in 1819. By the mid-19th century, dance calling had become a common practice throughout the rural South. Such calling was the key element that transformed the earlier European dances into a distinct American dance form, in a process that paralleled the way that the African American banjo transformed European fiddle styles to become southern dance music. Without the African American practice of dance calling, southern square dances would not exist in their present form.

Following World War II, a new form of square dancing, called “Modern Western Square Dancing,” developed from the traditional square dances of the western United States. With standardized dance calls, professional callers, recorded music, and western costumes, this new style of square dancing became popular across the country, competing with and displacing many of the older community-based rural dances. Today, Modern Western Square Dance clubs can be found throughout the South.

PHILIP A. JAMISON

Warren Wilson College

S. Foster Damon, The History of Square Dancing (1957); Philip A. Jamison, Journal of Appalachian Studies (Fall 2003); Richard Nevell, A Time to Dance (1977); Cecil J. Sharp and Maud Karpeles, The Country Dance Book, Part V (1918); Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside, eds., Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America’s Southeast and Beyond (1995).

Stepping

African American step teams throughout the South dazzle audiences with their dynamic, synchronized stomping and clapping and their choreographed dancing to hip-hop tunes. A complex performance involving synchronized percussive movement, singing, speaking, chanting, and drama, stepping developed in the early part of the 20th century as a ritual of group identity among African American college fraternities and sororities. Stepping reflects the African and African American heritage of those who pioneered its development, as well as the verbal and movement traditions prominent among blacks in the South.

Every year in late November, at the Bayou Classic in the Louisiana Super-dome, Grambling State University and Southern University compete in one of the largest historically black college football competitions in the United States. There, also, the best college step teams compete in the Bayou Classic Greek Show. Other competitive step shows take place throughout the South, as collegiate step teams vie for bragging rights while raising money for social causes. While such shows are the most public venue for collegiate stepping, most fraternity and sorority stepping happens on campus, where members of the nine historically black Greek-letter societies that compose the National Pan-Hellenic Council celebrate their organizations through probate (or neophyte) step shows that present new members to the public. They also sponsor competitive step shows to support scholarships and other social causes.

Stepping is a dynamic and vital performance for expressing and celebrating African American and other group identities. Popularized in films such as such as Stomp the Yard (2007), Drumline (2002), and School Daze (1988), and in TV programs such as A Different World (1987–93), stepping is now also performed by multicultural, Asian, Latino, and occasionally white fraternities and sororities, as well as by community, school, and church step teams. As other ethnic groups form step teams, they incorporate their own ethnic dance traditions into their stepping, while retaining signature African American features.

Stepping routines are orally composed and transmitted. When the step-master or leader is older than the steppers being taught, he or she may teach the routine by “breaking it down” into smaller rhythmic units that are imitated until everyone masters them. Composition is often collaborative in groups in which everyone is the same age. Circulating videotapes and DVDS of step shows (often available for sale online) aid in the transmission process; so also do video clips that are readily available on YouTube and other Web sites. Regional and national competitions, as well as regional and national meetings of the nine historically black Greek-letter societies, further help to disseminate steps. A striking example of oral composition can be seen in the way steppers use the words and tune of Omega Psi Phi’s song, “All of my love, my peace and happiness, I’m gonna give it to Omega,” as an oral formula, borrowing and modifying it as they incorporate it into various step routines. While preserving the same tune, a high school step team substituted the words “I’m going to give it to my people,” and a church step team sang, “It’s all our love and praise and honor, we want to give it to our savior—Jesus Christ.”

Each of the nine black Greek-letter societies has “trade” or “signature” steps that are performed by college chapters throughout the nation and convey the character and style of the organizations. These signature steps have names, and members within the black Greek system recognize them as belonging to particular organizations by their visual and oral patterns. When a group performs the signature steps of another organization, it does so either to pay tribute to the originating group (called “saluting”) or to mock it by performing the step in an inept or comic manner (called “cracking” or “cutting”). Some well-known signature steps include Alpha Phi Alpha’s “The Grand-Daddy” and “Ice, Ice”; Alpha Kappa Alpha’s “It’s a Serious Matter”; Zeta Phi Beta’s “Sweat” and “Precise”; Phi Beta Sigma’s “Wood”; and Iota Phi Theta’s “Centaur Walk.”

Stepping may have grown out of the popular drill team traditions of African American mutual aid and Masonic societies; it certainly reflects the same kind of emphasis on synchronized clapping and stomping. Interestingly, the founders of the first black college fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, were closely associated with black Masonic societies and held their first initiation in 1906 at a Masonic Hall, where they borrowed Masonic costumes for their ritual. The earliest written reference to what may be stepping appears in 1925, when an article on “Hell Week” in the Howard University newspaper describes Alpha Phi Alpha and Omega Psi Phi pledges “marching as if to the Fairy Pipes of Pan.”

Stepping may have also grown out of the black Greek ritual of “marching on line,” in which pledges expressed their brotherhood or sisterhood by walking in a line across campus, displaying their group’s colors and symbols. Over the years, groups added singing, chanting, and synchronized clapping and stomping to their marching. Early step shows often had the brothers and sisters moving in counterclockwise circles; as stage performances for audiences became more common in the 1960s, however, line formations became prevalent. Terms for stepping vary among campuses and change over time, and they include such designations as “demonstrating,” “marching,” “bopping,” “hopping,” “blocking,” and “stomping.”

Stepping reveals its continuity with African American dances that originated in the South during slavery. The most well-known dance of this period, “patting juba,” may have originated in an African dance called guiouba; it grew in popularity after slaveholders outlawed drums among the enslaved, for fear that they would use them to communicate and plan slave revolts. Without drums, slaves used their hands and feet to create the rhythm for their dances. Recalling this practice among enslaved dancers in Louisiana, Solomon Northup described “patting juba” as “striking the hands on the knees, then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left with the other—all the while keeping time with the feet, and singing.” Along with this percussive movement, dancers would sing and chant, often voicing a critique of slavery in coded language. When performing in a group setting, dancers would usually step juba in a counterclockwise circle, with both the words and the steps in a conversational, call-and-response form; the dancing relied on improvisation, low-step shuffling, and clapping, all of which are time-honored features of African American dance performance.

African American dancers on the minstrel stage also performed the juba dance. The most famous such dancer of the 19th century, William Henry Lane, was called “Master Juba” because of his extraordinary step dancing. In the 1840s, Lane held dance duels in the Five Points district of Lower Manhattan with Irish step dancers, including the white minstrel dancer Jack Diamond; in these duels, he freely blended African dance elements with Irish jigs. The frequency of such blending may well account for the widespread white adoption of the term “jigs” to describe African American step dancing, according to dance historians Marshall and Jean Stearns. Thus, stepping may reflect Irish as well as African influences.

Just as the early circular routines of fraternity and sorority steppers suggest the influence of patting juba, so too may they reflect another early African American dance form, the “ring shout.” Developed in black Christian churches during slavery, ring shouts feature counterclockwise movement, hand clapping, foot patting, stick beating (to foreground the rhythm), and call-and-response singing. Though ring shouts were primarily acts of worship, they also took place in some 19th-century secular contexts, such as house parties and gatherings of black soldiers in the Civil War. Ring shouts still occur among some church communities in the South and along Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Stepping also embodies aesthetic features common in Western and Central African dances. The counterclockwise circular movement of early step routines recalls not only patting juba and ring shouts but also a common dance pattern in Kongo culture that symbolizes the sun circling the Earth, according to art historian Robert Farris Thompson. One of the most striking stances of African American stepping—the “get-down” position, in which steppers bend deeply from the waist, or step with knees deeply bent—is common in Africa. Other characteristic features of African dance, according to Thompson, include call and response, dances that convey derision, the use of striking moralistic poses, an emphasis on correct entrance and exit, personal and representational balance, the establishment of clear boundaries around dances, looking smart, the mask of the cool, and polyrhythm (multiple meter). African American steppers exhibit all of these features, demonstrating the strong continuity of stepping with African culture. Indeed, steppers often claim that stepping originated in Africa. One AKA sister, for instance, said that stepping “goes all the way back to African culture,” when different tribes competed through dance, and a Christian step team in Detroit, Mich., chanted, “Africa is where stepping began, from the beat of the drums to the sound of our feet.”

Since the early 1990s, stepping has grown in popularity and spread beyond college campuses and African American fraternities and sororities to new practitioners, audiences, and venues. Latino, Asian, multicultural, and occasionally white fraternities and sororities around the country now step, as do many school, community, and church groups. Alpha Phi Alpha brothers from Howard University stepped for President Bill Clinton’s inaugural festivities in 1993, and the opening pageant of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Ga., featured stepping. African American fraternity and sorority members have played key roles in spreading stepping to new groups and contexts by teaching others to step, starting school, church, and community step teams to mentor youth, and participating in arts organizations such as Washington, D.C.’s Step Afrika, which uses stepping as a tool to promote education and intercultural dialogue.

At the University of Texas at Austin, the Epsilon Iota Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha sponsors two different stepping shows for non-Greeks. The Non-Greek Step show in the fall is the largest in Texas and includes high school and community step teams from across the state. In the spring, it sponsors “Step for Hope,” in which the fraternity members teach students of different cultural backgrounds how to step and then perform on the main mall in front of a large audience. Participating in this step show led sisters of Sigma Phi Omega, an Asian-interest sorority, to start stepping in 1998. Another Asian-interest fraternity at the University of Texas, Omega Phi Gamma, has sponsored a Unity talent show since 1995, in which the brothers perform their special step routine. The first intercollegiate Latino Greek step show on the East Coast, and perhaps in the nation, took place in the Bronx in July 1999. By 2006, Latino step shows were common on college campuses throughout the nation and the South.

Thus, increasingly throughout the South, one can find step shows flourishing in many contexts and among social groups quite different from the historically black fraternities and sororities that invented stepping. Despite the addition of salsa movements by Latino steppers, raas and garba dance movements by South Asian steppers, or Christian chants by church steppers, the stepping of these new groups retains many characteristic African American features. Stepping has proved to be a highly malleable tradition, able to incorporate new performers and styles as it functions to demonstrate group identity through its complex, synchronized percussive movements.

ELIZABETH C. FINE

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Carol D. Branch, in African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision, ed. Tamara L. Brown, Gregory S. Parks, and Clarenda M. Phillips (2005); Elizabeth C. Fine, Soulstepping: African American Step Shows (2003, 2007); Walter M. Kimbrough, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities (2004); Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (1996); Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (1979).

Stock Car Racing

Stock car racing is a form of racing with automobiles that resemble standard production passenger cars. Stock car racing has become especially popular in the South where in its most developed forms it takes place in specialized amphitheaters using expensive, powerful, and carefully made machinery.

Automobiles were initially more plentiful in the industrialized parts of the nation, so much early automobile racing was done in the North and Midwest. Informal races were soon moved from the streets onto existing horse racing “tracks,” which were surfaced with dirt. Starting around the turn of the century, the brick-surfaced oval track at Indianapolis, Ind., served as a new focus for racing activity.

It took longer for the automobile to reach rural areas, and not until the 1930s did stock car racing as it is known today become popular in the rural Midwest and South. Mass-produced automobiles gave working-class rural southerners more personal mobility than had been provided by horses. Farmers used cars for speedier delivery of their crops to more distant markets. In some cases, they distilled crops into liquor and transported the liquor to market as part of a longstanding family business. Liquor was a compact means of transporting crops and provided a greater return. This trade was opposed by governmental authorities, because most home-liquor makers (“moonshiners”) did not pay taxes on their sales. In their efforts to outdistance law officers, some of the liquor runners skillfully modified their cars for greater power and higher speeds. The drivers of these vehicles also participated in informal races between themselves and others interested in automobiles. Liquor runners, although a small minority of those who entered early races, included many of the most famous and proficient drivers and race organizers. Some of them became legends.

With the greater affluence and hence more widespread automobile ownership that followed World War II, racing became more popular than before, especially in the South. However, the rules under which the racing was conducted and the administration of the tracks were often uncertain. A concerted effort to standardize the rules and the administration of racing resulted in the formation in 1947 of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. (NASCAR). NASCAR has become the largest and best known of such sanctioning organizations in the United States, with wide media coverage of its activities.

Virtually ignored by the national media, the first major paved amphitheater (“superspeedway”) built in the South especially for auto racing opened in 1950 in Darlington, S.C. As a result of its success, tracks opened in other parts of the South. At present, stock car races are held from New England to California, although most of the big speedways are in the South. The Carolina Piedmont has the largest concentration of tracks, major races, driver home bases, and driver folk heroes. The heartland goes from central Virginia down to Talladega, Ala.

During the 1950s and 1960s, automakers noticed that successes of a make of car in the races led to increased sales. The auto companies and other sponsors poured money into the sport as a form of advertising. Support for racing has also come from other large corporations. For instance, a cigarette company sponsors several major race series. Individual racers and racing machines also are sponsored by small businesses and individuals.

Throughout its history, stock car racing has been identified with rural white southern males. Blacks and women, although occasional participants, have never made it to the top. Racing has become an accepted way (along with others, including singing and athletics) for a rural white male to achieve fame, money, and the trappings of success. Successful participants in the sport, such as Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, and Cale Yarborough, keep aspects of their southern heritage while they develop an ability to work with big business. Many of the best racers have, along with driving skill and a mechanical genius, a razor-sharp business acumen. They base their racing activities in their hometowns and maintain close family ties. Their “pit crews” tend to be drawn from the local population. They build closeness to their fans through personal appearances and project a “good old boy” image by expressing an interest in such male activities as hunting, fishing, and, of course, tinkering with automobiles. They are folk heroes with which the average southern male can identify. Stock car racing, with its noise, dirt, powerful cars, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, has become a symbol of the southern way of living.

Stock car racing combines a fascination with technology and a spirit of competition. It has become identified with the South, where it has served both as a sport and as a way for participants to leave rural poverty. At first glance, the cars appear to be like those available to the average person. However, the cars are in fact highly specialized technical accomplishments. The cost of the machinery keeps it from being a widely popular participant sport. As a result, there is mass popular support for a relatively small number of athletes. The drivers epitomize the successful southern male who has managed to retain his “down-home” manner. The average southern male can identify with the racers, both because he drives a car that looks like theirs and because he shares their identification with things southern. At present, many of the prominent drivers are in their 40s, an age by which athletes in many other sports have retired. A few younger drivers are beginning to gain recognition in Winston Cup racing, often through their successes in local competition. Winston Cup racing is the most publicized form of stock car racing.

There are different kinds of racing, varying with the scale of the effort and the technical details of the cars. Categories often are based on the age of the cars and their construction, especially their power plants and wheelbase lengths. Rules also vary with the track where the races are run.

There is a continuum of size and complexity in racing tracks. At the amateur level are small tracks (usually oval in shape and a quarter to a half mile long), which draw spectators and participants from immediately surrounding areas. In these races, older passenger cars are modified for increased safety and speed. As in other sports, there are many participants in local-level, dirt track races, which require less money and effort.

At the professional end of the scale are Winston Cup (formerly called Grand National) races on larger speedways. Contestants come from all over the nation. Media reporters jockey for position to interview the winning drivers. At this level, vehicles are usually constructed by specialty builders solely for racing and have little relation to production cars beyond outward appearance.

At all levels of racing, each vehicle has one or more mechanics who build and maintain the vehicle. The “pit crew” services the car during races by refueling, replacing tires, cleaning the windshield, and giving the driver refreshments.

Sponsors are individuals or businesses that provide money to support the racing effort. Their names are painted on the sides of the cars (along with each car’s number) so that the fans will be encouraged to buy their products. Some drivers have consistently used particular makes of automobiles, endorsing the manufacturer. Fans are fiercely partisan toward particular drivers. Many fans wear clothing and other items imprinted with the car number and name of their driver and belong to fan clubs boosting their favorite.

Track officials work to ensure that the race goes smoothly. There are often also officials from the organization (“sanctioning body”) that writes the racing rules. Although NASCAR is the best known of these organizations, smaller, local sanctioning bodies organize most racing events. These bodies write rules to promote safety and competition.

“Technical inspections” of cars are made to ensure that cars conform to the rules. Nevertheless, clever racers try to interpret the rules to their advantage. The emphasis on technical sophistication in the preparation of the vehicles is one of the excitements of the sport, and fans and racers alike are constantly alert to innovations that increase the cars’ speeds.

Each driver is involved with several kinds of competition simultaneously. Competition for winning the race by being the first to complete the required number of laps around the track is the most visible. Winning is a combination of driver skill and chance. Winning is also dependent on the speed and efficiency of the pit crew and the ability of the machinery to last up to 500 laps at speeds up to 200 miles an hour. Behind the scenes, drivers compete for the best sponsors and mechanics.

Before the race, drivers compete in trials designed to see which car can go fastest around the track. The faster a car runs in the trials, the closer it is placed to the front of the pack of 30 to 40 starting cars. The fastest car gets the most advantageous position (the “pole” position) at the front. Drivers compete to accumulate the most “points” over a season from various accomplishments, such as the position of their car in comparison to the winner’s at the end of each race, the number of races entered, and the number of laps completed.

DAVID M. JOHNSON

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

Patrick Bedard, Car & Driver (June 1982); Jerry Bledsoe, The World’s Number One, Flat-Out, All-Time Great, Stock Car Racing Book (1975); Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2000); Peter Golenbock, American Zoom (1993); Handbook of American Popular Culture, vol. 1, ed. M. Thomas Inge (1979); Tom Higgins and Steve Waid, Brave in Life: Junior Johnson (1999); Ed Hinton, Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black (2001); Mark Howell, From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A Cultural History of NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series (1997); Jim Hunter, Official 1982 NASCAR Record Book and Press Guide (1982); Bill Libby with Richard Petty, “King Richard”: The Richard Petty Story (1977); Bob Nagy, Motor Trend (June 1981); Dan Pierce, Southern Cultures (Summer 2001), Atlanta History (no. 2, 2004); Richard Pillsbury, Journal of Geography (no. 1, 1974); Don Sherman, Car & Driver (June 1982); Southern MotoRacing (biweekly newspaper about stock car racing, Winston-Salem, N.C.); Sylvia Wilkinson, in American South: Portrait of a Culture, ed. Louis D. Rubin Jr. (1980); Tom Wolfe, Esquire (March 1965).

Storytelling

Storytelling—a means of description, entertainment, and teaching known in all cultures—has played a rich role in the South, where Native American, European, and African storytelling traditions have intermingled and enriched each other for four centuries. Despite its great age, storytelling is always new when it unfolds as part of a living tradition, because the teller shapes the tale while interacting with an audience whose tastes and values inform the performance. Without the listeners’ interest and approval, the tale dies on the teller’s lips. Because tales always emerge in the moment, we cannot know the exact styles and stories of the earliest southern storytellers; nonetheless, written records give some idea of the tales’ content and how they were performed.

Southern storytelling began with the region’s native peoples, including the Cherokee, who once inhabited the Appalachian Mountains from Alabama to West Virginia. As in all storytelling communities, the Cherokee recognized (formally or informally) certain individuals as narrative specialists. Around 1750 some of these specially trained narrators recited a long legendary history of the Cherokee, beginning with their divine creation and then tracing their migrations across North America. Nearly 150 years later, when James Mooney made the first comprehensive study of Cherokee storytelling, no one could remember this story; tribal elders did recall, however, that in the 1840s boys chosen to learn the sacred stories would sit all night around a ritual fire listening to their teachers and then would strip and bathe in a stream to purify themselves. By the end of the 19th century, the Cherokee no longer observed this ritual, though tribal elders still specialized in the most sacred stories. Of course, most Cherokees knew and told many other types of stories, including local legends, tales of notable hunts and battles, and animal tales that featured a trickster rabbit (some of which resemble the African American tales of Brer Rabbit, a fact that perhaps reflects contacts between Cherokees and African Americans stretching back to colonial times).

When Europeans first reached the South, they brought with them longstanding narrative styles with which they described both the Indians and their stories. Through their writings, Europeans introduced the New World and its people to the Old. Explorers such as the German John Lederer, who traveled through North Carolina in 1670–71, learned Indian history from traditions “delivered in long tales from father to son” that the tellers had memorized as children. Indians also taught Lederer about the natural environment—how, for example, snakes would hypnotize squirrels in trees to lure them to the ground and eat them. Although Lederer did not believe this particular tale, he nonetheless repeated it in his Discoveries (1672).

Southern explorers, following a European tradition dating to medieval times, also told stories of their personal adventures, some of which were retold through succeeding centuries. For instance, Captain John Smith—who helped establish the colony of Jamestown, Va., in 1607—often told of his capture by the Powhatan tribe and how the young Pocahontas intervened to prevent his execution. Later historians dismissed this and other Smith narratives as fiction, though recent research supports the accuracy of some of these stories. Regardless of their historicity, explorers’ stories seized the popular imagination and blended into the tradition of the tall tale—a form that became the signature genre of the American frontier.

Tall tales were so popular that they long dominated America’s periodical literature; as early as the 18th century, and throughout the 19th, almanacs and weeklies were rife with tall tales celebrating southern wilderness heroes, both famous and nameless. Tall-tale performances became features of public life: just as John Smith told explorer tales for self-promotion, political celebrities, including Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett (1786–1836) and Louisiana governors Huey P. Long (1893–1935) and Jimmy Davis (1899–2000), used tall tales to advertise themselves. A successful narrator’s tall tales sometimes even outlived him, as in the case of the Crockett almanacs, which were published for two decades after the hero’s death at the Alamo.

Usually told in the first person and always presented as true, the tall tale typically begins with a credible situation in a recognizable natural environment and then adds a series of escalating exaggerations, ending as an unbelievable fiction. A plot known to folklorists as “The Lucky Shot” neatly characterizes this genre. A man starving in the wilderness is down to his last bullet; he must kill game or die. Spying ten ducks perched on a branch, he tamps a bullet into his double-barreled, muzzle-loading rifle. But at that very moment, a bear charges him head-on, a panther leaps toward him from his left, and a boar charges from his right. With the ramrod still stuck in one barrel, he pulls both triggers at once. His one bullet kills the bear; the gun’s left hammer flies off and kills the panther; the right hammer, in turn, kills the boar. Meanwhile, the ramrod flies to the ducks, pinning their feet to the branch. The once-starving hunter collects his game; he now has food for a year.

