$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5484-0

Published: Fall 2003

 Add Cloth to cart
 Add Cloth to cart
 View cart
 Checkout

Copyright (c) 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In 1923 a Vanderbilt University undergraduate and aspiring poet began attending the informal meetings of a group of local writers who called themselves the Fugitives. Robert Penn Warren had come to Nashville from Guthrie, Kentucky, a small town just over the Tennessee border that was best known for the Black Patch War, a violent struggle of tobacco farmers against the American Tobacco Company. The move from country to city came as quite a shock to the young aspiring poet. Nashville, he later recalled, "seemed like a perfectly huge city to me. I was much impressed by its grandeur and scale, [and] by its hurry and bustle." Warren would graduate in 1925, study at Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford, contribute an essay to I'll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the Southern Agrarians, and then go on to an illustrious career as a poet, novelist, and literary critic.[1]

In that same year of 1923, Sidney Harkreader, a lanky, twenty-five-year-old Middle Tennessee farm boy and fiddler, wandered into Melton's Barbershop, a well-known hangout for Nashville's growing community of traditional, or "old-time," musicians. Like Warren, Harkreader was a son of the country, but the circuitous route that brought Harkreader to Nashville belied his more humble origins in the farmlands of Middle Tennessee's Wilson County. During World War I, he left his father's farm to work at a newly constructed DuPont munitions plant just outside of Nashville. Taking advantage of the strong wartime labor market and seeking some adventure, he headed to Cincinnati. At the war's end, he came back home to Wilson County to farm. After a few seasons trying to scratch a living from the soil, he returned again to Nashville. At Melton's Barbershop, Harkreader met Uncle Dave Macon, a banjo-playing vaudevillian who liked the young fiddler and promptly asked Harkreader to join his act. The two toured the southern vaudeville circuit. By the fall of 1925 Fiddlin' Sid Harkreader was regularly performing on Nashville's newly inaugurated WSM radio station on the Barn Dance variety program that would soon be renamed the Grand Ole Opry.[2]

Certainly at first glance, Warren and Harkreader seem to have little more in common than having been in the same city at the same time. Yet each reveals a different facet of a massive, but largely unexamined, migration of population from the southern farms and hamlets to the region's growing cities, a migration that transformed both the rural and urban South. Across the South tens of thousands of rural people—blacks and whites, men and women—left the southern countryside to live and work in southern cities. This "southern great migration" came to transform the region, laying the foundations for today's modern, urban South.[3] The foundations for this migration were laid during the period between the economic depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, a period of sustained urbanization in the region. In 1890 a bit more than 10 percent of the region's population lived in urban areas; by 1930 this figure had swelled to nearly 33 percent.[4] Not only did the size of the South's urban population increase sharply, the region also saw the rise of a new class of fast-growing interior cities that eclipsed in size and importance of the coastal port towns that had dominated the antebellum urban hierarchy. Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Houston, Memphis, and, of course, Nashville, small or nonexistent before the Civil War, grew rapidly afterward and laid the foundations for the region's modern urban system.[5] Attracting few foreign immigrants or domestic migrants from beyond the South, the region's cities could only grow by pulling population from the farms and hamlets of the southern countryside.

This book explores the process of migration from the perspective of migrants themselves and probes its causes and consequences for both the rural and urban South. The focus is on Nashville and its Middle Tennessee hinterland. The diversified, highly self-sufficient, general farming regime that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century agricultural reformers thought would improve farm life in the cotton South was deeply embedded in Middle Tennessee life. If the yeoman farmer ideal could exist in the South, Middle Tennessee would be its home. By the same token, Nashville's economic leadership, never tied to myths of defeat, eagerly sought New South economic development. If the promise of the New South boosters would ever ring true, it would be in Nashville. The city also gave birth to two of the South's most creative cultural responses to migration and modernity in the circle of writers and critics who came to be known as the Southern Agrarians, and in the old-time music radio program that came to be known as the Grand Ole Opry.

Robert Penn Warren and his fellow Southern Agrarians offered a broad critique of New South economic development and industrial capitalism in an attempt to create an alternative to the modernizing trends sweeping the region. To fellow Agrarian Andrew Lytle, the "urbanization of the countryside" was shorthand for the spread of profit-oriented, progressive agriculture and consumerist values that were undermining the white yeoman culture that the Agrarians idealized as the essence of southern distinctiveness. That nearly all the Agrarian critics had forgone rural life to live, work, and write at one of the South's first modern urban research universities was an irony not lost to the group's critics. The Southern Agrarians needed urban life and urbanity. Nashville provided the necessary vantage from which they could view the region as a whole.[6]

Harkreader, no learned critic of literature, history, or regional development, was a genuine product of the upcountry white yeoman culture the Agrarians idealized. Yet, much more than anything expressed in the polemics of the Agrarians, his career as a musician illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which rural southerners faced the modernizing changes that were sweeping across the rural and urban South. While fiddle and banjo players had always been a staple of vaudeville, Harkreader was one of a pioneering generation of traditional performers who took advantage of new technologies—the phonographic disc and radio—to build careers as performers. As an early performer on the radio program that would evolve into the Grand Ole Opry, Harkreader helped define the emerging forms of what would later be known as country and bluegrass music. He did so from a radio program founded and owned by a Nashville insurance firm eager to build goodwill and demand for its products throughout the South.[7] Hence, a new technology that spearheaded the dissemination of an urban-based consumer culture in the rural South also became an agent of artistic preservation of that rural culture.

David Goldfield, pioneering historian of southern urbanization, was the first to draw our attention to these complex rural-urban relationships. He argued that southern cities needed to be understood in the context of the rural South that shaped the unique and distinctive characteristics of southern cities.[8] In order to understand southern rural-urban migration, however, one must appreciate the powerful influence the region's cities exerted over their rural hinterlands. One historical study, William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, has shown how Chicago's growth was fueled by its entrepreneurs' ability to impose capitalistic order over the rural countryside. Demographers' recent studies of the developing world have found strong relationships between rural development, urbanization, and migration.[9]

Historians have also examined closely the northward migration of black southerners that comprised the World War I-era Great Migration.[10] That movement, however, was part of a much broader exodus of blacks and whites from southern agriculture. Placing migration in the context of social, economic, and demographic change in Nashville and its rural hinterland allows us to understand the connections between urbanization and agricultural change. Doing so also allows us to appreciate the complexity of migration as individuals and families circulated between countryside and city in an attempt to cope with the rapid economic and social changes that swept the early-twentieth-century South.

This study begins with the Grand Ole Opry. The development of this rural radio minstrel show, which Chapter 1 examines, illustrates the complex changes that were sweeping both the rural and