“The Lucky Shot” captures some of the most common themes of southern tall tales: the wilderness is filled with both terrifying dangers and life-sustaining abundance; and given one last chance, a lone man—through either resourcefulness or dumb luck—secures abundance from danger’s jaws. Versions of this plot have been documented in English in performances by African American John Jackson in Virginia and Anglo Jimmy Wilson in Arkansas, as well as in French by Louisiana Cajun Adlai Gaudet and in Spanish by numerous narrators along the Gulf Coast—testimony to the fact that southern storytelling readily crosses the most rigid boundaries of culture, language, region, and race.

In contemporary southern settings, the tall tale is sometimes a large-scale affair; many county fairs and local festivals feature “liars’ contests” in which performers strive to tell the most preposterous tales. But more typical narrative communities are small, all-male groups that congregate at hunting camps, country stores, or courthouse squares. The teller usually speaks in a soft monotone of feigned sincerity, as if unaware that there is anything incredible about his story. Audience members who are “in” on the joke also betray no hint that the narrator is telling an outrageous lie. The ideal is to perform in such a low-key fashion that eavesdroppers believe they are listening in on a normal conversation. (In the Ozarks in the mid-20th century, for example, storytellers in general stores would exchange everyday news until a tourist approached. Just before the visitor reached the store, they would start telling their tall tales—about, for instance, how one of their children rode to school on the back of a friendly bear—to keep the visitor from suspecting that he was witnessing a joke at his expense.)

If the tall tale draws its power by deftly walking the line between fact and fiction, other stories—such as Märchen, or magic tale, the oral equivalent to the literary fairy tale—present an unvarnished fantasy world. The Europeans who settled the South may have carried only a few books, but they did bring a significant repertoire of Märchen. Joseph Doddridge recalled that on the West Virginia frontier, around 1770, “Dramatic narrations, chiefly concerning Jack and the Giant, furnished our young people with [a] source of amusement during their leisure hours. Many of those tales were lengthy, and embraced a considerable range of incident. Jack, always the hero of the story, after encountering many difficulties, and performing many great achievements, came off conqueror of the Giant.” Such tales as “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack the Giant Killer,” beloved in 18th-century Britain, were equally popular in the southern colonies.

More than two centuries later, the hero of the southern Märchen is still typically named Jack, and the Märchen are often called Jack Tales (or Jack, Tom, and Will tales, after the three brothers featured in many versions). Like the tall-tale hero, Jack—the youngest, smallest, and least promising of the three—relies upon resourcefulness and luck to outperform his brothers and save them from menacing giants, evil witches, and fierce animals.

The performance settings for southern Märchen are generally more intimate than for tall tales. Märchen telling typically takes place at home, within the family. The specialists tend to be the oldest family members, and the listeners the youngest. Maud Long of Hot Springs, N.C., recalled how, around 1900, her mother told Märchen at night to soften the children’s labor: “after supper, all of us were gathered before the big open fire, my mother . . . sewing or carding . . . ; the older girls were helping . . . and all of us little ones would have a lap full . . . of wool out of which we must pick all the burrs . . . , and to keep our eyes open and our fingers busy and our hearts merry, my mother would tell these marvelous tales.” Märchen telling also sometimes accompanied outdoors work. North Carolinian Frank Proffitt Sr., for instance, used tales to both goad and reward his son’s labor as the two worked together in the fields. When they finished hoeing a row, the elder Proffitt would tell a tale; then when the two resumed working, the boy would hoe quickly so that he could hear another tale upon reaching the next row’s end.

By the mid-20th century, Märchen were probably best known in the bedroom, told one-on-one by elders to their children and grandchildren; such sessions were often inventively personalized. In the 1940s, for instance, Kentucky Märchen teller Sydney Farmer entertained her granddaughter Jane Muncy with nightly tales as the two shared the same bed. Though Sydney told Jack Tales, she changed the hero’s name to Merrywise to help her granddaughter identify with the hero and to subtly teach her that small, vulnerable people could triumph in life through wisdom and positive thinking. Sydney’s tales so influenced her granddaughter that Muncy—now an adult psychologist—retells them to her clients to foster the same resiliency and hope that her grandmother’s tales had given her.

African Americans in the South brought with them vast repertoires of tales from West Africa; they also learned many Märchen from Europeans. Through household situations in which black elders entertained white children, they passed on to European Americans many of their animal tales, most famously those revolving around the character Brer Rabbit. As a boy, white Georgia journalist Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908) learned many such tales from older blacks and later published them in his Uncle Remus books (named after a fictional slave who personified the oral tradition that Harris had tapped). These books brought Harris widespread fame, though readers soon recognized that their art lay in Harris’s ear rather than in his imagination.

Long before and long after Harris wrote, rich African American narrative traditions thrived in households and at communal work and play settings. The wealth of this repertoire is exemplified in J. D. Suggs (1887–1955), a storyteller who shared 175 tales with folklorist Richard Dorson in the 1950s. Born in Kosciusko, Miss., to sharecropper parents, Suggs learned his first tales from his father at home. As he grew, he traveled widely before settling down to raise a family in Arkansas and eventually moving north to Chicago and Michigan. Throughout his adult life, he shared his family tales (and ones he learned during his travels) with friends and coworkers. Suggs’s narrative style, like that of many African American storytellers, was dramatically expressive, marked by constant variations in pitch and rhythm as he impersonated story characters, imitated animal sounds, and interjected snatches of chants and song. He specialized in many genres, including animal tales, tall tales, witch legends, magic tales, traditional historical stories, and anecdotes revolving around the competition between a wily slave named John and his white master.

Since the mid-20th century, the normally small-scale art of storytelling has acquired an increasingly public and professional face through the formation of storytelling societies and festivals. The largest venue for such performances is the National Storytelling Festival—held every October in Jonesborough, Tenn., which explicitly seeks to bring together traditional and professional narrators. At Jonesborough, in public library storytelling hours throughout the South, and on “ghost tours” (regularly conducted in New Orleans, La.; San Antonio, Tex.; Savannah, Ga.; and many other southern cities) master storytellers attract crowds of mutual strangers to experience together, in new ways, the power of one of the world’s oldest art forms.

CARL LINDAHL

University of Houston

John A. Burrison, ed., Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South (1989); Richard M. Dorson, ed., American Negro Folktales (1967); Carl Lindahl, ed., American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (2004); William Bernard McCarthy, Cheryl Oxford, and Joseph Daniel Sobol, eds., Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Jack Tales and Their Tellers (1994); Leonard W. Roberts, ed., South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales (1955); Vance Randolph, We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks (1951); Joseph Daniel Sobol, The Storyteller’s Journey: An American Revival (1999).

Tennis

Lawn tennis in the South shares much of the same general history as golf. Lawn tennis originated in the United States in New York in the 1870s and soon spread through the Northeast, Middle West, and the Pacific Coast. The United States Tennis Association (USTA), founded in 1881, soon governed the sport of tennis. A few southern cities such as New Orleans promoted the sport, but it was not a popular one until well into the 20th century. It lost many of its aristocratic trappings in the 1920s and became a middle-class game. Tennis celebrities such as Big Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen became popular in the South as well as elsewhere. In the South the game was a country club sport, but the 1930s saw an increase in the building of public courts, as with the building of community golf courses.

Tennis did not lose its country club image until the 1950s and 1960s. The game became more popular in those years with the emergence of appealing young stars, television coverage of major tournaments, large money payoffs to tournament winners, and the establishment of an open system of competition between amateurs and professionals. The Southern Tennis Association, based in Norcross, Ga., is the largest of 17 regional sections of the USTA, with over 180,000 members in 2009. Major tournaments are now held in the South. In 1970 Texas millionaire Lamar Hunt financed World Championship Tennis, which sent professional players on tours around the world. Tennis can now be found as an activity at southern resorts, and it can be played on public courts in cities and small towns throughout the region. The South, however, has produced surprisingly few of the game’s great players. Chris Evert from Florida is one of those, winning 157 professional singles titles on a 1,309–146 won-lost record in her career from 1969 to 1989. Tennis has not drawn the attention of many southern writers, but Rita Mae Brown’s Sudden Death (1983) and Barry Hannah’s Tennis Handsome (1985) have tennis players as the central characters.

The black community supported a vibrant tennis culture in the days of Jim Crow social segregation, with the South at the center of a network of institutions and coaches that produced some of the game’s historic figures. The American Tennis Association is the oldest African American sports organization, founded in 1916 and holding its first national championships at Baltimore’s Druid Hills Park in August 1917. The organization now consists of member country clubs throughout the nation and the Caribbean, and it provided until recently the only courts where blacks could play tennis and compete for championships. Coaches, both professional and amateur, worked to develop talent. Walter Johnson, a physician in Lynchburg, Va., opened his home and backyard court to young black players every summer, helping to produce two of tennis’s greatest players, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe. Gibson, at age 23, was allowed to play in the 1950 U.S. championship, the first African American to do so, and she won the singles championship there in 1957. She would win five of the prestigious Grand Slam championships, including twice at Wimbledon. Ashe had an equally successful career, winning both the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Open championships in 1968. In an 11-year professional career cut short by an early death, Ashe won 33 singles titles, including defeating Jimmy Connors to win the singles championship at Wimbledon in 1975.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

E. Digby Balzell, Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar (1995); Will Grimsley, Tennis: Its History, People, and Events (1971); Cecil Harris and Larryette Lyle-Debose, Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters (2007).

Tourism

Tourist. The word evokes images of Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts, Instamatic cameras and sun-reddened skin, a clay-streaked station wagon, laden with luggage and sacks of Florida oranges. Those millions of wayfarers who hurdle along interstates to bake on sunny beaches and see Rock City pump billions into the southern economy each year.

Tourism has become as much a part of life for Americans as work in the week and church on Sunday. The modern burst of tourism began in the late 1940s. Veterans, who could not be kept down on the farm after they had seen the world during the war, earned their two weeks of vacation and hit the highways for recreation, relaxation, and entertainment. Nearly every family now marks days off its calendar for a vacation, even two or three a year. Despite oil shortages and the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, Americans winced at gasoline prices, dipped into savings, and pointed their cars and campers South.

A century and more before, the purpose of most travels in the South was for health. By the late 1700s travelers eased into hot springs baths to unlimber muscles. Modern-day resorts such as the Greenbrier in West Virginia and the Homestead in Virginia trace their origins to those times and still offer bathing facilities.

For more than a century, Carolinians who lived along the coast traveled to save their lives. Spring through fall, or “frost to frost,” they fled the malarial, soggy low country for the spice of mountain air. Hendersonville, N.C., is still called “Little Charleston in the Mountains,” and many of the summer cottages, dating back to the mid-1800s and handed down through the generations, still stand.

In the decades after the Civil War, northerners invaded the South again, but this time as tourists in a campaign for their health. The mineral waters of southern springs and the salubrious southern climate were touted for their curative benefits. Physicians prescribed winter vacations in towns like Thomas-ville, Ga., which once boasted 15 hotels, 25 boardinghouses, and 50 winter cottages.

From the late 19th century to the mid-20th, pleasure travel evolved from a privilege of a wealthy few to an affordable luxury for the average family. A growing economy was partly the reason, but so also was the increasing ease of transportation—from carriages on dirt roads to railroads to family cars on interstates.

Of all southern states, Florida best symbolizes the rise of tourism. To see Florida in the mid-1800s, when much of the state was still wilderness, travelers had to go by boat. Honeymooners took romantic excursions along the Suwannee River, the St. John’s, and the Oklawaha to Silver Springs. Often the land alongside was scented with orange blossoms in spring, and, at night, the light from burning pine knots played on the overhang of cypress and Spanish moss. By the 1890s railroads were skimming the shoreline of both coasts; Henry Flagler linked Jacksonville to the squat settlement of Miami, building alongside his railroad such palatial hotels as the Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine and the Breakers in Palm Beach.

Down Flagler’s railroad came the very rich. But along the increasing miles of paved highways came the families of average means that, in the flush times of the 1920s, could afford pleasure travel. They fashioned homemade campers on Model-T’s, ate store-bought food from tin cans, and camped beside the roads. These “tin-can tourists,” as Floridians called them, pioneered the major mode of travel of two decades later—the family car. In the exuberance of release from the Depression, and with a car in every garage, Americans joyously flooded the highways of the South.

With war boom babies in the back seat, they traveled to the beach in summer and the mountains in the fall. Quiet seaside villages like Myrtle Beach, S.C., and mountain towns like Gatlinburg, Tenn., grew into garish neon playgrounds. The family spent nights in tourist courts, stopped at roadside souvenir stands, visited alligator farms, toured Mammoth Cave, walked Civil War battlefields, and yes, saw Rock City. Later, such “attractions” as theme parks offered rides and Broadway-type entertainment in a milk-and-cookies family atmosphere.

Quickly, tourism became an industry with a manufacturing mentality to mass-produce. Kemmons Wilson of Memphis, founder of Holiday Inns, and other entrepreneurs stamped one motel after another from the same mold. Fast food franchises arched their signs above highways. Many of those motels and packaged food restaurants rise at exits of interstates that tie doorsteps to destinations, bypass towns, and hold the countryside at arm’s length. Now, in driving 800 interstate miles, travelers may sleep in the same room every night, eat the same hamburger for every meal, and never see a town.

Why and to where do tourists today go on vacation? One large segment of the population indicates that three main factors, excluding cost, determine vacation destinations. Readers of Southern Living magazine, certainly the epitome of the middle-class southerner, say they travel primarily for scenery. And to most, scenery means mountains and seashore. Second, they go where they will find good restaurants and lodging: to resort condominiums on barrier islands and to quiet country inns in the mountains. And third, they choose routes and destinations to see historical sites. Even on pleasure trips to fish, swim, play golf and tennis, shop, hike, and canoe, southerners will stop a time or two to pay homage to the past.

Tourists who walk the narrow streets of Charleston pour some $460 million annually into the local economy. About 1 million visitors each year walk the battlefield at Vicksburg, Miss., and stroll through the re-created city of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Through travel, southerners continue to learn of life of a century or two ago. In the 1930s garden club ladies in Natchez introduced a new genre of travel when it opened a few antebellum homes each spring to visitors. The name of such tours—pilgrimage—is appropriate for southerners’ reverence of the past.

Many historic homes are open for lodging as well as tours, so guests may dream they dwelt in marble halls. At preserved villages like Old Salem in Winston-Salem, N.C., visitors watch costumed docents work at the crafts and cookery of two centuries ago. The Mississippi Museum of Agriculture and Forestry in Jackson moved an entire 100-year-old farm to its premises, where southerners hear words that have almost vanished from the daily vocabulary: singletree, laying-by time, bust the middles. Workers at the farm even plant a tiny patch of cotton and let the visitor try his or her hand at picking.

Historically, tourism for African Americans was a complex process. Uncomfortable and unhealthy Jim Crow railroad cars hardly encouraged travel over long distances. Automobiles gave more privacy and security, but difficulties in finding places to eat and sleep complicated touring. Blacks nonetheless developed particular travel locations, such as black-only beaches. With desegregation of the South’s public facilities in the 1960s and a growing commercialization of black history, tourism among blacks visiting southern tourist destinations increased. Alabama’s Black Heritage (1983) was a pioneering effort to promote African American heritage in the South, and other states and cities have targeted black tourists to heritage tourism sites.

GARY D. FORD

Southern Living

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2006); Ruth Camblos and Virginia Winger, Shopping Round the Mountains (1973); Charleston Trident Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Profile, 1982–83; John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (1985); Jeffrey Limerick, Nancy Ferguson, and Richard Oliver, America’s Grand Resort Hotels (1979); Edward A. Mueller, Steamboating on the St. John’s, 1830–1885 (1980); Anthony J. Stanonis, ed., Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (2008); Richard Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (2003); Southern Living (December 1983, April 1984); Travel Survey of Southern Living Subscribers (1984).

Tourism, Automobile

The automobile represents many ideals of American culture such as individual freedom, technological dominance, and the pursuit of happiness, and the American South has long been a popular destination for many on the road and on the move. The temperate climate of the region, in addition to the lure of sandy white beaches and the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains, made automobile tourism in the South a popular recreational activity. Tourism is one of the top three economic forces in every state that constituted the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. During the modern era, the South has experienced many changes brought about by the increased mobility and cultural exchange facilitated by automobile tourism. The influx of travelers and retirees to the region has caused a demographic and cultural shift.

Before the 20th century, the wealthy were the only ones able to engage in recreational travel. Many northern industrialists enjoyed the mild climate and healing waters—both oceans and hot springs—of the South. Many visited the region to vacation, build homes, and, perhaps late in life, migrate south for retirement. Northern capitalists J. P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, and Marshal Field all built elaborate homes and a country club on the once exclusive Jekyll Island in Georgia. The bucolic landscape and temperate climate of the South made the region especially alluring. Southern land was also inexpensive and largely undeveloped in the 19th century. As time went on, vacationing became a more accessible and common activity for all Americans.

When Henry Ford began to mass-produce the Model T in 1908, the first affordable automobiles began to open tourism to the average American. Yet the South left much to be desired in developed roads and infrastructure. The accessibility of the automobile combined with the Good Roads Movement to further democratize southern tourism. With the construction of the National Highway, connecting New York City to Atlanta, in 1909 and the Capital Highway, stretching from D.C. to Atlanta, in 1910 the North-South tourist trade was burgeoning. A few years later, in 1914, Carl Fisher was instrumental in developing the Dixie Highway, which connected Michigan to Fischer’s developing resorts in Miami Beach, Fla. The Dixie Highway was developed with an eastern and a western route to maximize the tourist sites and towns along the way.

The trajectory of roads could make or break small communities that depended on tourist dollars. Following the development of the 1926 National Highway System, many new roads led to roadside attractions such as auto-camps, filling stations, and a plethora of roadside stands selling various wares. Southern attractions have long played up the region’s rich history, especially the Revolution and the Civil War. The biggest monument to the Confederacy began in 1915 when the United Daughters of the Confederacy started planning a bas-relief carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and “Stonewall” Jackson on Stone Mountain in Georgia. The mountain is also infamous for being the site of the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. In the 1920s, Gutzon Borglum began the carving only to leave after disagreements with managers. The next artist destroyed Borglum’s beginnings, and the project was not completed until the early 1970s. Today, Stone Mountain State Park draws many tourists. Stone Mountain is a tourist attraction that possesses both a complicated history and the allure of natural beauty and recreation.

One of the major reasons to pack the kids in the car was to see the country and experience different places. With all of the families on the road with more money and increased leisure time in the postwar era, there was a need for various roadside attractions. One of the most recognizable sites along the southern roadways is the yellow and red sign advertising Stuckey’s pecan shop and roadside stand. Williamson Sylvester Stuckey went into the pecan business just as the southern roadside trade was booming. Stuckey is representative of many people who went into one business and ended up diversifying to take advantage of all those cars on the road needing gas and the tourists craving food and cheap souvenirs.

In addition to natural attractions such as beaches and mountains, the early era of automobile tourism also added destination tourism attractions such as Kentucky’s Wigwam Village, South Carolina’s South of the Border, Florida’s Cypress Gardens, the resort of Gatlinburg, Tenn., and Arkansas’s Dogpatch USA, just to name a few. Walt Disney World, located in Orlando, Fla., opened in 1971 and today is the nation’s largest and most popular example of destination tourism. The South has always offered cultural and heritage tourism spanning from Colonial Williamsburg, to Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, to the federal funding of a Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor to preserve the distinctive African American culture along the southeastern coast.

Early in the 20th century, auto camping took the form of “gypsying” and engaged the American values of independence and self-reliance. Later, as a growing consumer society evolved and the democratization of travel and leisure ensued, the roadside became a largely tame, commercialized, and homogenized landscape. There was a lull in the development of automobile tourism during the Great Depression and both world wars. Following World War II, a booming postwar economy and consumer culture led to an extensive expansion of tourism. In 1956 Eisenhower’s push to develop a transportation system and the passage of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways helped both to defend the country against foreign threats and to provide better transportation for its citizens. The development of good roads often led to sunny seaside resorts and campy roadside attractions as well as national defense. The dominance of high-speed superhighways in the 1970s served to destroy local color as well as decimate old neighborhoods and businesses. The places and people left behind were often poor and black, such as in Overtown, an African American community in Miami that was displaced by the building of Interstate 395. The interstate led to a more homogenized roadside culture with chain motels, gas stations, and restaurants. However, the South had developed a reputation for its distinctive regional flair and southern hospitality even in the face of a mundane commercial roadside.

Southerners are known for the emphasis they place on hospitality and recreation. The mythologized “southern hospitality” of the region’s inhabitants is complicated by its hostility toward outsiders and history of racism. The influx of automobile tourism, which drew snowbirds and a more geographically diverse citizenry, has served to change a region that has often been hostile toward change. Tourism can lead to a more complex and open South; however, it also can lead to overdevelopment of the region’s natural resources and the dominance of developers and large corporations that care little for regional flavor and local color. Tourism has often been seen as a double-edged sword because of the complexity of the positive and negative repercussions. Appealing to outsiders has often led to the proliferation of misconceptions and stereotypes about the South, such as the ignorant Hillbilly or the myth of the Lost Cause and idyllic antebellum South.

From the autocamps of the 1930s to the chain hotels of today, the South has sold itself as a land of southern hospitality, old-time charm, and beautiful landscapes. Local images and historical memory have often conformed to the expectations of tourists. The hospitality industry in the South was primarily segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 desegregated public accommodations. Southern leisure culture still struggles with its legacy of segregation and racism. The automobile leveled class differences in America, and it also potentially offered more freedom to African Americans to travel undisturbed by Jim Crow segregation. However, automobile travel could be a dangerous gamble for African Americans traveling through the South. From the 1930s until the end of the 1950s travel guidebooks, such as The Negro Motorist Greenbook and Travelguide, provided African Americans with suggestions for “vacation and recreation without humiliation.” However, “driving while black” could be a major problem in the South. For example, in 1948 Robert Mallard was attacked and killed by a Georgia mob for simply being a prosperous black man with a nice car. In the face of southern racism, guidebooks and word of mouth led to the development of strong black communities and businesses based in recreation. Beaches for African Americans, such as Florida’s American Beach and South Carolina’s Atlantic Beach, survive today. Many key moments in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s centered on the mobility of African Americans, such as Rosa Parks’s protest against sitting in the back of a bus and the “Freedom Rides” that civil rights organizations undertook during the period. Southern automobile tourism serves as one battlefield for the meaning of modern citizenship, mobility, and freedom.

Automobile travel in the South deals with the serious nature of race relations and the frivolous aspects of campy roadside attractions. The act of driving to or through the South has certainly changed in the 21st century. While regions of the United States are much more connected today, there are still signs of a distinctive southern culture to be found while touring the American South.

NICOLE KING

University of Maryland at Baltimore County

Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (1979); Tim Hollis, Dixie before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun (1999); David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds., The Automobile and American Culture (1980); C. Brenden Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword (2007); Cotton Seiler, American Quarterly (December 2006); Claudette Stager and Martha Carver, eds., Looking beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture (2006); Richard Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (2003).

Tourism, Culinary

In 1936 Kentuckian Duncan Hines published the country’s first restaurant guide, Adventures in Good Eating. In the introduction to the book, Hines explained that his “interest in wayside inns is not the expression of a gourmand’s greedy appetite for fine foods but the result of a recreational impulse to do something ‘different.’” With that declaration, one could argue, culinary tourism was born.

Culinary tourism is the search for vernacular eating and drinking experiences that are specific to place. Folklorist Lucy Long describes culinary tourism as the “intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other—participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style not one’s own.” Culturally, the concept has its roots in the development of automobile travel and the expansion of personal eating experiences outside the home. Once the Model-T began bouncing down the dirt roads of the South, drive-ins and roadside cafés sprang up to greet them, showcasing local and regional foods and growing in popularity as travelers were exposed to new recipes and ingredients.

Following the South’s evolution of restaurants, and the later notion that individual cities such as New Orleans, Charleston, Memphis, and San Antonio (to name just a few) were culinary destinations, came the development of localized food festivals. Initially established to recognize a seasonal harvest or event, food festivals have grown into grand celebrations of a wide variety of southern foods and culinary traditions. One of the South’s oldest food festivals is the Alabama Peanut Festival in Dothan, which began in 1938. Today, it is the nation’s largest peanut festival, bringing more than 150,000 people annually to this small Alabama town for the 10-day event. The community of Breaux Bridge, La., started its Crawfish Festival in 1960, one year after the Louisiana Legislature named Breaux Bridge the Crawfish Capital of the World. These festivals, which began as simple community gatherings, have now grown into destination events, bringing people from all over the country to experience localized food traditions, putting iconic southern foods on the national stage.

New Orleans might be considered the epicenter of culinary tourism in the South. Celebrated for its multicultural heritage, the city is a mélange of cultural traditions—jazz, Mardi Gras, and St. Joseph’s Day, to name a few—as well as culinary traditions unique to the area, and New Orleans has long been a specific destination for unique food experiences. There is hardly a tourist who has not visited the Crescent City without having a beignet or a bowl of gumbo, making New Orleans the perfect illustration of the relationship that culinary tourism has to cultural tourism. The two are inextricably combined.

In 1984 writer John Egerton traveled through 11 states to explore the idea that food is one of the most significant elements of southern culture. Three years later he compiled his findings in the seminal work Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. Egerton’s book was an early affirmation that “the traditional food and drink of people in the South—and the rituals surrounding their consumption of it—constitute the most defining, uniting, and enduring manifestation of the region’s culture.” Southern Food helped catalyze the food-ways scholarship movement, which started gaining both popularity and validation in the 1990s.

In 1999 the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), based at the University of Mississippi, produced the Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail, a multifaceted online project that includes oral history interviews with tamale makers, essays that put hot tamales in a greater cultural context, and an interactive map. The SFA followed the Tamale Trail with three more culinary trails: Boudin, Gumbo, and Barbecue. The success or impact of these documentary projects cannot be measured, but their existence is certainly evidence that there is a need—and an audience—for resources that identify, illuminate, and support culinary tourism in the region.

The rise of travel- and food-related television shows has also spurred an interest in culinary tourism. The Food Network, founded in 1993, has capitalized on travel-themed programs that introduce viewers to people, places, and foods that they might not otherwise encounter. Alton Brown’s Food Network series “Feasting on Asphalt,” which premiered in 2006, follows Brown across the country as he seeks out small, family-owned establishments serving honest, local food. Cooking shows that feature southern chefs also offer inspiration for culinary tourism, because restaurants are also connected to many of the personalities who host such programs, such as Emeril Lagasse of New Orleans and Paula Deen of Savannah. Fans of their shows seek out a deeper connection with them and their food through the experience of eating at their establishments. The Food Network also features the series “All American Festivals,” which celebrates regionalism through food, taking viewers across the country to get a taste of events such as the Grit Festival in Warwick, Ga., and the Cornbread Festival in Pittsburg, Tenn. And while one cannot be a culinary tourist from his or her couch, these kinds of shows can certainly inspire culinary travel.

Road guides written in the same vein as what Duncan Hines pioneered in the 1930s have experienced a resurgence in the past few decades, thus inspiring a new breed of culinary tourist. Calvin Trillin’s American Fried (1974) and the first edition of Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood (1977), two books that celebrate vernacular food across America, were contemporary precursors to the more specialized regional food guides that were to follow. In 2000 food writer and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, John T. Edge, focused on the Deep South, publishing Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South, a compendium of information on restaurants and roadside cafés throughout the region. Much more than a collection of entries on where to find the best fried chicken or crispiest catfish, Southern Belly profiles the history of establishments from Arkansas to Virginia and the people who run them. This elevation of food as seen through a historical and cultural context is explored on a more subregional level in Fred Sauceman’s three-volume work, The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, from Bright Hope to Frog Level. Focusing on the foodways of southern Appalachia, Sauceman offers colorful stories about the traditional foods of the area and the people behind the recipes.

It is not just restaurants and festivals that inspire people to hit the road. The greater awareness of and appreciation for artisanal producers has influenced culinary tourism in the region as well. Small, craft-oriented businesses such as Sweet Grass Dairy, producer of artisanal cow and goat cheeses in Thomas-ville, Ga., make items that highlight local foods and ingredients, celebrate generations-old production techniques, and are usually quick to open their doors for visitors.

In 2007 the Travel Industry Association published a report that 27 million travelers, or 17 percent of American leisure travelers, have engaged in culinary tourism since 2004. This statistic is an illustration of the growth of culinary tourism within the industry, as well as an effort to try to capitalize on its popularity. Many communities now showcase local food products, festivals, and culinary histories to entice visitors, with great results.

AMY EVANS STREETER

University of Mississippi

Rodger Lyle Brown, Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture of Festivals in the American South (1997); John T. Edge, Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South (2007); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1993); Louis Hatchett, Duncan Hines: The Man behind the Cake Mix (2001); Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1936); Lucy Long, Culinary Tourism (2003); Fred Sauceman, The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, from Bright Hope to Frog Level (2006); Jane Stern and Michael Stern, Roadfood (1977); Calvin Trillin, American Fried (1974).

Tourism, Cultural

Cultural tourism makes use of the South’s history and cultural activities to attract visitors. Although tourists visit the region’s natural attractions, commercial amusement and theme parks, and shopping venues, they also come to experience preserved aspects of the South’s dramatic past and to enjoy its cultural expressions. State and local tourism boards increasingly target cultural, or heritage, tourism in attracting visitors, preparing special brochures, maps, timelines, Web sites, and other features to highlight cultural attractions. Although southern cultural tourism before the 1970s stressed white heritage and presented black culture in only stereotypical ways, contemporary tourist agencies are making special efforts to attract African American tourists, and in the process they contribute to reimagining southern culture as a black-white biracial culture.

Southern tourism increased dramatically in the 1920s, thanks to better roads south, a relatively prosperous national economy, and a self-conscious appreciation of heritage among middle- and upper-class white southerners who wanted to preserve architectural and other material features with historical significance. These efforts often drew from existing romantic imagery of the South. Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, tourism efforts produced notable defining activities in the region. The Natchez Garden Club, for example, began the Spring Pilgrimage in 1932, attracting 1,500 visitors from 37 states for tours of 22 of the city’s historic homes. The Pilgrimage also had a barbecue, a cotillion at the Natchez Hotel, a parade with an Azalea Queen and a Japonia King, and a “historical pageant.” Renamed the Confederate Pageant, the latter became a key event of the Pilgrimage, presenting a vision of a refined white society and blacks singing plantation songs.

Charleston’s Azalea Festival began two years after the Natchez Pilgrimage, in 1934, promoted by Mayor Burnett Rhett Maybank and utilizing the city’s cultural resources and civic leadership. Costumed historical pageants had been added by the late 1930s, such as an Old South medieval-styled lancing tournament and the reenactment of a pirate’s hanging. The Preservation Society gave house and plantation tours, while black singers performed spirituals in “Plantation Echoes” and “negro street criers” competed. The Charleston Museum offered a rice-husking demonstration by black field hands who sang old work songs. The scale of the Azalea Festival’s use of cultural, as well as environmental, features was an innovation, and its success inspired other communities across the region to utilize local resources and tie them to overarching southern mythology to attract tourists. Elite white Charlestonians succeeded in creating a marketable past, one that involved blacks in stereotypical ways. Brochures, advertisements, and souvenirs were marketed, highlighting Charleston’s connections to the Lowcountry. Local boosterism and public spectacle connected this tourism effort to economic development and modern mass culture’s consumerism, important models for the future.

White elites profited the most from these tourism efforts in Natchez, Charleston, and other cities in the early and mid-20th century. They gained new sources of wealth and prestige, buttressing the all-important role of respectability and gentility in the southern social system. These events were community activities that brought tourists and made jobs. Black street vendors, taxi drivers, café waitresses, hotel clerks, antique dealers, and other working-class people also benefited from these tourism efforts.

In the decades since these early tourism efforts, many southern locales, sites, institutions, and cultural experiences have been used to attract tourists. The Cherokee Reservation in western North Carolina presents Indians as hawkers for commercial goods on the street, dressed in Plains Indian garb not native to the Southeast; yet one can also learn from educational exhibits and firsthand experience about Cherokee heritage. The French Quarter in New Orleans is highly commercialized yet one can hear jazz and eat Creole and Cajun food while sitting in a carefully maintained historical district. Museums, music festivals, arts and crafts fairs, and countless other cultural experiences can be marketed as tourist attractions.

The Civil War is a key cultural tourism site in the South, given that most of the war’s fighting took place in the region, leaving a landscape legacy of battlefields and related sites. The Civil War Trust’s book Civil War Sites: Official Guide to Battlefields, Monuments, and More offers information on more than 600 sites in 32 states, with sites selected for historical significance and educational opportunities afforded by them. Many states organize Civil War tours in the forms of “trails” that provide linked information making it easier for tourists to visit many battle locations. The Tennessee Historical Commission sponsors one of the largest such efforts, the Tennessee Civil War Heritage Trail, with a brochure called A Path Divided, which gives information on 62 sites divided into the categories of Invasion by River, Fight for West Tennessee, Contest for Middle Tennessee, East Tennessee Mountain War, and Hood’s Tennessee Campaign. As the commission’s Web site notes, the state’s Civil War heritage is in “grave danger,” as many sites are “fragile and vulnerable to damage.” The goal of the brochure is “to help visitors to discover Tennessee’s rich Civil War past and to understand better the convictions of the men and women who fought in it.”

African American heritage has also become a major part of southern tourism efforts. Alabama led the way with its 1983 brochure promoting black heritage sites in the state. Governor George C. Wallace saw the attention to black sites as a sign of the state’s aspirations toward racial reconciliation and a new image of Alabama. Civil rights museums and locales have been especially effective in attracting tourists. The King National Historic Site in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn District attracts more than a million visitors a years, and civil rights museums are now found in at least a dozen southern cities, including Savannah, Selma, Memphis, and Birmingham. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute took 13 years to build and cost $12 million. It is part of a civil rights district in Birmingham that includes the Kelly Ingram Park and the 16th Street Baptist Church, bombed in 1963. Critics see the civil rights museums as sometimes presenting a heroic view of the movement that stresses leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. at the expense of stories of more mundane grass-roots activism, but the Birmingham Institute presents its story to 100,000 visitors a year and offers exhibitions and educational activities that engage local activists like Fred Shuttlesworth as well as King.

Natchez, meanwhile, is also promoting black tourism in its Pilgrimage activities, with its Southern Road to Freedom staged in the First Presbyterian Church. It celebrates the story of Ibrahima, a slave brought to Natchez in the late 18th century who eventually gained his freedom and went back to Africa. The drama also highlights 1861 as a key year, as the Confederate Pageant does, but in this case the story of black Natchez emphasizes the beginning of the Civil War as a dividing line between oppression and the coming of freedom. The black and white pageants present a segregated history, though, with audiences often segregated as well. Natchez Pilgrimage lasts four weeks, attracts 100,000 tourists a year, and generates 1.5 million dollars a year.

Finally, in discussing examples of cultural tourism, one should mention the state of Mississippi’s embrace of blues music. The Mississippi legislature created the Mississippi Blues Commission in 2004 to oversee efforts to promote and preserve the blues. It has 18 appointed commissioners, representing major organizations and geographic/political regions in the state that support blues initiatives. Its major activity has been support for a Mississippi Blues Trail consisting of sites that honor people, places, organizations, and events that have been important in blues history. “Welcome to the Mississippi Blues Trail,” says the Web site devoted to it, “your unforgettable journey into the land that spawned the single most important root source of modern popular music.” The site assures readers that sites “run the gamut from city streets to cotton fields, train depots to cemeteries, and clubs to shrines.” Trail markers are scattered across the state, but the majority of them are in the Delta. Area promotions link the Blues Trail to such other tourist attractions as golf courses, hotels, and restaurants with “down-home southern cooking.” The B. B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center opened in September 2008, a state-of-the-art museum with exhibitions and educational programming that aim to “build bridges between the community and the world while preserving the rich cultural and musical heritage of the Mississippi Delta.”

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005); Steven Hoelscher, in Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism, ed. Celeste Ray (2003); Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006); Anthony J. Stanonis, ed., Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (2008); Richard Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (2003); Tennessee Historical Commission, www.tn.gov/environment/history/path.divided/home.shtml; Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (2005).

Traveling Shows

A visit from a traveling show was a major event in the life of the southern small town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Colorfully decorated wagons and, later, trucks drove slowly through towns, with jugglers and acrobats drawing children and their parents out of their homes and into a happy procession of people anticipating fun at the show grounds. The coming of traveling shows signaled an unusual period of gaiety, when normal moral restrictions might be loosened and humdrum daily life enlivened. Most of these shows flourished from the end of the Civil War to World War I. After World War I grass-roots show business in the South continued to be dynamic, providing the training and experiences for many performers and businessmen in entertainment industries such as country music, jazz, the blues, and gospel. In addition to the circuses, carnivals, Wild West shows, and minstrels that had earlier become staples, there were tent shows, burlesque houses, magicians, freak shows, vaudeville bills, aerial daredevils, water circuses, and medicine shows.

The American circus, with its animal and clown shows, had antecedents in antiquity, but the real beginnings of the modern circus were in England in the mid-1700s. Animal trainers, acrobats, jugglers, and itinerant actors traveled through the American colonies, but the first recorded appearance of the circus in America was in 1791. Early circuses were city shows, and the predominantly rural South had less exposure than the North to circuses in the antebellum era, although circuses did appear along the lower Mississippi River in the 1820s. The basic pattern of the circus was established by the 1850s—circus parades to draw crowds, exhibitions under canvas walls or tents, trained animals, clowns, acrobats and aerialists, jugglers, ventriloquists, and freak shows. Multiple rings were introduced in the 1870s. The golden age of the circus was from 1870 to 1914. Phineas T. Barnum, George F. Bailey, W. C. Coup, and the Ringling brothers were leading circus entrepreneurs. In 1918 a merger brought the appearance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. As circus audiences became larger in the early 20th century, the circus shows became more elaborate. The Wild West show became part of the event, and stages and rings were added, more dangerous animal acts were encouraged, and money was poured into acts, costumes, and pageants.

Circus owners adapted to the South by advertising their shows as classical and biblical, because they featured chariot races and religious depictions. The most popular circuses touring the South were John Robinson’s Circus and Menagerie, W. C. Coup’s Monster Shows, and the Grand New Orleans Menagerie and Circus (which had a Mademoiselle Eugene marching ahead of lions and tigers down southern streets to stir interest). In the 1890s almost 40 groups annually toured the region, from April to December, some of them touring only the South. Southerners turned out in large numbers for the circus, with rural people coming into town ahead of the circus in order to camp in or under wagons, watch the circus set up, and view the circus parade and opening ceremonies. Excursion trains brought thousands of people to the cities where the largest circuses were held. The appeal of the circus was universal, but the poor and children were its most fervent enthusiasts. Blacks and whites sat on opposite sides of the same tent. Gamblers and pickpockets frequently accompanied the circus, taking advantage of the rural folk coming out for the show, and the circus always seemed to bring out drinking and fighting. Community and religious leaders objected to them.

Only a dozen or so circuses continue to tour the nation today, but attendance at these is still large. Florida has served as the winter quarters for the Ringling Brothers circus, and Florida State University has become a prominent circus center because of the amateur productions on campus.

The carnival was another traveling show, closely related to the circus. “Pleasure gardens,” modeled on London’s Vauxhall and Ranelagh, were forerunners of carnivals, appearing in North America near the time of the American Revolution, offering the chance for visitors to stroll, eat, and drink. By the turn of the 20th century, trolley parks had emerged in eastern cities offering more exciting amusements. The beginnings of the American carnival are usually dated from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which included outdoor rides, fun houses, and games of chance. Coney Island opened the same year, but even before this, in the 1880s, the traditional state fairs had begun to set aside special areas for outdoor amusements.

Carnivals traveled the South, with their heyday between the world wars. Elaborate shows came to bigger cities, but smaller affairs hit the region’s more typical small towns. They included set features: machine rides such as the Ferris wheel, roller coaster, and tunnel of love; the midway featuring food (such as popcorn, cotton candy, corn dogs, and caramel candy), shooting arcades, gypsy fortune tellers; the freak shows (featuring the Fat Lady, Tattooed Man, or midgets); and the girlie shows with risqué strippers. Gamblers, hustlers, and pickpockets of all sorts frequently accompanied the traveling carnival, as well as the circus. Harry Crews’s article “Carny,” which appeared in Blood and Grits (1979), portrays life on the road for carnival workers in the South; he discusses the distinctive vocabulary of “carny talk” and the social hierarchy among the carnival workers. Those who set up shows rank at the bottom of this society; the hustlers who run the working games rank higher; the “patch man,” who exists to patch over conflicts that emerge within the carnival community and between it and the outside world, ranks still higher. Crews stresses that the farther south the carnival went, the rougher the shows were; a strip show that was relatively tame in Pennsylvania could be gross in Georgia.

The medicine show was a popular aspect of southern entertainment after the Civil War. During the fall, especially, when southern farmers had whatever money they would have during the year to spend, traveling salesmen of cheap patent medicines would appear. Few of these were of much value, as they were typically filled with alcohol or were strong purgatives that usually caused more illness than they cured. To attract attention, medicine salesmen would employ singers, such as the bluesman Sonny Terry or country singer Jimmie Rodgers (who sometimes worked in blackface), to put on a “medicine show” that would draw people together, creating an audience for the salesman to hawk his goods. In normally quiet southern towns and rural areas, this entertainment, no matter how poor in quality, was worth listening to, and people willingly came out to hear it. Performers would pass out Congo oil, liniments, or similar remedies designed to cure whatever ailed anyone with money in hand. Colorful pitchmen with names such as Joe “Fine Arts” Hanks, the Canadian Kid, Doc Zip Hibler, Mad Cody Fleming, Widow Rollins, and Population Charlie were hustlers who went back and forth between medicine shows, carnivals, tent shows, and other forms of grass-roots show business.

The road company theater was another example of the traveling show in the South. Before the Civil War, permanent theaters had existed in southern cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond, many of them presenting road show spectaculars featuring exciting stage activities, musical performances, Shakespeare and other dramatic fare, and melodrama. After the war, this continued, with new auditoriums and opera houses appearing. In Atlanta, the 400-seat Davis Hall was built in 1865 as an essential part of the rebuilding of the city. Dallas erected its first opera house in 1872. The new theaters and opera houses were elaborately decorated with balustraded verandas, crimson velvet wall hangings, glass chandeliers, and several tiers of seats for those of different social classes. Blacks and prostitutes were generally restricted to the highest galleries.

In 1869–70 the Wilmington, N.C., theater presented 50 evenings of entertainment, including Shakespearean plays, magicians, and Italian opera. Established theaters in cities presented the best American and European performers and plays, but in smaller places the offerings were less ambitious. The average theatergoer seemed to prefer the extravagant and sentimental, but originality was valued little until after World War I. Italian touring companies performed Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and Mignon, among others; Shakespeare continued to be a favorite; and less uplifting shows, especially melodramas with such titles as Ten Nights in a Bar Room and The Drunkard, and spectacles with mechanical thrills, as in the chariot race in Ben Hur and the railroad crossing the stage in Under the Gas Lights, were also popular. Stock companies presenting these programs typically were in a town for a week or so, offering different shows daily. By the 1880s a new star system emerged, leading to shows centered on a celebrity performer giving a single show. Broadway shows from New York—which was the source for many of these performances throughout the period—also went on the road in the early 20th century.

A special aspect of the touring theater was the tent show. The first theater company to tour under canvas was an Illinois group in 1855, and the tent show continued to be mainly a midwestern and southern phenomenon even after permanent theaters proliferated in towns. Rural and small-town audiences seemed especially fond of these shows and continued to support them well into the 20th century. The average tent could hold almost 1,500 people. The tent show presented family-oriented dramatic performances, with three-act plays and specialty entertainers. They were clean shows, avoiding the kind of suggestive material in carnivals and vaudeville. After the movies became popular, the tent shows boasted of offering “a decent alternative to epics, orgies, sex, and horror.” Traveling “rep” groups, with such names as Harley Sadler’s Own, the Ted North Players, and Swain’s Dramatic Show, played a town for three days to a week, offering their repertoire of the six to nine plays a season they had prepared. Usually presenting comedies, they also tried to include at least one serious play, sometimes an adaptation of a popular novel such as The Virginian, The Trail of the Lonesome Pines, or The Shepherd of the Hills.

The tent shows brought vaudeville to the South. It was not urban entertainment, as in the North, but rather performances designed to appeal to small-town folk. They offered popular singers such as Jimmie Rodgers, who served his apprenticeship in the 1920s in the traveling shows. Black blues singers also performed in this context, as did novelty bands such as Happy Cook’s Kentucky Buddies. Impresarios such as W. T. Swain, known as Colonel Swain or “Old Double Eyes” to some who had done business with him, worked the South. Described by Nolan Porterfield as “sort of a cross between P. T. Barnum, William Randolph Hearst, and a snake-oil salesman,” Swain typically wore a black suit, set off by a white bow tie and his silver gray hair. For four decades he was a major figure in the traveling theater of the mid-South and Southwest. Colonel Tom Parker, who eventually struck pay dirt as manager of Elvis Presley, was another typical tent show manager.

Almost 400 tent-show companies traveled the nation in 1925, mostly in the Midwest and South, visiting 16,000 communities and entertaining 76.8 million people. The Great Depression hit the shows hard, and eventually the competition from radio and television led to their decline. In the 1950s, 30 companies still toured under canvas, but by 1968 only 3 remained.

The tent road show contributed a popular character to show business lore and to regional imagery—Toby. He was the country bumpkin, a humorous figure who appeared in these shows around 1910. One manager, Fred Wilson, built the character into his shows and others copied him, until rural and small-town audiences knew him and looked forward to the character’s appearance. A rustic, seemingly backward man, Toby would outwit and confuse the city slickers who tried to take advantage of him. Awkward, bumptious, but shrewd and full of common sense, Toby embodied the southern rural self-imagery of the Arkansas traveler. The character was adapted to different regions—in the Midwest, he was simply a rural hayseed; in the South, a hillbilly from the mountains; in Texas, he was a cowboy. By 1916 some 200 actors specializing in Toby, and always appearing the same—red-haired, freckled, with blacked-out tooth and farm clothes—traveled the circuit.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

George L. Chindahl, History of the Circus in America (1959); Joseph Csida and June Bundy Csida, American Entertainment: A Unique History of Popular Show Business (1978); John E. DiMeglio, Vaudeville U.S.A. (1973); Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (1973); Joe McKennon, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival (1972); Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up: An Illustrated History of the American Medicine Show (1976); Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (1970); Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (1979); Gregory J. Renoff, The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820–1930 (2008); William L. Slout, Theatre in a Tent: The Development of Provincial Entertainment (1972); Marcello Truzzi, Journal of Popular Culture (Winter 1972); Don B. Wilmeth, American and English Popular Entertainment: A Guide to Information Sources (1980), in Concise Histories of American Popular Culture, ed. M. Thomas Inge (1982).

Two Stepping

Two stepping is the basic form of partner dancing done within country fan culture. The dance, often called the Texas Two Step, has been part of southern (and especially southwestern) culture for many decades and is an integral part of honky-tonk rituals for fans both young and old. In 1978 New York Times writer William K. Stevens described it as a “controlled, old-fashioned country dance of considerable grace and elegance”; today, however, it is more often viewed as a marker of downhome or redneck identity, although the version of it performed in country dance competitions is a flashy, polished, and fast-moving display of technical prowess, always with boots and cowboy hat present.

The two step derives from a popular 19th-century “polite” social dance of the same name, although that one used a different basic pattern. That 19th-century two step was replaced in the 1910s by a new, trendier social dance called the foxtrot, named for its originator, vaudevillian Harry Fox. Dance teachers distilled Fox’s jaunty performance into a set of standardized steps, the most basic of which alternated two glide steps with two quick, trotting steps in a pattern of “slow-slow-quick-quick.” By the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the West, Southwest, and Acadian regions—where partner dancing was an integral part of each community’s social fabric—the foxtrot was so widely adopted that even where it was not referred to by name, its rhythms became the default social dance. As one lifelong country fan and dancer recently recalled, “Back then, it was just dancing. I guess it’s what we call a two step today, but we just called it ‘dancing.’” When the term “two step” resurfaced in country music and culture, it was applied to the most common style of dancing at the time—a simplified foxtrot—thereby creating the new definition of the two step as it is now done.

Between World War II and 1980, country fans in different regions maintained different dance traditions. Leon McAuliffe, longtime steel guitar player for the legendary western swing band Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys, explained: “[West of the Mississippi] we played for dancing. East of the Mississippi they played a show . . . just for people to sit and listen.” Although there was some two stepping in the Southeast during those years, the widespread adoption of the practice across the region did not occur until 1980, when the movie Urban Cowboy brought the dance and its native dance hall environs to rural and urban communities all across the country. The film’s featured two-step sequences launched a fad that brought waves of instructional books and videos to a newfound market of country nightclub goers. Since that film, the term “two step” and the dance have become a synecdoche for country music and honky-tonks in general.

The basic form of the dance is done by partners in closed dance position, moving counterclockwise around the dance floor. In most country nightclubs, two-step songs make up approximately a third of the music played during a typical evening, while the rest is a combination of waltzes, polkas, line dances, and regional favorites such as the Cotton-Eyed Joe and Schottische. Two-step songs, which are usually in duple meter (2/4 or 2/2 time), are found in both traditional honky-tonk styles and pop-crossover styles of country music, as well as in Cajun music. The tempo of the dance has varied historically, but the current officially sanctioned tempo, according to the United Country and Western Dance Council, is 176 to 200 beats per minute, where each beat is implicitly defined as one quarter of a musical measure. Each “slow” step within the basic pattern occupies two beats, and each “quick” step occupies one beat, so the basic pattern of the dance (“slow-slow-quick-quick”) requires one and a half measures of music. This phrase overlap—where the length of the dance pattern and the musical measures do not match—creates interesting rhythmic interactions between the music and the dancers’ movements.

There are an increasing number of two-step variants danced in different communities. Many dancers who enter two-step competitions prefer to begin the dance with the “quick-quick” steps. In the thriving gay country dance scene, dancers sometimes modify the dance so that both leader and follower face the same direction, standing front to back, in what is called the shadow. In some regions, the basic rhythm of the two step is adjusted to a syncopated pattern. In others, such as Oklahoma, two step is replaced by a local variant known as shuffle (sometimes called triple-two), which substitutes a step-together-step pattern (a triple step) for each of the slow steps.

One of the earliest references to the dance in country song lyrics appears in Bob Wills’s “New Spanish Two Step,” an extremely popular country hit in 1946. In subsequent decades, country singers have frequently mentioned the dance as a way of affirming their authentic connection to country music traditions. George Strait sang “It’s dance time in Texas where the wine and music flows / we’ll do that Texas two step and that old Cotton-Eyed Joe” (“Dance Time in Texas”) in 1985, while Mary Chapin Carpenter sang “Find a two-step partner and a Cajun beat” (“Down at the Twist and Shout”) five years later in her recipe for the perfect evening out. Country artists have also used the dance’s name as part of poetic wordplay in their songs, such as when Tracy Byrd sang, “The first step is the two step, then we’ll talk” (“The First Step”) in 1994. The dance has also been appropriated as a convenient verbal metaphor for smoothly circumventing political issues or other controversies.

Today, country fans throughout the South learn to two step at independent dance studios, at large country nightclubs, and from friends and family. Given the pervasive presence of the dance within the fan community, it is no surprise that parents frequently teach their children and grandchildren the basic two step, a practice that moves the dance squarely into the vernacular folk traditions of southern culture.

JOCELYN R. NEAL

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

James Bridges, director, Urban Cowboy (film, 1980); Tony Leisner, The Official Guide to Country Dance Steps (1980); Shirley Rushing and Patrick McMillan, Kicker Dancin’ Texas Style (1984); Jerry C. Duke, “Country-Western Dance,” International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998); United Country and Western Dance Council Official Rules (2007).

Visiting

Human beings have probably “visited” ever since they developed enough language and leisure to communicate about something other than access to food, safety, and a mate, but southern Americans have tended to make visiting especially central to their lives. Joe Grey Taylor (1982) quotes an Alabaman who, in the 1920s, described visiting as a “happy recreation,” which was, nevertheless, taken “very seriously.” Southern newspapers still include reports about people visiting from out of town, whether in a society column focused on the local elite or in reports from small town church congregations. Certain common expressions of hospitality have long reflected the belief that southerners should always give the appearance of being willing to set aside whatever they are doing to visit with someone: “Y’all come to see us sometime”; “Come again real soon”; and “Come set a spell.” Southerners who announce that they have “had a good visit” with someone usually mean their conversation made them feel closer and that they are looking forward to seeing each other again.

The primary purposes of any visit have usually been to have fun and escape daily worries, to help each other solve problems, or to establish and reinforce personal ties. There has not been enough research to determine what visiting traditions, if any, have been exclusively southern, but many practices have been affected by their cultural and historical contexts. Until the 20th century, most southerners lived in relatively isolated rural settings, making them especially appreciative of any opportunity to talk with anyone, whether neighbors or strangers. Until the spread of air-conditioning, people wishing to escape both the summer heat and the isolation of their houses would sit on front porches where they could invite passersby to join them for a chat. The Sunday highlight for many churchgoers has been the chance to visit after the service either outside or in a “fellowship hall.” At weddings, funerals, revivals, and other special gatherings, southerners have talked around tables “groaning” with massive platters of food (or, before football games, by the “tailgates” of each other’s cars and trucks). Small sets of people wishing to be alone, particularly courting couples, have, throughout southern history, “gone for a ride,” whether on horseback, in a carriage, or in an automobile.

The enduring social hierarchies in the South inspired complex regulations about who can see whom under what circumstances and how each individual should behave. Men have staked out special contexts for stag visits, including fishing, hunting, militia musters, political meetings, business luncheons, private clubs, locker rooms, bars, brothels, gambling, and various sports venues. Small town men have gathered to chat and play cards or checkers in front of courthouses, in barbershops and country stores (sometimes open late to serve as a male community center), and, in recent decades, at a common table in “meat and three” restaurants. Melton McLaurin (1987) noticed that men in his grandfather’s store kept rehashing the same subjects rather than approaching topics that might stimulate tensions, but many male conversations have ended in fights, especially when they were fueled by alcohol.

Women have been most apt to visit in each other’s kitchens or parlors, in beauty shops (significantly called “beauty parlors” by many southern women), or while shopping together. Urban ladies of the 18th century followed the English pattern of holding “tea-tables” at which they discussed fashions and people who were not present. Gossip has often been the special purview of females, allowing them to share opinions on who needed to be helped, reined in, or shunned. The primary “work” for the wives and daughters of wealthy planters, besides making sure that their servants did as bid, was to nurture relationships with other elites through frequent visits. One young antebellum wife complained about having to give up her quiet days at home “to pay morning calls” but acknowledged that it was “a duty we all owe society, and the sacrifice must be made occasionally.”

Heterosexual visits have occurred most often at parties, whether casual and spur of the moment or formal and planned. Each generation of southerners in each class has set standards for what kind of visiting was suitable for young men and women with romance on their minds. Until they were ready to court seriously one special female, 19th century young males tended to gather in small groups and then visit a series of young women. Young people of the New South spent entire evenings riding a streetcar, much as their great grandchildren would “hang out” at a mall. For most of the 20th century, however, couples went on formal “dates,” during which the young women were expected to feign interest in whatever fascinated their male companions.

Although visiting has never been an exclusive class privilege, access to particular gatherings has often been restricted. The wealthy have always had more leisure time as well as more money to spend on food, drink, servants, and congenial private and public spaces in which to entertain, but this may have made opportunities to visit more precious to people who had to spend most of the day working. Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), describes members of an all-black community who “had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long” enjoying “the time for sitting on porches” when they might “hear things and talk.” Members of the lower classes have faced restrictions on their ability to unify through visiting since the earliest slave traders prevented Africans with the same language from being chained next to each other. Mills and other workplaces have been decorated with “no talking” signs. In spite of this, workers have met clandestinely in the woods and swamps of plantations, during stolen moments when overseers were out of sight of workers, in workplace and school bathrooms, and during coffee and smoking breaks. Such visits have often included making jokes about the authorities being crossed.

The most significant visiting taboo in southern history has been that against people of different “races” interacting as if they were peers. White men could have sex with both willing and unwilling black women, but they were never to be caught eating at the same table with African Americans. White women and their enslaved or free black servants might gossip together and help each other in childbirth, but they were never to let their “friendships” develop to a point that might challenge their social differences. Byron Bunch, in Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), criticized Lena Grove, the daughter of humanitarian carpet-baggers, for visiting sick black people “like they was white.”

In the 20th century, historical developments such as the civil rights movement and the migration of northerners to the South eroded some of the restrictions concerning who can interact with whom. Visiting practices among 21st-century southerners are probably less distinctive than in earlier times, but visiting, for whatever reasons and in whatever form, remains a favorite pastime across the South.

CITA COOK

State University of West Georgia

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (1979); Joyce Donlon, Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture (2001); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family (1987); Crandall A. Shifflett, Coal Towns (1991); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South (1982).

Water Skiing

With mild winters, hot summers, and many rivers and lakes, water sports are a significant recreation enjoyed by southerners. Aquaplaning behind outboard motor boats or sleek mahogany inboard runabouts was popular in the South in the 1920s. But the American Water Ski Association credits the beginning of water skiing to Ralph Samuelson of Minnesota, who on 22 June 1922, mastered the skill of riding behind a boat, holding onto a window-cord rope with two barrel staves for skis strapped on his feet.

Northern water skiers had the advantage of being snow skiers, but on northern lakes, never warm even in summers and often frozen in the winter, the water skiing season was short.

Down south, water skiing developed rapidly, and Cypress Gardens, which opened in 1936 in Winter Haven, Fla., became the water ski capital of the world. The genius behind Cypress Gardens was Dick Pope Sr., a flamboyant promoter for whom the saying “he can sell ice to the Eskimos” fit perfectly. But the real idea person, gardener, and plant collector was his wife, “Miss Julie,” a native of Pike County, Ala., and a true southern lady not averse to hard work. The Gardens featured beautiful girls wearing antebellum gowns, a perfect Old South illusion following the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.

While Pope was in the military in World War II, Miss Julie initiated the first water ski show. When a few soldiers showed up at the Gardens to see the show, Miss Julie quickly gathered her children, their friends, and employees who could ski or drive the boat, and sent them out to perform. It must have been good, because the story relates that 700 soldiers came to see the show the next day, and show skiing was born. The South, the nation, and the world learned from pictures how to do it. Belles in ballet skirts over bathing suits performed routines, clowns delighted audiences, and handsome lads flew off wooden ramps. The acts of the ski show were set. Although many sites offered water ski shows after the mid-1950s, it was the Cypress Gardens Water Ski Show that set the benchmark, spread the idea of water skiing, and provided outstanding tournament water skiers.

Competitive water skiing had its origins in Long Island, N.Y., and Holland, Mich., where Chuck Sligh nursed along the American Water Ski Association. Tournaments featured three events—jumping, tricks, and slalom. Tournament skiing quickly moved into Florida. In 1947 Cypress Gardens initiated the Dixie Tournament during spring break. Dick Pope Jr. was the first person to “ski” barefoot, a skill that many later learned.

The first world championship was held in France in 1949, but the next year it was hosted by Cypress Gardens, an event covered by the media, which made water skiing popular across the South. Henry Suydam began a water ski program at Rollins College in Winter Park, and other Florida and southern colleges followed.

Ida Cason Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, Ga., added water ski shows and ski instruction in 1955 and competition the following year. Callaway hosted the Southern Regionals in 1957 and the U.S. Nationals in 1958, but since 1959, the annual Masters Tournament built Callaway’s skiing reputation.

The vast majority of southern water skiers, however, are not interested in competition. They are motivated by some inner drive and the desire to beat a relative or friend in mastering new skills. These weekend skiers enjoy the sport, skiing behind boats that are designed with special elevated tow hooks and that produce either flat or high wakes for different types of water skiing or any boat with enough power to pull a skier up.

The first wooden skis were replaced by laminated plastic, and Manila hemp ropes by plastic ropes. Short and wide trick skis were designed to facilitate turning from front to back and turns in the air, off wakes and ramps, and with the foot holding the rope. Skis pointed at both ends entered North America when European skiers brought “banana peel skis” to the 1957 World Tournament in Toronto. Tapered trick and slalom skis became a staple of southern skiers, but not before southern designs made the skis more stable. Florida has many water ski schools where skiers from all over the world come to be coached by former champions.

Several developments changed the leisure southern water ski world—the introduction of individual water craft in 1968 allowed young and old to race across the water with the same thrill of water skiing but without the learning curve or the strength, balance, and physical pain that came with water skiing. The wake board surpassed water skiing in popularity for weekend skiers, and skiing for disabled skiers became popular. Hydrofoil water skiing is the latest way to enjoy water skiing.

In 2010 water skiing is regulated by USA Water Ski in Polk City, Fla., where the offices of the American Water Ski Educational Foundation and Water Ski Hall of Fame are also located.

LEAH MARIE RAWLS ATKINS

Auburn University

Jack Andresen, Skiing on Water (1950); Dick Pope Sr., Water Skiing (1958); Mary M. Flekke, Sarah E. MacDonald, with Randall M. MacDonald, Cypress Gardens (2006).

Whittling

Whittling refers to woodcarving with a knife, usually a pocket knife. It is a pastime often associated with—but not confined to—the Appalachian South and has served many functions for southerners. In earlier days, whittlers often made practical products such as handles for hammers and axes, walking sticks, and various other everyday items. Some writers have emphasized the role of self-reliance in the popularity of whittling in southern Appalachia, relating the decline of whittling to the increased availability of consumer goods.

Despite the emphasis on making practical items, whittling also serves as an outlet for creativity. One of the most famous examples is the snake walking cane, once a popular whittling product in Appalachia. This type of cane consists of a standard-looking shaft but also features a snake of raised bark coiled around its length, usually whittled in detail down to the forked tongue.

Dave Penland, a Confederate war veteran and mountaineer, whittling by the fireplace, Beech, N.C., c. 1920 (William A. Barnhill, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-118644], Washington, D.C.)

According to most whittlers, visualization is essential to good whittling. Once a block of wood is sawed down to usable size, a good whittler will see the end product before carving out the broad contours. Finer details come next, followed by sanding. Whittling is commonly a time-consuming pursuit, and some items require weeks of work. While some whittlers sell their products, most whittle for personal use and enjoyment. At times, schools such as the John C. Campbell Folk School of Brasstown, N.C., have encouraged Appalachian southerners to capitalize on this folk tradition as a means of income.

Some whittled objects are wholly recreational in usage. A popular example is the whistle. Other whittled objects are purely aesthetic. These include whirligigs (windmills) and representational art—usually miniature depictions of animals. Whittlers apply artistic variations to these forms. Whittling also serves as a pastime, and it serves no other purpose for the significant percentage of whittlers who simply whittle sticks down to nothing instead of carving anything out of them. Some writers have indicated that this was a useful way for southern men to sit down for extended periods of time without projecting idleness.

“Arkansas,” as sung by the Osborne Brothers, treats whittling as a marker of impoverished elderly southern men. The song asks,

Arkansas, are your rivers still flowing?

Is your cotton growing, white as snow?

Do the young men still piddle with the thought of growing rich

And slowly turn to old folks sittin’, whittling on a stick?

Searcy, a small town in Arkansas’s Ozark region, has been known as the nation’s whittling capital since 1955, though the title is unofficial and its origins are unclear.

MILES LASETER

University of Mississippi

Wrestling

William Faulkner wrote that Thomas Sutpen, the Old South planter who is the central character of Absalom, Absalom!, would watch an evening of slave wrestling. At the end of “the spectacle,” he would enter the ring, “perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy, domination.” He and a slave would soon be “naked to the waist and gouging at one another’s eyes.”

Physical grappling is an old tradition for southern men. In the colonial era well-off gentry planters presided over and sometimes joined in sports such as wrestling, which served as a communal bonding experience between social classes. One of the rituals in frontier areas of the antebellum South, which spawned real-life Thomas Sutpens, was the gouging match. It was a brutal sport where each man tried to pry his opponent’s eyes out of their sockets using a thumb for leverage. Brutal though they were, wrestling and eye gouging were not surprising pastimes for men in a society where violence was common. Indians, animals, outlaws, and nature were threats to life; physical labor was long and grueling. Gouging matches tested a man’s strength, dexterity, and ferocity. In Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain told of an appropriate product of this world, a self-styled Arkansas wrestling champion called “Sudden Death and General Desolation.”

Itinerant wrestlers toured the South in the late 19th century, often with minstrel shows and fairs. By the beginning of the 20th century, though, wrestling was best known in American culture for its ethnic wrestlers, appealing to immigrants in northern cities. Just the names of Irish Dan Mahoney, Stan Zbyszko, Turkish-born Ali Baba, Killer Kowalski, or Bruno Sammantino could get ethnic pride juiced up, for or against these colorful figures. They created modern wrestling with its theatrical competitions, outlandish characters, and stylized violence. Professional wrestling became well anchored in the South in the 1950s. Television helped extend wrestling’s appeal in the region, as smaller stations appreciated the low cost of producing live wrestling shows that had family appeal. The decade’s popular wrestlers included masked men, including the Hooded Phantom and Zuma, the Man from Mars; patriots such as Mr. America; and the pretty boy, “Gorgeous George” Wagner. The wrestler narrative has to have villains as well as heroes, and the sight of German and Japanese wrestlers provoked post–World War II southern audiences. Gulf Coast Championship Wrestling promoted the sport in Alabama and Florida, and the National Wrestling Alliance sponsored matches in Virginia and the Carolinas. Other centers of the sport were in Memphis and Texas.

Professional wrestling thrived in the South after the war, just as it declined in popularity elsewhere, as other parts of the nation embraced professional football and baseball franchises, of which the South had few until recently. Professional wrestling did return to national prominence in the 1980s, with super celebrity Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea) from Florida transcending the ring to become a star on television and in film. The National Broadcasting Company showed Saturday Night’s Main Event beginning in 1985, the first national wrestling show since the 1950s. The emergence of an extensive network of cable television stations in the 1980s gave more opportunity for broadcast of wrestling events across the nation.

Although college football packs southern stadiums, stock car racing has historic roots and popular appeal in the South, and baseball remains popular, professional wrestling has long drawn southerners to small-town arenas. The wrestling season, of course, is 52 weeks long, and matches are promoted in countless towns and cities so small other sports would never give them a second thought. An estimated 60 percent of the national attendance is in the South. In 1984 a still-record 43,000 fans turned out at Texas Stadium in Dallas for a match.

The small town arenas are often drab, barnlike buildings with dirt floors and concrete seats, but their center typically contains a red, white, and blue wrestling ring brilliantly lighted by rows of television lights. The Friday or Saturday night entertainment is part athletic competition and part soap opera. Until recently, professional wrestling was the only sport many of these fans knew, and they have been intensely loyal and enthusiastic. In the wrestling ring, good and evil are distinct, and the fans pour into the arena to cheer the good guys and to jeer and curse the bad ones. Professional wrestling is the morality play of modern sports. If the good guy wins his match, that is simple justice, and if he loses, that is life. French theorist Roland Barthes indeed sees wrestling enacting “a purely moral concept: that of justice.”

Wrestling promoters say their patrons are predominantly working class, with the average wrestling crowd made up of the kind of people whose pickups in the parking lot wear bumper stickers with messages such as “I Fight Poverty, I Work.” Professional wrestling targets males 18 to 54, but about 20 percent of its audience is under 18. Seventy-five percent of television viewership of professional wrestling has a high school education or less, and about 70 percent has a household income under $40,000. Women represent a sizable proportion of the sport’s audience, with one survey suggesting 36 percent of the television audience for wrestling is female.

Whether sport or entertainment in local arenas, professional wrestling is big business. By the 1990s southerners represented professional wrestling’s core constituency, and its two leading entrepreneurs in that decade had southern origins. Atlanta-based Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and North Carolina–born Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF) have dominated the sport since then. In 1995 the WWF grossed $55.8 million and the WCW earned $48.1 million from cable television pay-per-view showings alone. The WWF retail sales were more than $400 million in 1999. By the 1990s the South was the leader in producing American professional wrestlers, another factor giving a strong southern base to the sport. A 1995 survey revealed that 49 percent of American-born wrestlers were from the South, with Texas, Tennessee, and Florida among the top five states in birthing wrestlers.

The most frequently asked question by outsiders is whether professional wrestling is only entertainment. Are these guys athletes or entertainers? A fair answer is that they are both, that most of them have the skills, stamina, and strength for legitimate wrestling. But the wrestlers say that the fans, especially in the South, want to see “catch as catch can” competition, replete with exaggerated falls, wild punches, and frenzied action. Keeping the fans excited week after week, however, takes effort. This responsibility belongs partly to the promoter and partly to a “matchmaker,” who is employed by the individual or group sponsoring matches in a region. The matchmaker’s job is to decide which pairings of wrestlers, because of reputation or chemistry, are likely to please and excite the crowd.

Because the same dozen or so wrestlers compete against each other week after week around local circuits, the pairings have to be adjusted to maintain interest. Once the matchmaker gives the assignment to the wrestlers, they must build up as much interest as possible before the match and then make the match itself as exciting as possible. The prematch buildup is boosted with television shows taped and shown in each of the cities on the circuit a couple of days in advance of the live wrestling. The promoters pay for the television time, and the show includes some wrestling and a generous amount of interview time in which the wrestlers describe what they are going to do to their next opponents. The matchmaker will also bring in big-name outside wrestlers to increase attendance. The local wrestling world is often a family business. At one time promoters were related by blood or marriage, with promoters and wrestlers now often the second or third generation in the business.

Southern wrestlers have long adapted popular culture images of the region for what Louis M. Kyriakoudes and Peter A. Coclanis term their “stylized wrestling personas.” The southern social types portrayed in the ring have reflected the South’s changing role in American culture. Southern wrestling characters first appeared in significant numbers in the 1960s, which saw stereotypes of both the raw, degenerate, Deliverance-like mountain man and the more positive simple hillbilly, uncorrupted by modern civilization. Haystacks Calhoun, from Morgan’s Creek, Ark., weighed in at 601 pounds and wrestled in knee-length overalls, while Crusher Blackwell tipped the scales at 400 pounds. The 1970s saw a rise in positive regional images among southern wrestlers. Dusty Rhodes, aka Virgil Runnels Jr., embraced working-class roots as the son of a Texas plumber. He proclaimed he was an “all around good guy, fighting for the American way of life.” Kyriakoudes and Coclanis see him as a new type of southern wrestler, urban and blue collar, yet still a variant of the regionally specific good old boy. Patriotism was a popular theme for southern wrestlers in the 1970s as well, epitomized by Sergeant Slaughter, at first a villainously brutal drill instructor but then transformed during the Iranian hostage crisis into a heroic symbol of the United States. By the 1980s black wrestlers were increasingly popular, and one of them, Tony Atlas, Mr. USA, an African American body builder from Virginia, embraced patriotism, too, in grudge matches with a Russian wrestler. Ranger Ross, a black wrestler from Ft. Bragg, N.C., wore army boots and a camouflage jacket, while waving a large American flag as he entered the ring. Wrestlers effectively parodied southern icons, as in Honky Tonk Man’s Elvis persona and Brother Love’s representation of a hypocritical preacher suspiciously suggesting the disgraced preacher Jimmy Swaggart.

Wrestling remains a popular spectator sport in the South, but the embrace by sports fans of southern professional football, basketball, baseball, and hockey franchises, not to mention the stepped-up promotion of the always-popular stock car racing in the past decade, may be drawing diehard wrestling loyalists away from a sport with deep regional connections.

RANDALL WILLIAMS

New South Books

Montgomery, Alabama

Michael R. Ball, Professional Wrestling as Ritual Drama in American Popular Culture (1990); Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957); Elliott Gorn, American Historical Review (February 1985), “The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting and the Rise of American Sports” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1983); John Gutowski, Keystone Folklore (1972); Louis M. Kyriakoudes and Peter A. Coclanis, in The Sporting World of the Modern South, ed. Patrick B. Miller (2002); Gerald W. Morton and George M. O’Brien, Wrestling to Rasslin’: Ancient Sport to American Ritual (1986); Newsweek (11 March 1985); Randall Williams, Southern Exposure (Fall 1979); Mark F. Workman, Folklore Forum (1977).

Aaron, Hank

(b. 1934) BASEBALL PLAYER.

Mobile, Ala., has produced several great baseball players, including Willie McCovey, Amos Otis, and Satchel Paige. Perhaps the greatest of them all is Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron. Born 5 February 1934 in Toulminville, a black community in Mobile, he began playing amateur baseball while in high school at the Josephine Allen Institute. Playing first with the Pritchett Athletics, Aaron later played on weekends with a local semiprofessional team, the Mobile Black Bears. An exhibition game between the Bears and the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League proved to be Aaron’s breakthrough into professional baseball.

The Clowns were impressed with the young player’s performance and offered him $200 a month to join the team. Aaron accepted, playing with the Clowns in 1952 and compiling a .467 batting average with his cross-handed swing. Team owner Syd Pollock attracted attention from the Boston Braves when he ended a letter with the postscript, “We’ve got an eighteen-year-old shortstop batting cleanup for us.” On 12 June 1952 the Braves purchased Aaron from the Clowns for $10,000 and sent him to play in the Class C Northern League at Eau Claire, Wis. After being named rookie of the year there, he was sent to Jacksonville, Fla., where he played second base for the Braves’ Class A South Atlantic team. During the off-season he trained in Puerto Rico to play in the outfield and in 1954 won a starting job with the Braves (which had moved to Milwaukee) when outfielder Bobby Thompson was injured during spring training.

No longer a cross-handed hitter, Aaron became best known for his hitting ability and power. In 1956 he won the National League batting championship with a .328 average. Bypassing such stars as Stan Musial and Red Schoendienst, the league gave its most-valuable-player award to Aaron the following year, the same year he clinched the league pennant for the Braves with an 11th-inning home run against the St. Louis Cardinals. A Milwaukee real estate firm supposedly accepted that home run ball from Aaron as a $1,000 down payment on a home.

When the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, Aaron hit 44 home runs and signed a $100,000-a-year contract with the team. In 1972 he signed a contract for $200,000 a year, the largest player salary in baseball history at the time.

During his major league career Aaron steadily approached the record number of home runs set by Babe Ruth, who hit 714. In Cincinnati on 4 April 1974 Aaron hit his 714th home run. Braves officials wanted him to hit his record-breaking home run in Atlanta, so they decided that he would not play in the remaining games in Cincinnati. When Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn objected and threatened to penalize the team, Aaron was put back in the lineup, but he returned to Atlanta without another hit.

The game in Atlanta on 8 April 1974 between the Braves and the Los Angeles Dodgers was sold out and nationally televised. A New York Times writer said that “to many Atlantans, it was like the city’s festive premier of Gone with the Wind during the 1930s when Babe Ruth was still the hero of the New York Yankees and the titan of professional sports.” That evening, Aaron hit his 715th home run, this one on a fastball thrown by pitcher Al Downing.

With a total of 755 home runs and numerous other major league records, “Hammerin’ Hank” or the “Hammer,” as Aaron was called, retired in 1976, after playing his final years with the Milwaukee Brewers. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. Since then, Aaron has worked for the Atlanta Braves as senior vice president and assistant to the president and for Turner Broadcasting as a corporate vice president of community relations and a member of TBS’s board of directors. In 1990 Aaron published his best-selling autobiography I Had a Hammer, and in 2002 President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

More than 30 years after it had been set, Aaron’s home run record fell to San Francisco Giants slugger, Barry Bonds, on 7 August 2007, although Bonds’s record-breaking feat was shrouded in controversy as he was under investigation for steroid use. Nevertheless, the always-gracious Hank Aaron prerecorded a congratulatory video that was broadcast over the JumboTron at AT&T Park in San Francisco the night Bonds broke Aaron’s long-standing record.

JESSICA FOY

Cooperstown Graduate Programs

Cooperstown, New York

Marjorie Dent Candee, ed., Current Biography (1958); New York Times (9 April 1974); Edna Rust and Art Rust Jr., Art Rust’s Illustrated History of the Black Athlete (1985); Tom Stanton, Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America (2004); Charles Van Doren, ed., Webster’s American Biographies (1979).

Ali, Muhammad

(b. 1942) BOXING CHAMPION AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” are the words most often attributed to Muhammad Ali, the Olympic gold medalist and world heavyweight champion boxer. Graceful yet powerful, as his catchphrase implied, Ali became just as famous for his stance against racial intolerance and his outspokenness against American society—in which he felt black men and women were treated as less than equal to whites—as he did for his incredible success in the ring. Named Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. when he was born—Ali’s father was named after the ardent 19th-century, Madison County, Ky., abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay—Ali’s destiny as social critic seemed fated from birth. Ironically, however, Ali changed his name to Muhammad Ali after embracing the Nation of Islam, insisting that Cassius Clay was his “slave name.”

Ali began his boxing career as a 12-year-old boy in his hometown of Louisville, Ky. When his new bicycle was stolen, he reported the theft to the first police officer he found, crying and claiming that he would beat up whoever had stolen the bike. As it happened, that officer was Joe Martin, a boxing coach at the Columbia Gym in Louisville. Martin told the distraught boy, “Well, you’d better come back here and learn how to fight,” thus beginning his and Ali’s trainer-boxer relationship.

“I was Cassius Clay then,” Ali said years later in a Sports Illustrated story. “I was a Negro. I ate pork. I had no confidence. I thought white people were superior. I was a Christian Baptist named Cassius Clay.” But by the time Ali was a high school senior he had begun exploring Islam, writing a senior paper on Black Muslims that nearly kept him from passing the class. He boxed as an amateur for six years, winning the light heavyweight gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. (Ali claims to have thrown his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after returning from Rome to Louisville and being refused service in a whites-only restaurant.) Ali turned professional that same year and won his first heavyweight boxing champion title in 1964 against Sonny Liston. Shortly thereafter he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, symbolizing his new identity as a member of the Nation of Islam.

The shift in Ali’s religious faith came at a volatile time in American civil rights history. Ali became famous after winning the gold medal in Rome, and after winning his first boxing championship and announcing his conversion to Islam, he became an outspoken critic of American racial injustice, a message in line with his new Muslim faith. Ali’s obvious prowess in the ring made him a highly visible symbol of black masculinity, and his comments outside the ring became a source of black pride, propelling him into the role of a strong, straight-talking black leader.

In 1967 Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam War, claiming conscientious objector status on the basis of his religious beliefs. He later said to a Sports Illustrated reporter, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” As a result of his refusal to serve, Ali lost his boxing license and was stripped of his heavyweight boxing champion title.

In 1970 Ali regained his boxing license, and although he made millions in the ring, he was ostensibly opposed to the sport: “We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.” Nevertheless, Ali went on to fight in some of the most famous and highly promoted boxing matches in history, such as “The Fight of the Century,” fought in Madison Square Garden against Joe Frazier; “The Rumble in the Jungle,” fought in Zaire, Africa, against George Foreman; and “The Thrilla in Manila,” fought in the Philippines, again against Joe Frazier. Ali lost the first bout by unanimous decision but won the latter two, further cementing his reputation as the epitome of black masculinity.

In time, as public support waned for the war in Vietnam and as the pace of violence against blacks in America slowed, Ali’s antiwhite rhetoric diminished, but his passion for racial justice prevailed. In recognition of his contributions to the world of sports and to racial equality, during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta Ali served as the final bearer of the Olympic touch and received a replacement for the gold metal he won in 1960.

In all, Ali won nine heavyweight championship titles, and in 2001 he was the subject of the feature film Ali. Will Smith portrayed the champion, a role for which he was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

Gerald Early, ed., The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998); Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (1991); Hunt Helm, Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal (14 September 1997); David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1998).

Annual Interstate Mullet Toss

Opinions differ on how it got started. The confusion is compounded by the fact that the person credited with the idea—Jimmy Louis, one of the first musicians hired by the Flora-Bama Lounge and Package—tells two different stories. For some time, he and others vowed that Louis saw a cow-patty-pitching contest at a rodeo out west, and when the Flora-Bama’s owners were looking for an excuse to throw a party (and make a little money) Louis suggested tossing a mullet. Maybe so. But in a 2006 documentary, The Last Roadhouse, Louis told the camera, “You want the truth about the Mullet Toss? It just come out of a fit of narcosis. I got stoned one night and thought it up.” Some say both stories are true. Either way, what began on the last full weekend in April 1984 as an excuse to sell and drink beer, and attracted only about 250 people at the start, today brings more folks to the Redneck Riviera than any other event, including the 4th of July.

Why a mullet? Why not? The mullet is considered by many to be a trash fish, a bottom feeder, whose persona is not unlike that (by reputation at least) of many who frequent the Flora-Bama and whose shape—minus the fins—is not unlike a particular part of the male anatomy. Although the Flora-Bama is said to be a place where you can find “a millionaire sitting next to a biker,” one also finds that in that atmosphere identification with, and perhaps sympathy for, the lowly mullet makes perfect sense.

So what is it all about? Throwing a mullet. The rules are simple. Select your mullet from an ice bucket full of mullets. Stand inside a circle on the sand with your mullet in your hand and throw it—without leaving the circle. Then go and get your mullet, check your distance, put the mullet back in the ice. The circle is in Florida. The throw flies into Alabama—hence the “interstate” in the name.

Although records are kept, they are not kept well, so even though in 2004 one man threw his fish nearly 190 feet, how nearly is a matter of some debate. There are also categories for women, seniors, children, and others.

Like records for distance, crowd size is also difficult to pin down, but numbers in excess of 5,000 are considered conservative. Perhaps the best measure of the success of the event is the quantity of beer sold in the period between Friday, when it starts, and Monday, when it shuts down. Estimates are that in 2004 the Flora-Bama reportedly sold about 4,000 cases in three days. That is about 96,000, 12-ounce beers.

In the air. Flora-Bama Interstate Mullet Toss, 2009 (Photograph courtesy of Harvey H. Jackson III)

All for a mullet.

HARVEY H. JACKSON III

Jacksonville State University

Alan West Brockman and Joe Gilchrist, producers, The Last American Roadhouse: The Documentary of the Flora-Bama (film, 2006); Ryan Dezember, Mobile Press-Register (27 April 2008); Harris Mendheim, director, Mullet Men: Second Place Is the First Loser (film, 2000); Michael Swindle, Mulletheads: The Legends, Lore, Magic, and Mania Surrounding the Humble but Celebrated Mullet (1998), Village Voice (13 May 1997).

Appalachian Trail

The Appalachian Trail, a 2,178-mile footpath traversing the mountains from Maine to Georgia, is considered one of the most culturally valued and successful wilderness projects of the 20th century. Often referred to as the longest and skinniest National Park, the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) crosses 14 states and more than 60 federal, state, and local parks and forests. Marking the official route of this congressionally recognized National Scenic Trail, white paint blazes two-inch by six-inch vertical rectangles, found in both directions on everything from signs, bridges, rocks, trees, posts, or other objects approximately one-tenth of a mile apart.

Harvard graduate Benton MacKaye first proposed the idea for the A.T. in 1921. MacKaye’s vision of the Appalachian Trail project was not the long-distance hiking trail known today but rather a pragmatic vision for wilderness conservation in the Appalachian region. The trail was completed almost 16 years after MacKaye’s initial proposal of the Appalachian Trail project. However, during World War II, much of the trail route was lost as maintainers were unable to work. By 1951 the trail was officially declared complete once again. Since 1958, Georgia’s Springer Mountain has been the southern terminus of the A.T., as indicated by a bronze plaque mounted on the summit. Approximately 4 million people set foot on the A.T. each year.

Of the “Triple Crown” of long-distance hiking trails (the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail), the A.T. is arguably the most internationally famous and most populated long-distance hiking trail in the United States. The A.T. attracts the largest number of thruhikers (those attempting to hike the entire trail in one continuous journey each year). Since 1936, slightly more than 10,000 completed hikes made by thruhikers and section hikers (those completing the trail in large sections over a period of time) have been recorded by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Of this number, approximately 200 have hiked the entire trail on more than one occasion. For the thousands of individuals who attempt to thru-hike the A.T. annually, only about one in four accomplish this goal, with thru-hikers taking anywhere from four to seven months to complete the trail. The majority of long-distance hikers on the Appalachian Trail are northbounders (i.e., NOBOS), meaning they begin in Georgia at Springer Mountain, located in Amicalola Falls State Park, and hike north. While April Fool’s Day is a traditional starting day for a northbound thru-hike, some long-distance hikers begin as early as February.

The Southern Appalachians include three states: Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The southern portion of the A.T. is dotted with many points of interest, including the summit of Georgia’s Blood Mountain, which has spectacular views. The highest point on the A.T., Clingman’s Dome, is located in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the trail enters the park at Fontana Dam, the highest dam east of the Mississippi River. North Carolina and Tennessee are both noted for their open grassy “balds,” namely Tennessee’s Max Patch, and Siler Bald and Wesser Bald, both located in North Carolina. Special hiking events also take place along the trail. Current and former hikers come together in Hot Springs, N.C., for Trailfest, while others celebrate the A.T. on White Blaze Day in Gatlinburg, Tenn. However, the largest gathering of long-distance hikers transpires every May in Damascus, Va., during the annual Trail Days Festival.

KRISTI M. FONDREN

University of Southern Mississippi

American Long-Distance Hiking Association-West, ALDA-West: Triple Crown (2009); Appalachian Trail Conservancy, 2,000-Milers: Facts and Statistics (2008); Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Step by Step: An Introduction to Walking the Appalachian Trail (2008); Appalachian Trail Conservancy, About the ATC: History (2008); Karen Berger, America’s Triple Crown: Hiking the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide Trails (2009), Appalachian Trail: Something Unique (2009); Dan “Wingfoot” Bruce, The Thru-Hiker’s Handbook, 16th Edition (2006); Kristi M. Fondren, Walking on the Wild Side: An Examination of a Long-Distance Hiking Subculture (2009); Ronald Foresta, Transformation of the Appalachian Trail (1987); Benton MacKaye, An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning (1921); Ben A. Minteer, Wilderness and the Wise Province: Benton MacKaye’s Pragmatic Vision (2001); Roland Mueser, Long-Distance Hiking: Lessons from the Appalachian Trail (1998).

Ashe, Arthur

(1943–1993) TENNIS PLAYER.

Arthur Ashe grew up under racial segregation in Richmond, Va., and became a singular figure in American tennis, a notable humanitarian and social reformer, and a symbol of the South. The son of a policeman, he played on segregated playground tennis courts, but the U.S. Open championships are now played at the Arthur Ashe Stadium at Flushing, N.Y.

Lynchburg, Va., physician Walter Johnson took Ashe under his wing, as he did other promising African American tennis players, and Ashe soon moved to St. Louis to play tennis in an integrated environment and became the first African American to win the National Interscholastic League tennis championship. He attended the University of California at Los Angeles on a tennis scholarship in 1963 and became the first black member of the U.S. Davis Cup team the same year. He won the NCAA singles championship in 1965 and captured the U.S. Clay Court championship title in 1967. The following year he won both the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Open tournaments and was on the winning Davis Cup team, all the while serving as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. For the next 12 years he was in the top-10 ranking of world tennis players. He won three Grand Slam major tournament championships, including the Australian Open (1970) and Wimbledon (1975), in addition to the 1968 U.S. Open. In his career, he won 33 singles titles.

Ashe retired in 1980, after having heart surgery the year before. He had been denied a visa to play in the South African Open, and after retirement he intensified his involvement in efforts to bring an end to apartheid there, calling for the nation to be expelled from the world tennis circuit. He was arrested in South Africa in 1985 for protesting apartheid and in Washington, D.C., in 1992 for demonstrating against treatment of Haitian refugees. He worked as a commentator for the American Broadcasting Company and HBO, and he authored A Hard Road to Glory (1988), a three-volume history of black athletes in the United States. He had a second heart surgery in 1983 and discovered in 1988 that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during his second operation. He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS and used his misfortune to promote efforts to prevent and treat the disease. In 1992 he established the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health to work to improve medical care for under-served populations. Ashe died 6 February 1993.

Ashe’s father, a widower, intentionally raised his son to have the manners and discipline traditionally associated with a gentlemanly ideal. “I wanted him to be a gentleman that everybody could recognize,” the senior Ashe said. Writer Digby Balzell, reflecting on Ashe’s life, wrote, “The moral life of Arthur Ashe has constantly renewed my faith in the staying power of the gentlemanly ideal.” Ashe’s personal qualities helped him in negotiating the stresses and complexities of transcending the color line in high-pressure sporting contexts. His own qualities and their representation by others positioned him as a specifically southern gentleman. Despite controversy at the time, Richmond erected in 1995 an Arthur Ashe monument on Monument Avenue, previously marked only by statues to white heroes of the American Revolution and the Confederacy.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Arthur Ashe, with Frank DeFord, Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion (1975), with Arnold Rampersad, Days of Grace: A Memoir (1993); Matthew Mace Barbee, in Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (2009); E. Digby Balzell, Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar (1995); Robin Finn, New York Times (8 February 1993).

Atkins, Leah Marie Rawls

(b. 1935) WATER SKIER.

Alabama’s first world water skiing champion, Leah Marie Rawls Atkins, reigned supreme in the sport from 1951 to 1958. In her first year of competition, at the age of 16, she won first place overall at the Ontario championships in South Hampton, Canada. Following this early success, she continued to establish records and win championships in both national and international arenas. Her impressive tally of accomplishments includes winning the United States women’s overall national championship and the women’s overall world championship in 1953. She also became the first woman senior judge and first woman board member of the American Water Ski Association, in 1976, and was the first woman inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. In 2004, Atkins received the American Water Ski Educational Foundation award for extraordinary contributions to the sport.

Atkins was born in Birmingham, Ala., 24 April 1935, and grew up spending time at her parents’ cabin on the Warrior River, where she learned to swim and ride the surfboard at the age of four. Later she learned to water ski, and when she saw photographs of people doing tricks on water skis at Cypress Gardens, she began trying to do them herself. Success did not come easily, but Atkins was tenacious; although she finished last in every event at the 1950 Lake Guntersville ski competition advertised as Alabama’s first state championships, she still considered the trip worthwhile because that competition is where she learned to jump. Because of Atkins’s determination to compete, her father hired men’s champion Henry Suydam as her coach. The following year, she won her first event in junior girl’s tricks. Suydam’s coaching turned her career around and she dominated women’s water skiing for the next seven years. When she moved up to the women’s division, she won the U.S. nationals in California, then the world championship in Toronto.

Leah Marie Rawls Atkins, Alabama’s first world water skiing champion (Photograph courtesy of Stacye Hathorn)

Incredibly, Atkins married and began her family in the middle of her water skiing career. When they married in 1954, she and her husband, George, lived on Lake Martin where they practiced three times a day for competition. Atkins taught skiing lessons and performed Sunday ski shows. While in residence on Lake Martin, Atkins once unwittingly performed a service for her state by rescuing Governor Gordon Persons when she spotted him in his stalled boat waving a white towel.

She took a brief hiatus from her water skiing career for the birth of her first child in 1955 but was back in the thick of the competition by 1957. In 1958, Atkins taught skiing in Italy, and it was there that year that she skied in her last tournament. Her second child was born in 1959, and she subsequently turned her focus entirely towards academic pursuits. Although often referred to in the press as a “pretty blonde,” Atkins proved to have her fair share of brains. She earned a Ph.D. degree in history from Auburn University and taught at three Alabama universities. She was the founding director of the Samford London Study Centre and also the founding director of the Auburn University Center for the Arts and Humanities (now the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center) where she remained for the last 10 years until her retirement. Dr. Atkins has created quite a legacy having published many articles and books on Alabama history. Moreover, she and her husband have a family of 4 children and 13 grandchildren.

STACYE HATHORN

Alabama Historical Commission

Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, www.ashof.org; Jimmy Smothers, Alabama Gadsden Times (26 August 2007, 28 August 2007).

Atlantic Beach, South Carolina

Atlantic Beach, S.C., is one of the last surviving beachfront communities on the East Coast with a history of African American ownership and self-governance. A small parcel of land at just under 100 acres, Atlantic Beach offered one of the few recreational beaches open to blacks during Jim Crow segregation. Despite the racism of the early 20th-century South, Atlantic Beach, also known as the Black Pearl, became a vibrant spot for African American leisure culture.

Black-owned since the early 1930s, when businessman George Tyson purchased the land, Atlantic Beach was designed to be a “haven for blacks” on the Grand Strand. When Tyson ran into financial problems, the Atlantic Beach Company, a group of local black professionals, took over his failing mortgage in 1943. Dr. Leroy W. Upperman, the last surviving member of the company until his death in 1996, pointed out that it was “not out of altruism, but as a business venture” that the company sought to develop a beach for African Americans.

During its “golden era,” from the 1940s through the 1960s, Atlantic Beach hosted entertainers such as James Brown, Ray Charles, Martha and the Vandellas, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and the Drifters, who performed in but could not stay at the whites-only hotels of neighboring oceanfront communities. Atlantic Beach was designed for all African Americans and welcomed domestics and schoolteachers as well as famous entertainers. The small community persevered through hardships, such as harassment by the Ku Klux Klan in 1950 and the devastation of Hurricane Hazel in 1954.

Following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated public accommodations, new opportunities and freedoms were opened for African Americans in the South, and Atlantic Beach, like many other black businesses and communities, struggled to maintain its economy and sense of place. In 1966 Atlantic Beach incorporated as a municipality of Horry County. Just two years later in 1968, when the surrounding towns consolidated into North Myrtle Beach, Atlantic Beach opted to maintain its autonomy as a black beach with black control. The small independent town still struggles with economic and social issues.

In 1980 the Carolina Knight Riders, a local African American motorcycle club, and Atlantic Beach politicians joined forces to start the Atlantic Beach Bikefest. The festival began to grow exponentially in the 1990s by drawing younger motorcycle enthusiasts from around the country. The Atlantic Beach Bikefest began to cause controversy in the late 1990s when it grew beyond the borders of the small black beach into the larger and predominantly white tourist town of Myrtle Beach. Tourists’ claims of discrimination drew national media attention and an investigation into civil rights violations. In 2003 the NAACP helped plaintiffs claim suit against the city of Myrtle Beach and local business for discriminatory practices. These tensions pushed the Grand Strand, essentially the entire northern coast of South Carolina, to grapple with its sense of “southern hospitality.” While all of the suits were settled in 2006 for the plaintiffs, the black motorcycle festival controversy is still unresolved, and the region still struggles over tourist dollars and political boundaries.

The town of Atlantic Beach has weathered many problems related to corrupt politics and sour development deals as well as internal crime and external racism. The hopes for a successful redevelopment—one that considers the important identity and history of the town—are still alive. The Black Pearl remains a symbol of the strength of African Americans in the South to persevere and build physical and psychological communities during the era of legal segregation and the resulting challenges of maintaining that sense of place and community as desegregation offered wider access and mobility for African Americans in the region.

NICOLE KING

University of Maryland at Baltimore County

Jeffrey Collins, “Once-Segregated South Carolina Beach Town Fights to Survive,” Associated Press (30 January 2009); Catherine H. Lewis, Horry County, South Carolina, 1730–1993 (1998); Barbara F. Stokes, Myrtle Beach: A History, 1900–1980 (2007); Will Moredock, Banana Republic: A Year in the Heart of Myrtle Beach (2003).

Big Bend National Park

According to Indian legend, when the Great Spirit had finished making the Earth he dumped all of the leftover rocks in what is now Big Bend country. Sometime later, yet still over a hundred years ago, a Mexican cowboy described Big Bend country as a place “where the rainbows wait for the rain, and the big river is kept in a stone box, and water runs uphill and mountains float in the air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains.”

What is now Big Bend National Park sits on the U.S.-Mexican border along the Rio Grande and covers 801,000 isolated acres of southwestern Texas wilderness. The Rio Grande, the Chihuahuan Desert, and the Chisos Mountains constitute the three distinct geological divisions within the park—Big Bend often considered to be “three parks in one”—and because of these diverse areas the park’s climate is one of extremes. Altitudes range from 1,800 at the river to over 7,800 feet in the Chisos Mountains (highest point is Emory Peak at 7,832 feet, which is accessible by hiking trail). During the summer months, ground temperatures in the Chihuahuan Desert can reach a sweltering 180 degrees, but winters are normally mild, with temperatures hovering around a balmy 80 degrees. Because of the harsh summer climate, most hiking and camping in Big Bend is done between the months of November and April.

Average rainfall in the Chisos Mountains reaches 20 inches, creating a vast diversity between plant and animal life in the mountains and on the desert floor. Because of the range’s relative isolation, several species of plants and animals can be found only in the Chisos Mountains, making the park a nature lover’s paradise. Cacti and wild-flowers carpet the desert, and the flora changes to grasslands as one approaches the mountains. As the elevation continues to increase, taller plant life such as the evergreen sumac, mountain mahogany, and the Texas marone replace leafy shrubs and bushes. In all, Big Bend is home to more than 1,200 species of plants (including pink and blue bluebonnets, yucca flowers, lechuguillas, and 60 species of cacti), 3,600 species of insects, 450 species of birds, 75 species of mammals, and 67 species of amphibians and reptiles. Animals include panthers, Mexican black bears, kangaroo rats, jackrabbits, roadrunners, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and coyotes. Summer tanagers, painted buntings, vermillion flycatchers, sandpipers, kill-deers, golden eagles, and cliff swallows attract birdwatchers from across the globe.

The Rio Grande forms 118 miles of border between the United States and Mexico through the Chihuahuan Desert. The name of the park is derived from the U-turn the river takes on its border, redirecting the river’s southeasterly flow northeastward, and the flow of the river varies between a languid current perfect for floating downstream and intense white-water rapids. (Those who chose to navigate the Lower Canyon of the Rio Grande are required by the National Park Service to sign an Assumption of Risks and Agreements of Release and Indemnity form.) Popular scenic canyons made by the river long ago include the Santa Elena Canyon, Mariscal Canyon, and Boquillas Canyon, and garfish and turtles that live in the river illustrate the evolutionary record that extends back 50,000 years when the area was a lush, swamplike savannah.

Big Bend, because of it remoteness, is one of the least-visited national parks in the United States, attracting only 300,000 to 350,000 visitors annually. The entrance to the park at Persimmon Gap lies 70 miles from the nearest town. It is, however, one of the largest parks in the National Park System. It is popular with adventurous hikers and backpackers and offers more than 150 miles of trails for day hikes and backpacking. Some of the most popular trails include the Chimneys Trail, Marufo Veg Trail, Outer Mountain Loop, and Dodson Trail. Other attractions include the Santa Elena Canyon and Mule Ears Peaks, two impressive rock towers seemingly thrust upward from the middle of the desert floor.

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

Arthur R. Gómez, A Most Singular Country: A History of Occupation in the Big Bend (1990); John Jameson, The Story of Big Bend National Park (1996); J. O. Langford with Fred Gipson, Big Bend: A Homesteader’s Story (1952); Ross A. Maxwell, The Big Bend of the Rio Grande: A Guide to the Rocks, Landscape, Geologic History, and Settlers of the Area of Big Bend National Park (1968).

Blue Ridge Parkway

The most popular unit within the U.S. National Park Service system, the Blue Ridge Parkway annually records more than 16 million visitors. The focal point of this linear park is a 469-mile stretch of two-lane, landscaped road that traverses the crests of the Blue Ridge Mountains and adjoining ranges. The parkway was constructed to accommodate tourist driving and to encourage recreational enjoyment of southern Appalachia. While used for local transportation, the parkway attracts millions of visitors who travel considerable distances for a range of recreational opportunities. In addition to showcasing the region’s natural beauty via scenic vistas and overlooks, the parkway provides access to hiking trails, picnic areas, campgrounds (for recreational vehicles as well as tent camping), and bodies of water—streams, rivers, ponds, and man-made lakes—for fishing and boating. Although no admission fees are charged for its use, the parkway is closed to commercial vehicles. All cars are required to observe a strictly enforced speed limit (generally 45-miles-per-hour, though slower speeds are posted in some sections).

The parkway was not the first tourist road planned for the Blue Ridge. In 1909 Colonel Joseph Hyde Pratt, attempting to capitalize on the growing popularity of automobiles in the United States, proposed a ridge-top toll road in a section of North Carolina’s and Georgia’s Blue Ridge. When World War I forced cancellation of the project, only one short segment of that road had been constructed (near Pineola, N.C.).

In the 1920s, growing out of the national trend toward constructing scenic parkways, a federally constructed tourist road, Skyline Drive, was built in the recently designated Shenandoah National Park, located in the northern Virginia Blue Ridge. By the mid-1930s, another tourist road—originally called the Appalachian Scenic Highway but soon renamed the Blue Ridge Parkway—was designated to connect Skyline Drive/ Shenandoah National Park with another newly established Appalachian park to the south: Great Smoky Mountains National Park. When completed, the Blue Ridge Parkway would enable tourists to travel between the two national parks through rural and at times undeveloped mountain landscapes without the visual interference of billboards and other manifestations of modern, commercial civilization. Another justification for the parkway was that it would provide economic relief to Depression-era residents of the Blue Ridge region.

Given its length and the difficulties of land acquisition and road construction, the parkway, begun on 11 September 1935, took 52 years to complete. The upper part of the road coursed through Virginia, while North Carolina won the bid over Tennessee for the parkway’s lower route. Necessary rights-of-way were obtained by the government through the voluntary sale of properties by landowners or through the exercising of eminent domain laws. Three Depression-era federal programs—the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the Emergency Relief Administration—channeled funds for the employment of laborers to work on the parkway’s roadbed, landscaping, and recreational facilities.

The parkway begins at the southern terminus of Skyline Drive near Waynesboro, Va., and courses 355 miles southward along the crest of the Blue Ridge range, at which point the road veers southwestward for more than 100 miles across such other mountain ranges as the Blacks, the Great Craggies, the Pisgah Ledge, the Great Balsams, and the Plott Balsams. The parkway ends near Cherokee, N.C., at the eastern entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Internationally renowned as a masterpiece of engineering and design, the parkway incorporates banked curves, extensive landscaping intended to create a “natural” appearance, and intricate stone masonry in many of the parkway’s tunnels, bridges, and viaducts. In the last-completed section of the parkway—a short stretch over Grandfather Mountain—is the Linn Cove Viaduct, a state-of-the-art suspension bridge that has become the parkway’s most photographed feature.

The parkway encompasses or borders a number of popular tourist destinations. In Virginia are the exhibition of historical Appalachian farm buildings at Humpback Rocks, the James River/ Kanawha Canal, the Peaks of Otter, Mabry Mill (an often photographed waterwheel gristmill), and the Blue Ridge Music Center (a museum and concert venue for interpreting and promoting regional music). Sites of interest along the parkway’s North Carolina section include Doughton Park, Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, Julian Price Park, Linville Falls, the Museum of North Carolina Minerals, Craggy Gardens, the Folk Art Center (an outlet for the exhibition and sale of regional crafts), Mount Pisgah (formerly part of the adjacent Biltmore Estate), and the Shining Rock Wilderness Area (a popular area for backpacking).

While the majority of campers, hikers, anglers, and bicyclists enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway between May and late October, the road remains in use during colder months, though particular sections may be closed to vehicles in the wake of storm-related damage.

TED OLSON

East Tennessee State University

Leonard M. Adkins, Walking the Blue Ridge: A Guide to the Trails of the Blue Ridge Parkway (2006); Ted Olson, Blue Ridge Folklife (1998); Tim Pegram, The Blue Ridge Parkway by Foot: A Park Ranger’s Memoir (2007); Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History (2006).

Bowden, Bobby

(b. 1929) COLLEGE FOOTBALL COACH.

The legendary football coach of the Florida State University Seminoles, Bobby Bowden ranks at or near, along with Joe Paterno, the top of the list of all-time winningest coaches in Division I collegiate football history.

Robert Cleckleer “Bobby” Bowden was born on 8 November 1929 in Birmingham, Ala. At 13, Bowden was bedridden for six months with rheumatic fever. Listening to radio broadcasts made him a fan of Crimson Tide football. He recovered and excelled at football, earning All State honors in 1948 at Woodlawn High School. With a scholarship to the University of Alabama he hoped to play quarterback, but he eloped in 1949 to marry his high school sweetheart, Ann Estock. In 1952, he transferred to Howard College and earned All-America honors. He was a member of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and graduated in 1953.

Bowden remained with the Bulldogs as an assistant coach at Howard College, 1954–55, and moved to South Georgia Junior College, 1956–58, before landing the head coach job at Howard College (now Samford University). From 1959 to 1962, Bowden posted a 31–6 record as coach of his alma mater. Bowden next went to Florida State University as the wide receivers coach under Bill Peterson, and then he went to West Virginia in 1965. Bowden served as offensive coordinator for four seasons before taking over the head coaching responsibilities in 1970. In six seasons, from 1970 to 1975, he coached the West Virginia Mountaineers to a 42–26 mark.

At 46 years old, Bowden accepted the head coach position at Florida State University in 1976. Within four years, a team that had won only four games over the previous three seasons was propelled to an 11–1 record in 1979. That team fell short of the national championship with a loss at the Orange Bowl.

From 1987–2000 Bowden’s Seminoles finished the season ranked in the top five. During those 14 seasons Florida State was 152–18–1 and earned the national championship titles in 1993 and 1999. Bowden’s teams also played in the championship game at three other bowl games over that stretch.

Since joining the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1992, Bowden won the conference title 12 times. Bowden was named conference coach of the year in 1993 and 1997. The field at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee was named for him in 2004.

Coach Bowden enjoyed recruiting, and his personal magnetism attracted talented players to FSU. Two Heisman trophy winners played under Bowden: quarterbacks Charlie Ward in 1993 and Chris Weinke in 1999. Twenty-four Seminoles were been named consensus All-Americans. Moreover, during his tenure 28 players were selected in the first round of the NFL draft. Since 1993, more than 100 Seminoles have been drafted into the pros.

Bowden is an iconic figure of college football. As a coach he enjoyed the limelight and the prestige he earned. He easily fielded the questions of the press, charmed football fans at speaking engagements, and enjoyed attention at public functions.

With a 33–21 win over West Virginia in the 2010 Gator Bowl, Bobby Bowden coached his final game as FSU head coach. His record as a head coach ended at 389 wins, 129 loses, and 4 ties.

LLEWELLYN D. COOK

Jacksonville State University

Mike Bynum, Bound for Glory: The Horatio Alger Story of FSU’s Bobby Bowden (1980); Mike Freeman, Bowden: How Bobby Bowden Forged a Football Dynasty (2009).

Bryant, Paul “Bear”

(1913–1983) FOOTBALL COACH.

Born 11 September 1913 to a sharecrop-ping family in Moro Bottom, Ark., Paul “Bear” Bryant became the most successful college football coach in history. The youngest of 11 children of Wilson Monroe and Ida Kilgore Bryant, Paul Bryant was born on a farm and sold farm goods to help his invalid father and his mother. At age 12 he earned his nickname by fighting a bear at the Lyric Theater in Fordyce, Ark. He played football for the Fordyce High School Red Bugs and received a football scholarship to the University of Alabama, where he played end.

Bryant was an assistant coach at the University of Alabama and at Vanderbilt University, then served two years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was head coach at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Alabama. After coaching his last game in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, Tenn., in December of 1982, Bryant had a record 323 victories. He died in January 1983, and his funeral was one of the largest in southern history, with an estimated 500,000 people turning out to see the funeral procession from Tuscaloosa to the Birmingham burial site.

Bryant was one of the modern South’s preeminent mythic figures. A product of the rural poverty so typical of the South in his youth, Bryant rose to national success. The Bear Bryant story is a rags-to-riches American tale, told in the southern vernacular. In his origins, Bryant symbolized the poor sharecrop-ping South, but he became a middle-class hero to well-off southerners who made football a part of their lifestyles.

During Bryant’s early years at Alabama, he was the center of controversy. In 1963 Saturday Evening Post accused Bryant of involvement in a scheme to throw a game. A jury trial exonerated him, but the national press followed this episode with charges Bryant encouraged unnecessary violence on the field. His coaching success and sheer longevity led to fundamental changes in his reputation by the 1970s. Sportswriters created a legend about Bryant with their stories of his toughness, generosity, compassion, shrewdness, and democratic egalitarianism. “Generations from now they will speak in hushed tones about the backwoodsy man from Fordyce whom the city slickers couldn’t beat,” wrote Memphis sportswriter Al Dunning when Bryant died. The New Yorker magazine referred to him as an “actual genius.” Observers compared him with Douglas MacArthur, John Wayne, and, most frequently, George Patton.

Paul “Bear” Bryant, University of Alabama football coach, 1970s (Courtesy of the Paul W. Bryant Museum/University of Alabama)

Although he was a national figure, southerners felt a special claim on Bryant. He was most admired in the South because he was a winning leader. For a people whose heroes sometimes symbolized lost causes, Bryant was a change. The Bryant legend was not just one of power and victory. Observers stressed his character and class, his concern for making athletes decent people. In his early career there were recruiting scandals and stories of his meanness, but these were forgotten when sportswriters began his apotheosis in the 1970s. The Bryant legend embodied aspects of earlier regional mythology—the New South hope of education transforming the region; the fighting South, with football as Celtic sublimation; and the Jeffersonian agrarian dream with Bryant as wise rural rustic. The Bryant legend is part of the Sports South myth, which views sports as central to the modern southern identity. Bryant was slow to recruit black athletes in the 1960s, and some observers saw him as the sports equivalent of another Alabamian of the era, George Wallace. But he later became one of the first Deep South coaches to recruit black athletes, seeing his need for their talents to remain competitive. He ironically came to embody the hope for a biracial South, in which southern blacks and whites, working together, will achieve great things off the football field as well as on it.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Birmingham News Staff, Remembering Bear (1983); Andy Doyle, in The Sporting World of the Modern South, ed. Patrick B. Miller (2002); Keith Dunnavant, Coach: The Life of Paul “Bear” Bryant (1996); James Peterson and Bill Cromartie, Bear Bryant: Countdown to Glory (1984); Charles Reagan Wilson, South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1987).

Busch Gardens

Busch Gardens Tampa, one of several Florida theme parks, is Tampa’s most popular tourist attraction and a leading example of urban-based amusement venues in the South. When Busch Gardens opened in 1959, it encompassed 15 acres of vegetation, birds, and limited amusements adjacent to a brewery that tourists and local residents could visit for no charge. The original gardens evolved into an elaborate African themed park that attracted more than four million visitors annually at the height of its popularity.

August A. Busch Jr., the chairman of the board and president of Anheuser Busch, sought a southeastern location for a brewery. Busch was familiar with the Tampa area because the St. Louis Cardinals, the major league baseball team that he owned, held its spring training in St. Petersburg. Busch initially purchased 152 acres and then expanded its holdings to 265 acres in late 1965, and eventually to its present size of 335 acres. During its first several years, Busch Gardens attracted about 1.5 million visitors annually, more than any other attraction in Florida. It included a hospitality house overseeing a lagoon where visitors could enjoy complementary glasses of Budweiser.

Busch Gardens opened a monorail in 1966 to carry passengers above its newly created Wild Animal Kingdom, recreating the African Veldt. The area included several animal species found in Africa, such as chimps, lions, rhinos, cheetahs, and elephants. In 1970, when Disney was about to open its Orlando facility, Busch decided to compete. He announced to expand Busch Gardens and charge admission for the first time.

Busch Gardens added several different sections including Nairobi, Serengeti, Stanleyville, Congo, and Timbuktu. The park also included a large amphitheater and a movie theater. In late 1975, advertising for Busch Gardens emphasized the African theme and branded the park as “The Dark Continent.” Advertisements included such headlines as “The Best Part of a Florida Vacation Is Spending a Day in Africa” and “Instead of a Zoo, We Created a Continent.” According to the general manager, the “Dark Continent” offered visitors “a place where the entire family can step back in time and relive the misery, intrigue and adventure associated with big game, native folklore and classic feature films made on location in Africa.” Eventually, “The Dark Continent” was dropped and the name Busch Gardens Tampa Bay was adopted. Starting in 2006, visitors entered Busch Gardens Africa, a brand introduced to correspond with the Anheuser-Busch park in Williamsburg, Va., whose name was changed to Busch Gardens Europe.

In addition to its several types of rides, animals, elaborate vegetation, and a variety of shows, Busch Gardens offers roller coasters. Its first roller coaster, the Python, opened in 1976. The Scorpion followed in the Timbuktu area in 1980. Kumba opened in 1993, claiming to be the largest steel roller coaster in the Southeast. Montu, an Egyptian-themed coaster, opened in 1996. Gwazi, the “Southeast’s largest and fastest double wooden coaster,” was completed in 1999. SheiKra was introduced in 2005, billed as North America’s first dive coaster.

Busch Gardens has been positively recognized by theme park analysts and aficionados. Forbes magazine recognized it in 2005 as among the world’s top-10 amusement parks. In 2000 Forbes reported that frequent riders of steel roller coasters voted Montu as their second favorite, and the Golden Ticket Awards presented by Amusement Today have several times recognized Montu as one of the country’s top-10 steel roller coasters. Busch Gardens has also won several awards from the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, including prizes for the quality of its entertainment and its landscaping.

Busch Gardens has played a significant role in Tampa’s economy, consistently rated as the most important draw for tourists and a major employment generator. During the 1980s it ranked in the top-10 private-sector employers in Hillsborough County. The Busch brewery in Tampa closed in 1995. In mid-2008, Belgian brewer InBev NV acquired Anheuser-Busch, and the acquisition included the 10 Anheuser-Busch theme parks. In 2009 InBev sold all Busch properties to the Blackstone Group, which removed the last remaining traces of Anheuser-Busch ownership other than the name.

ROBERT KERSTEIN

University of Tampa

Dana Anderson, Journal of Popular Culture (Fall 1999); Ken Breslauer, Roadside Paradise: The Golden Age of Florida’s Tourist Attractions, 1929–1971 (2000); Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments (2001); Karen Haymon Long, Tampa Tribune (27 January 2002); Gary Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (2005).

Case, Everett

(1900–1966) COLLEGE BASKETBALL COACH.

Indiana native Everett N. Case helped bring basketball insanity to North Carolina. Hired by North Carolina State in 1946, he successfully transplanted Indiana’s high school basketball mania to North Carolina at the college level through a combination of aggressive on-the-court play, successful teams, and tremendous promotional abilities. His legacy includes his name on the ACC tournament MVP trophy, the popularity of that conference tournament, and the tradition of cutting down nets after great wins.

When N.C. State hired him on the recommendation of renowned coach Chuck Taylor, Case already held a record of 726–75, including four Indiana state championships. After a trip to Raleigh, Case sensed that the university and the area were ripe for basketball madness. His 1946–47 team, nearly all from Indiana and, like Case, fresh out of the service, was an instant success. The 1946–47 running and pressing “Hoosier Hotshots” won the Southern Conference tournament and received a bid to the NIT. State lost in the regional semifinal to Kentucky—coached by Adolph Rupp. It was the only meeting of these titans of college basketball.

In the fall of 1949, the new 12,000-seat William Neal Reynolds Coliseum opened, the largest arena on the East Coast at the time. Case took immediate advantage of the coliseum, inaugurating the Dixie Classic tournament during Christmas week that same year. Matching the Big Four schools of UNC, Duke, Wake Forest, and host State against four of the nation’s top programs, the tournament instantly became a success.

Case’s teams went on to win 45 games in a row in Southern Conference play and remained undefeated in six tournaments. State continued its dominance in the new Atlantic Coast Conference, winning the first three ACC titles. Case’s success motivated other schools to upgrade their programs. UNC brought in Frank McGuire after his St. John’s Redmen beat Case twice in one year. Wake Forest hired Bones McKinney, and Duke hired one of Case’s boys, Vic Bubbas. These fine coaches, as well as problems in Case’s locker room, made the 1955–56 team the last truly dominant State team for nearly two decades.

Recruiting violations, a national cheating scandal, and his own health hounded Case’s second decade at State. Case recognized the importance of recruiting early on, running afoul of Indiana high school officials. At State, the program suffered a one-year, then a four-year probation—at that time the longest ever handed out by the NCAA—primarily for the then-common practices of holding tryouts and paying travel expenses of recruits.

If Case continually tested the NCAA recruiting rules, he was proactive in fighting gambling corruption. Revelations that gamblers were bribing college players, especially in the area around New York City, rocked the nation in 1951. Case brought in agents of the FBI and the N.C. State Bureau of Identification to warn players about being involved with gamblers. In 1961 the scandal broke anew, again in New York City. The web of money and point shaving soon entangled players at both State and Carolina. Three State players admitted taking money from gamblers. The penalty for both universities was a deemphasis of college basketball in order to lessen its allure for gamblers. Games were limited to 18, geographic restricts were placed on scholarships, and the Dixie Classic was ended.

Two years later Case’s declining health took a turn for the worse. Over the course of the 1962–63 season, he suffered from shingles and gout and finally had gall bladder surgery. Confident that the next year’s squad would be one of his best, he attempted to coach one more year, but after the second game of the year, a close loss at Wake Forest, his declining health forced him to retire. Pete Maravich took over the team, which won the ACC tournament, defeating the heavily favored Duke.

Everett Case died in his home in Raleigh on 30 April 1966 of heart disease related to myeloma. Of the 57 young men he coached, 23 returned to Raleigh for the funeral. His will divided his estate among all the boys who had played for him.

Case left a legacy of success. He was 397–135 at State, with six straight conference championships and 10 in all. Case was an innovative coach who brought new techniques to the game—charting, game films, and scouting. His up-tempo offense and aggressive defense changed the game of college basketball and attracted fans. State led the nation in on-campus attendance seven years in a row. The legacy of all the Big Four coaches of this era, particularly Case, is the premier college basketball conference in the country.

PAUL R. BEEZLEY

Jacksonville State University

Casinos, Mississippi

During the late 20th century, casino gambling, previously restricted to Las Vegas, Nev., and Atlantic City, N.J., spread rapidly across the nation. In the states of the old Confederacy, Indian bands developed casinos in North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama. Louisiana and Arkansas have “racinos” that operate at dog and horse tracks. Mississippi and Louisiana adopted the “riverboat” approach.

Of all the places taking advantage of this new wave of gambling in the South, by far the most successful are two spots in Mississippi—the Gulf Coast and Tunica County, just south of Memphis. Politicians from these regions collaborated to secure casino legislation in 1990. Both parts of the state were in dire need of economic revitalization in the 1980s. The Delta had long been one of the poorest parts of the nation, and the resort communities on the Gulf Coast had entered a period of relative decline.

The initiative to legalize casinos in Mississippi began in the late 1980s. Supporters chose a low-key strategy. Rather than styling their bill as a statewide revenue measure that would require a 60 percent vote, they crafted it as local legislation for specific counties. Thus, as local legislation requiring only a simple majority vote, the casino bill slipped through and was signed by Governor Ray Mabus in spring 1990. Fortunately for the casino advocates, the attention of antigambling forces was focused on defeating a statewide lottery bill pending in the same session.

Casino opponents launched lawsuits to overturn the new law, but they were unsuccessful. Soon, several coastal counties and Delta counties authorized gambling. On 1 August 1992, Isle of Capri in Biloxi was the first to open. Within two years more than two dozen casinos had commenced operation although some soon moved or closed.

Tunica County’s position near Memphis ensured that it would be the principal locus of Delta casinos. Though even closer to Memphis, the voters of DeSoto County spurned casinos. There was an early shakeout period during which small dockside operations folded while well-financed big barges with adjacent hotels came to dominate the market. In 1992 there were only 16 hotel rooms in all of Tunica County. By 2000 there were 6,000 rooms with more on the way, and Tunica had become the nation’s third largest gaming center. In 2004 the county boasted some 14,000 slot machines and more than 400 tables in more than a half million square feet of gaming space. By that time nine casinos were well established with Sam’s Town, Hollywood, Horseshoe, and the Grand (now Harrah’s) dominant.

A similar pattern of early small operators followed by bigger establishments emerged along the Gulf Coast. On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, the dominant coastal properties with large hotels and big-name entertainment were Grand-Biloxi, Grand-Gulfport (now Island View), Imperial Palace (now IP), and, most notably, the luxurious 1,740-room Beau Rivage.

On 29 August 2005 the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina devastated the casinos along the coastal beaches and seriously damaged the back bay properties as well. Katrina proved that floating barges were too vulnerable on the hurricane-prone coast, so the legislature, anxious to restore jobs and preserve tax revenue, amended casino law to allow casinos to relocate up to 800 feet from shore. Three casinos did not rebuild, but the other properties, including Isle, IP, Grand, and Beau Rivage, soon remodeled and resumed operation. The Hard Rock, which had been under construction when the storm hit, finally opened over a year later.

Although much smaller in scale than those near Tunica and on the Gulf Coast, several casinos operate in the southern river region at Vicksburg, Greenville, Lulu, and Natchez.

Two important decisions were key to the success of Mississippi’s casinos. First, the bill drafters opted for Las Vegas–style gambling with strong regulations to guarantee the integrity of the games but with relatively low taxes, no limit on the number of casinos, and very few operational restrictions. This gave Mississippi operators a distinct competitive advantage over casino boats in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Louisiana, which were beset with higher taxes and stiffer regulations such as required cruising and loss limits.

The second important provision in the law allowed flexibility in the type and placement of the floating casinos. The image of “riverboat” casinos is one of tourists gambling on modern replicas of 19th-century sternwheelers, but the Mississippi legislation set no such requirements on casino appearance. Most Mississippi casinos developed the technique of surrounding huge barges with land-based lobbies, shops, and hotels to create the effect of one large building even though the actual gaming floor was technically floating. Tunica County developers dug ditches as “tributaries” of the Mississippi so that their barges could float in shallow manmade lagoons well back from the edge of the river.

From an economic standpoint, Mississippi casinos were successful even beyond the vision of the legislators who authorized gambling in 1990. Ten years later, only Nevada and New Jersey derived more tax revenue from gaming. Tunica County and the coastal gaming counties built new schools, roads, and other public facilities. In 2004 the state’s 29 nontribal casinos employed nearly 30,000 with a payroll of $885 million and served 8–12 million customers, more than three-quarters of whom were from out of state. The incredible growth that Mississippi casinos experienced in the 1990s has slowed because of increased competition from surrounding states. But thanks to a good head start and a continued favorable regulatory and tax environment, the Mississippi casino industry continues to exhibit steady, if slowed, growth.

BRADLEY R. RICE

Clayton State University

Denise von Herrmann, ed., Resorting to Casinos: The Mississippi Gambling Industry (2006), The Big Gamble: The Politics of Lottery and Casino Expansion (2002); Steve Bourie, American Casino Guide 2009 (2008).

Christmas

The first celebration of Christmas in North America was likely by the Spanish in the 1500s, and it certainly took place in the South, although whether in Florida or the Southwest is unknown. The first recorded commemoration of Christmas in the British colonies on the mainland was in Jamestown, Va., in 1607. About 40 of the original 100 colonists, unsure of their survival, gathered in a primitive wooden chapel for a somber day. Until well into the 19th century, the Protestants of New England looked with suspicion upon Christmas as a “popish” day, but southerners generally encouraged a joyous celebration.

Gentleman farmers, in particular, regarded the day more as a time of relaxation and social activity than as a religious holiday. They preserved such European customs as caroling, burning the Yule log, and decorating with greenery. But the environment worked to make a distinctive festival. Native seafood and turkey replaced the traditional European dishes of beef and goose. White southerners added regional touches such as eating fried oysters, drinking eggnog with rum, and going on a Christmas morning hunt for foxes or other small game. Pines replaced European firs and cedars for the Christmas tree, and Spanish moss was used as a primitive “angel hair” for decorating in the Deep South. The poinsettia became a custom in 1825 when a Charleston man with that name brought a red flower back from Mexico as a gift, and others were soon decorating with poinsettias.

The French in Louisiana introduced the tradition of Christmas fireworks, setting off firecrackers and firing rifles. Until the World War I era, southerners rarely used fireworks on the Fourth of July but did punctuate the Christmas holiday with them. A long-standing Cajun custom is the Christmas Eve bonfires, known as feux de joie (fires of joy), burning all night along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.

Three southern states were the first in the nation to make Christmas a legal holiday—Louisiana and Arkansas in 1831 and Alabama in 1836. The plantation was the center for the most elaborate and distinctive antebellum southern celebration of Christmas. In backcountry rural areas, plantation houses became the scene of sometimes-extravagant Christmas partying, eating, and playing, including the morning hunt. For slaves, Christmas had special meaning. December was a slow work month on the typical plantation, and it became the social season for them. The slaves’ holiday lasted from Christmas to New Year’s Day. The setting off of fireworks became a noted custom among the slaves as well as the whites. The end of Christmas at the New Year saw a more somber mood often settle among slaves as slave hiring and contracts often turned over, sometimes resulting in slave auctions and family separations.

Christmas as currently celebrated, in broad outline, was an invention of the 19th-century Victorians, who sentimentalized the day and made it the focus for new traditions. By the 1930s the celebration of Christmas had become even more secular than before, with the exchange of gifts for adults and Santa Claus for children. The religious aspects of Christmas were played down by the Victorians, but by the mid-20th century this dimension had become stronger. Some Protestant churches even imitate, in modified manner, the Catholic midnight Eucharist. In Jewish communities the festival of Hanukkah has expanded and absorbed many of the characteristics of Christmas.

Christmas has become the holiday par excellence in the South as elsewhere in the United States. Merchants begin to prepare for it and to advertise their offerings long before Halloween. The Santa Claus parades come early in December, if not sooner, and parties are given throughout the month. Fireworks, the antebellum custom, are still seen. Christmas trees adorn the streets, and one southern state, North Carolina, is a national leader in the number of trees harvested and first in terms of dollars made per tree. Christmas programs and music are the fare on television and radio. Cards and presents flood the post offices. Charities set up stalls on street corners and with ringing of bells summon passersby to make contributions. Churches, of course, have special services. A few southern families make some effort to celebrate the 12 days culminating on 6 January, a day sometimes called “Old Christmas” (which is perhaps a faint recollection of when Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, changing the celebration of Christmas from the 6 January date on the Julian calendar). In New Orleans the season of Carnival officially begins with Twelfth Night parties on the eve of Old Christmas. Many communities now sponsor candlelight tours of historic places at Christmas, reinforcing the holiday’s ties to the idea of tradition itself.

ALLEN CABANISS

University of Mississippi

William M. Auld, Christmas Traditions (1968); John E. Baur, Christmas on the American Frontier (1961); Emyl Jenkins, Southern Christmas (1995); Harnett T. Kane, The Southern Christmas Book: The Full Story from the Earliest Times to the Present: People, Customs, Conviviality, Carols, Cooking (1958); Joanne B. Young, Christmas in Williamsburg (1970).

Cobb, Ty

(1886–1961) BASEBALL PLAYER.

Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb, arguably the greatest of all professional baseball players and the first nationally known southern player, was born on 19 December 1886 in Banks County, Ga. His father was William Herschel Cobb, an itinerant schoolmaster who, after moving his family to Royston in Franklin County, Ga., served as state senator, county school superintendent, and editor of the local newspaper. His mother, Amanda Chitwood Cobb, was the daughter of a prominent Banks County landowner.

Tyrus Cobb showed early signs of being an intelligent, hard-driving youngster, impatient with his own and others’ shortcomings. Skinny but fast and well coordinated, he starred on the town baseball team and acquired a burning ambition to pursue the game professionally. That ambition clashed with the wishes of his equally strong-willed father, who intended his elder son to be a lawyer, physician, or career military man. Finally, Tyrus won W. H. Cobb’s permission to try out with the Augusta team in the South Atlantic League. Although he was a failure at Augusta in 1904, Cobb came back the next year to lead the league in hitting and thus gained the attention of major league scouts. The 18-year-old Cobb was about to join the Detroit Tigers in the American League when he learned that his father had been shot to death by his mother, who claimed she had mistaken him for a prowler.

Arriving in Detroit late in August 1905, “Ty” Cobb (as sportswriters soon dubbed him) finished that season with the Tigers. The next spring, while his mother was tried and acquitted on a charge of voluntary manslaughter, young Cobb struggled to gain a regular place on the Detroit ball club. It was, he said long afterward, “the most miserable and humiliating experience I’ve ever been through.” Cobb was subjected to the customary harassments and petty cruelties that rookies usually had to endure in that day. But as a sensitive, troubled young man, a proud southerner among ballplayers who were mainly Irish-American northerners, Cobb reacted strongly against such treatment and ended up a friendless loner on the Detroit team. The death of his father and his painful early experiences with his teammates largely account for why he became, as he later described himself, “a snarling wildcat,” driven to prove himself to everybody, including himself, season after season and game after game.

Prove himself he did. In 1907 Cobb won the American League batting title, in the course of leading the Tigers to the first of three straight league championships. For 11 of the next 12 years he outhit everyone in the American League and frequently led as well in runs scored and bases stolen. Unquestionably the top star of baseball’s “dead-ball” era, Cobb remained an outstanding player after the advent of the “lively ball” in 1920 and the emergence of the power-oriented style of baseball heralded by Babe Ruth’s home run exploits. From 1921 through 1926 Cobb managed the Detroit team and continued to play the outfield; his final two years as a baseball player were with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. He retired with an astonishing lifetime batting average of .367 and some 42 other records.

Already a millionaire by the time he hung up his uniform, Cobb ultimately built his personal fortune to $10 million. A man who had quarreled and brawled with teammates, umpires, opposing players, spectators, and many people off the field, Cobb continued to be a hard man to get along with in his long years of retirement. In 1947 his marriage of 39 years to Charlie Marion Lombard Cobb, an Augusta native, ended in divorce, and nine years later a second marriage, to Frances Fairburn Cass Cobb of Buffalo, N.Y., came to a similar end. Moreover, he became estranged from his surviving three children. By the time of his own death from cancer on 17 July 1961, in Atlanta, few people remained whom Cobb could call his friends. His renown in baseball, however, remains undiminished.

CHARLES C. ALEXANDER

Ohio University

Charles C. Alexander, Ty Cobb: Baseball’s Fierce Immortal (1984); Ty Cobb, with Al Stump, My Life in Baseball: The True Record (1993); John D. McCallum, The Tiger Wore Spikes: An Informal Biography of Ty Cobb (1956); Don Rhodes, Ty Cobb: Safe at Home (2008); Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by Men Who Played It (1974); Al Stump, Cobb: A Biography (1996).

Colonial Williamsburg

Something more ubiquitously American than uniquely southern permeates the air about Colonial Williamsburg. What appears to epitomize southern genteel traditions is more a slice of general Americana—a replica of history as all Americans might wish it had been—than a monument to the Tidewater aristocracy that bred generations of influential southerners.

The real Williamsburg, founded in 1699, appeared less tidy and behaved less decorously than today’s bewigged guides would have the tourists believe. About 2,000 people lived permanently in what served Virginia more as a political and cultural mecca than as a trading center. At least half those residents were black, slaves who served the wishes of the other half. The pace of life shuffled along leisurely except during the “Publick Times”—generally held once each season during the 1700s, but daily fare for the interpretive 1900s—when either the provincial courts or legislatures held sessions. Williamsburg surged and ebbed to its own social tides through the colonial period, until 1781 when the capital was moved upriver to Richmond. Then, except for the frenzy of the Peninsula campaign in 1862, it declined into dormant insignificance.

Revival came at the hands of the local rector, W. A. R. Goodman, who convinced John D. Rockefeller Jr. to bequeath part of the family fortune to fund a restoration project. Work began in 1926, and by the 1930s buildings were being opened to the public. Rockefeller spent over $80 million in 40 years as 600 postcolonial structures were demolished, more than 80 existing period buildings restored, and replicas reconstructed over excavated foundations. His success spawned other restoration projects across the South, notably those in Salem and Savannah. Yet Williamsburg has persisted as the most popular “preserved” area. By the 1960s more than 15 million visitors had crowded the 130-acre site, and a second phase of restoration and reinterpretation was instituted to meet demand. Popularity peaked during the American Revolution Bicentennial.

A cultural commitment is explicit in the purpose behind Colonial Williams-burg—to interpret American history in light of acknowledged national values. John D. Rockefeller III, son of the restorer, said: “Colonial Williamsburg must help make history—not simply serve as a reminder of history.” As such, there is more to the pristine atmosphere than a mere commercialization of a past regional graciousness. The guided tours stress less the lifestyles of the gentry than the values of liberty they came to hold. Journalist Bill Moyers has argued that in a place where “people lived routinely and seldom easily,” more modern Americans, from all regions, find cultural significance from a presentation “too tidy to be real,” but too encompassing to be missed. In 1994 Bill Moyers’s comment proved all too true when a mock slave auction provoked the ire of black religious and civil rights groups, including the Virginia chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Virginia branch of the NAACP. Before the production, a small group of demonstrators gathered, accusing Colonial Williamsburg of sanitizing history, but the show went on nonetheless. After a moving dramatization of the horrors of slavery, at least one of the protest organizers retracted his objections to the production, claiming, “Pain had a face. Indignity had a body. Suffering had tears.”

Colonial Williamsburg found itself in a fiscal decline during the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, and into the 2000s, dropping in attendance from 1.1 million in 1985 to 707,000 in 2008. By 2006 the historic district was operating at a $36 million deficit. Because of waning of tourism dollars, the 2000s saw development encroach upon Colonial Williamsburg. In February 2007 developers announced that they were building more than 300 new homes on the historic Carr’s Hill tract, and in December 2007 Colonial Williamsburg made the decision to sell Carter’s Grove, a 750-acre plantation on the north shore of the James River, as well as a number of other landholdings.

GARY FREEZE

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1999); Robert P. Maccubbin, Williamsburg, Virginia: A City before the State, 1699–1999 (2000); Marcus Whiffen, The Public Buildings of Williamsburg, Colonial Capital of Virginia: An Architectural History (1958); George Humphrey Yetter, Williamsburg Before and After: The Rebirth of Virginia’s Colonial Capital (1988).

Daytona 500

The Daytona 500 is a 500-mile automobile race run annually in Daytona Beach, Fla., as the opening event in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (NSCS) championship season. Daytona sports one of the few beaches in the United States where the sand is packed hard enough to drive on, and auto racing on Daytona Beach itself dates back to the turn of the 20th century. But the modern history of the Daytona 500 dates to 22 February 1959, when the first 500-mile race was held at the newly opened Daytona International Speedway, the venue for the February season opener ever since.

Lee Petty, the father of Richard Petty, won the 1959 Daytona 500, and the track’s history and that of the Petty clan have been closely aligned ever since. Son Richard won NASCAR’S most prestigious race seven times. (Petty’s record-setting 200th career win was also at Daytona but in the July race, not the 500.) Sociologist John Shelton Reed once pointed out that Petty is one of only three men known throughout the South as “The King,” the others being Jesus and Elvis.

For more than a half century, the Daytona 500 has been NASCAR’S biggest, richest, most prestigious event. The total purse for the 2008 race was $18,700,000, with $1,506,040 going to winner Ryan Newman of Indiana. Annual attendance at the event is not reported but is reliably estimated to be on the order of a quarter million fans.

The 1979 Daytona 500 was the first NASCAR championship race to be covered by live television. CBS viewers of the event witnessed one of the most spectacular finishes in the race’s storied history. The two race leaders, Cale Yar-borough and Donnie Allison, crashed in Turn Three of the final lap, allowing Richard Petty to shoot past for his sixth Daytona 500 victory. The excitement at the finish line was as nothing compared to the Yarborough-Allison fistfight that broke out in Turn Three.

Daytona 500 winners comprise a who’s who of NASCAR. In addition to the Pettys, event winners have included such storied names in American racing as Junior Johnson, Fireball Roberts, Mario Andretti, Cale and LeeRoy Yar-borough, A. J. Foyt, Bennie Parsons, Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon. Bobby Allison was 50 years old when he won the race in 1988, the oldest winner ever. Jeff Gordon was the youngest (age 25 years, 6 months) when he won his first Daytona 500 (of three) in 1997.

NASCAR has had a long if thin history of female competitors beginning with Sara Christian, who competed in NASCAR’S inaugural season in 1949. But the only woman ever to compete in the Daytona 500 was Janet Guthrie in 1977. Guthrie was also the first woman to drive in the Indianapolis 500.

Twenty-four race car drivers have been killed at the Daytona track, but only one died in the Daytona 500 itself. Dale Earnhardt (“The Intimidator”) was killed in a wreck on the last turn of the final lap of the 2001 event. (Eight other drivers have died in Daytona 500 practice runs or qualifying attempts.) Earnhardt’s death was truly the end of a NASCAR era and stimulated widespread discussion about driver safety and NASCAR’S role in assuring it. The only like event in recent memory that has had an equivalent impact on the popular culture was the death of Princess Diana (who, it seems appropriate to add, also perished in a high-speed automobile crash).

As part of its Bicentennial Celebration, in May 2001 the Library of Congress recognized the Daytona 500 as a “Local Legacy” of enduring historical and cultural significance. In the recognition ceremony, Florida congressman John Mica, remarked, “The Daytona 500 has become known as the Great American Race, and is a source of entertainment for countless Americans. . . . [Its] designation as a Local Legacy will help ensure that our future generations continue to appreciate [its] significance.”

JIM WRIGHT

University of Central Florida

Ed Hinton, Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black (2002); Daytona 500 Web site: www.daytona 500.com; J. J. O’Malley, The Daytona 500: 50 Years, the Great American Race (2007); Bob Zeller, Daytona 500: An Official History (2002).

Dean, “Dizzy”

(1911–1974) BASEBALL PLAYER.

Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean, who was born in Lucas, Ark., in 1911, toiled in cotton fields all over the South as the son of a poor migratory farmer. Dean never advanced past the second grade. Enlistment in the army during the Great Depression gave him comparative stability and a nickname that lasted, “Dizzy.”

Dean’s return to civilian life brought him a contract in the far-reaching St. Louis Cardinal farm system and a quick advancement to the parent club. It was his first step en route to an eventual place in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Dean’s fastball became a feared weapon for the Cardinals. Many hitters knew what it was to be knocked down by a loud and proud Dean. A high-and-tight Dean fastball was described very accurately by the opposition as “high neck in.”

Dizzy Dean, Arkansas-born baseball player and sportscaster, 1930s (National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.)

The boldness of the flame-throwing Dean gained just as much attention as his pitching. His first employer, Branch Rickey, quickly learned this when he confronted Dean, telling the young pitcher he was quite a braggart. Dean’s reply, quoted in dialect, was an unblinking “’Tain’t braggin’ if you kin really do it!” The combination of excellent pitching and colorful personality made Dean one of the sport’s greatest gate attractions and, in turn, one of its wealthiest ballplayers. Yet, his eccentricities drove many crazy. In one game, troubled by an umpire’s call and what he believed to be poor backing by his own team, he decided to lob the ball to opposing hitters.

One of many high points in Dean’s career was the 1934 World Series. After winning the first game, he was put on a shortwave hookup to Antarctica to talk with famed explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd. “Howdy, Dick Byrd,” shouted Dean. In the fourth game of the Series, in a pinch-running role, he was flattened by an infielder’s throw and carried off on a stretcher. He reported later, “They X-rayed my head and found nothing.” The statement was used to full advantage by the press. Then, in the seventh and final game, he shut out the Detroit Tigers.

A broken toe, the result of a line drive during an all-star game, reduced Dean’s efficiency considerably and led to an earlier retirement than desired. Dean had learned well, however, how to take advantage of his uniqueness and was soon entertaining people from the radio booth, doing play-by-play broadcasts. The hillbilly image was played to the hilt—and very profitably. A Dizzy Dean broadcast introduced such terms as slud, swang, press-peration, airs (errors), and spart (spirit), as well as players called Scorn (Skowron), Bearer (Berra), Mannul (Mantle), and Richison (Richardson), always intermingled with a very liberal sprinkling of “ain’t.” When his cornpone English brought protests from teachers, among others, Dean candidly assessed, “A lot of people who ain’t saying ain’t, ain’t eating.” If he had a favorite word, though, it was “I.”

Wealthy and retired, Dean moved “down home” to the Ozarks to live out his life. He is buried in Wiggins, Miss., and the Dizzy Dean Museum, which is a part of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame, displays his memorabilia in Jackson, Miss.

JOHN E. DIMEGLIO

Mankato State University

Robert Gregory, Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball during the Great Depression (1993); John Heidenry, The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series—and America’s Heart—during the Great Depression (2008); Curt Smith, America’s Dizzy Dean (1978); Vince Staten, Ol’ Diz: A Biography of Dizzy Dean (1992).

Disney World

Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Fla., is a vacation resort complex that ranks as one of the South’s most popular holiday spots and draws nonsoutherners to the region as well. It includes three amusement parks (the Magic Kingdom, MGM Studios, and the Animal Kingdom), numerous hotels and resorts, campgrounds, golf courses, shopping centers, and the EPCOT Center (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). This complex, which opened in 1971, is on 25,000 acres of land (40 square miles, or twice the size of Manhattan Island) and, like a municipality, provides many of its own services. It represents the fruition of Walt Disney’s ideas, which were first expressed in the opening of Disneyland, near Anaheim, Calif., in 1955.

Disneyland pioneered as the prototype theme park, but later parks, such as Six Flags over Georgia (Atlanta), Six Flags over Texas (Dallas), Opry-land (Nashville), and even Dollywood (Pigeon Forge, Tenn.), which all borrowed heavily from Disney, focused on aspects of the past or present southern experience. Both Disneyland in California and Disney World in Florida originated ideas that relate to city planning and architecture, such as the extensive use of mass transit and the design of spaces to entertain people.

The Magic Kingdom, Disney World’s first amusement park, covers 100 acres with activities—ranging from exhibits and rides to services such as restaurants—oriented around particular conceptual or historic themes. These themes come from Disney’s perceptions of popular ideas about the American experience—and include small-town Midwest America about 1900 in Main Street USA, American history in Frontierland, the importance of technology in Tomorrowland, and literary and mythic figures and themes in Fantasyland. Despite their location in the South, few of these popularizations embodied in Disney World relate directly to the region, although in 2008 Disney World brought 17 million people to central Florida, making the park the most visited theme park in the world.

In 1982 Disney World opened its second theme park adjacent to the Magic Kingdom: EPCOT Center. The inspiration for EPCOT Center was the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, Walt Disney’s idea of a utopian city of the future, a place where technology and machines improved quality of life, cars would travel underground, and alternate forms of transportation, such as the monorail, would operate efficiently above ground. The theme park took the ideals of a futuristic city and incorporated them into informative and educational rides. In addition to the world of the future, internationally themed rides, shops, and restaurants, which highlight the individual cultures and traditions of 11 countries around the world, form a ring around a “lagoon” in the center of the park in anachronistic juxtaposition with the futuristic essence of the rest of the park. Eventually, as the future became the present, the future that Disney and the park’s creators imagined has begun to seem dated, resembling science fiction more than the actual future. Today, the park is simply known as Epcot.

In 1989 Disney opened Disney-MGM Studios, a park modeled on the theme of a Hollywood motion-picture studio. Rides and live entertainment are based on famous films and Disney-produced pictures and television shows, such as Toy Story, Playhouse Disney, Raiders of the Lost Ark (“Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular!,” a live-action production that includes a plot, several stunts, and a great deal of fire), and Sunset Boulevard. In 2007 Disney officials announced that the park’s name would be rebranded as Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

In 1998 Disney opened its fourth and largest single park: Animal Kingdom, a 500-acre, wildlife-themed park that contains a number of real-animal habitats, fictional African and Asian villages, international restaurants (such as the Restaurantosaurus and the Yak & Yeti), elaborate parades with Disney characters dressed in safari garb, thrill rides, and live stage productions of well-known Disney films, such as Festival of the Lion King and Finding Nemo: The Musical.

Most of the rides, shows, and performances throughout the parks are given by extremely sophisticated, computer controlled (“audio-animatronics”) robots, appropriate perhaps to the high-technology of South Florida. These robots ensure identical presentations for each audience. Numerous forms of mass transit, ranging from a monorail to buses to horse-drawn wagons, move visitors around the parks and allow easy access to other parts of the resort. The parks have many other architectural and city planning features that make the experience pleasant for visitors as well as serving as models for what humanized technology can do.

Disney’s graphics, architecture, and technology blend to create a “magic” aura where visitors can suspend their disbelief and enjoy themselves. The rides, robots, and attractions allow them to return for a moment to their own childhood and to relive the mythic origins of the nation. The parks, with their own versions of American history, folklore, and technology, serve as a unifying experience for the millions of Americans who have visited them. The parks provide a shared cultural experience, a common interpretation of history (albeit somewhat fantasized), and a vision of the future that results in greater cultural sameness among southerners as well as among other groups of Americans.

DAVID M. JOHNSON

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

Richard E. Foglesong, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando (2003); Carl Hiaasen, Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World (1998); Margaret J. King, ed., Journal of Popular Culture (Summer 1981); David Koenig, Realityland: True-Life Adventures at Walt Disney World (2007); Jeff Kurtti, Since the World Began: Walt Disney World, the First 25 Years (1996); Charles Ridgway, Spinning Disney’s World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent (2007); Walt Disney Productions, The Story of Walt Disney World (1973).

Dogpatch USA

Dogpatch USA was an Arkansas theme park based on the popular and long-running Al Capp comic strip, Li’l Abner. Located in a remote and rugged area of the Ozarks, Dogpatch USA survived for about a quarter century, closing its gates for good in the early 1990s.

Inspired by the success of Branson’s Silver Dollar City, which had opened in 1960, a group of businessmen in the small town of Harrison, Ark., about 40 miles south of Branson, formed Recreation Enterprises, Inc., for the purpose of founding their own tourist attraction. The Arkansas investors obtained permission from Capp to use his characters and allowed the Boston-based comic to invest in Recreation Enterprises, Inc. The result was Dogpatch USA, a theme park located on the site of an abandoned farming community known as Marble Falls, situated in a rural area 10 miles south of Harrison.

Capp flew in from Boston to attend the grand opening on 18 May 1968, and thousands of visitors got their first glimpses of the zany hillbilly denizens of Dogpatch—Li’l Abner and the Yokums, Daisy Mae and the Scraggses, Lonesome Polecat, Hairless Joe, and a massive statue of Gen. Jubilation T. Corn-pone, the town’s Civil War hero, at the entrance to the park. They also got to see the saggy-roofed log buildings that local workers had constructed to resemble the slovenly dwellings of Capp’s imaginary mountain village. Taking a page from Silver Dollar City’s successful theme park efforts, Dogpatch USA featured Ozark musicians and craftspeople, resulting in an awkward mix of blatant hillbilly stereotyping and cultural celebration. An economic impact study had predicted that the park would ultimately bring in more than a million visitors per year and contribute $5 million annually to the local economy, but the investors did not seem convinced. At the close of the first season, they sold Dogpatch USA to a Little Rock businessman, the first of many times the park would change hands.

Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and his wife beneath the statue of Gen. Jubilation T. Cornpone near the entrance of Dogpatch USA (Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville)

The new owner, Jess Odom, announced plans to spend millions of dollars to make Dogpatch USA the equal of such amusement parks as Six Flags and Disneyland. At the very least, Odom knew how to attract publicity, for in early 1969 he generated national headlines by hiring former Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as general manager of the park. Although Faubus’s tenure at Dogpatch USA would prove a brief one, Odom upgraded the park’s attractions by building a railroad, a roller coaster, and other rides and by hiring a creative director to supervise the actors portraying Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, and the other characters. In the early 1970s, Odom constructed Marble Falls Estates, a ski resort and convention center, adjacent to Dogpatch USA.

In spite of the millions that Odom and his successors spent on the park, Dogpatch USA never achieved anything close to the success of Silver Dollar City, or any other solvent theme park for that matter. The park’s remote location limited attendance, and after Capp retired in 1977 the characters of fictional Dog-patch became increasingly peripheral to the mainstream of American popular culture. In addition, Odom’s Marble Falls Estates hemorrhaged money, leaving his whole enterprise in danger of folding. Odom eventually abandoned his dreams of a winter wonderland in the Ozarks, and Dogpatch USA, which had managed at least marginal profits during its first decade, struggled to entice visitors to the Ozark backcountry. The park occasionally turned a profit in the 1980s, but the debts accrued by Odom’s other properties continued to pile up until they choked Dogpatch USA out for good. After a series of desperate moves—a season of free admittance, abandonment of Capp’s characters, and more emphasis on native crafts and folk traditions—Dogpatch USA closed its gates in 1993.

In the years since Dogpatch’s demise, the abandoned theme park has become a favorite haunt of “underground” explorers and local teenagers; the many varieties of souvenirs peddled for 25 years at Dogpatch USA have become collector’s items. Local residents perhaps wrote the last chapter in the Dog-patch saga in 1997 when they successfully petitioned the U.S. Postal Service to change the community’s name back to Marble Falls. The exaggerated hillbilly stereotypes are gone, but so are the valuable dollars that helped sustain a rural region that remains among the poorest in Arkansas.

BROOKS BLEVINS

Missouri State University

Brooks Blevins, Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (2002), Arkansas, Arkansaw: A State and Its Image (2009); Rodger Brown, Southern Changes 15:3 (1993); Donald Harington, Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns (1986).

Dollywood

Located near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., Dollywood is an iconic southern amusement park that is both important to the economy of the Appalachian region and a powerful example of the commodification of southern culture.

Dollywood is the most recent and most successful of several amusement parks to share the same site in Pigeon Forge. The first—Rebel Railroad, built in 1961 by North Carolinians Grover and Harry Robbins—offered visitors a trip back to the Civil War with rides and attractions that echoed both staunch regionalism and the Lost Cause. The pro-Confederate theme included a train ride that culminated with a Yankee attack thwarted by southern soldiers and their tourist allies. After some commercial success, the Robbins brothers, who also owned the Tweetsie Railroad Park in North Carolina, sold Rebel Railroad to Art Modell and the Cleveland Browns in 1970. The Browns rechristened the park Goldrush Junction and adopted the imagery of the Old West, but soon realized that depictions of mountain culture were more profitable. The 1970s saw a resurgence of hillbilly imagery in American popular culture, and the Browns believed that a return to Appalachian roots would enhance the park’s tourist appeal, but such hopes were never fully realized.

The strange marriage of the Appalachian theme park and one of the National Football League’s worst franchises ended with the sale of Goldrush Junction to Branson, Mo., entrepreneurs Jack and Pete Hershand. The Hershands helped to establish Branson as a tourist destination in the 1960s and 1970s in part through their Ozark-themed park Silver Dollar City. They soon turned the Pigeon Forge park into an Appalachian Silver Dollar City, complete with mountain musical shows, craft demonstrations, Appalachian-themed rides, and daily recreations of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

In 1985 country music superstar and Sevier County native Dolly Parton became the Hershands’s partner, bringing her image, her money, and her marketable name to enhance the park’s appeal. The renamed Dollywood used Parton’s star power and her unabashed love for her native mountains to breathe new life into the park and Pigeon Forge. The new partners set about enhancing the park’s Appalachian themes. Attractions such as the Mountain Sidewinder and Daredevil Falls water rides emphasized the region’s landscape, while the White Lightning rollercoaster simulated a chase between moonshiners and the law. After enjoying these rides, visitors could find a meal at Aunt Granny’s Dixie Fixins or visit a museum dedicated to Parton’s life. Although many of Dollywood’s early attractions offered a healthy dose of campy, clichéd, and stereotypical depictions of mountain people, such images evolved over time. Parton and her partners realized that the park’s stereotypical portrayal of mountain culture did not reflect societal realities, but they also knew that tourists wanted to experience something of mountain culture—real or imagined—during their visits. Although unflattering and negative Appalachian stereotypes can still be found in Dollywood’s imagery and attractions, the partners realized that more positive portrayals of mountain culture could also draw visitors. This duality reflects Parton’s own willingness to make light of her mountain roots while simultaneously taking great pride in the region’s people, heritage, and culture. More recently, the park employed artisans who demonstrate mountain crafts such as candle making, blacksmithing, and wood-carving and offer their wares for sale at craft shows on the park grounds. Dollywood even blended southern agriculture and religion to draw tourists, hosting a Gospel & Harvest Celebration to showcase the region’s religious musical heritage and foodways. While critics of the park and its portrayal of mountain people exist and have at times been quite vocal, the park draws more than 2 million visitors annually and has generated tremendous growth in Sevier County.

Dollywood’s history demonstrates the ways that southern tourism entrepreneurs have used image, culture, and stereotypes to carve out a niche in the region’s tourist economy. The park stands as an important example of how the South is packaged and sold to tourists, as well as the tensions that accompany a tourism economy.

RICHARD D. STARNES

Western Carolina University

Scot Haller, People Magazine (5 May 1986); C. Brenden Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A Double-Edged Sword (2007); J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (1995).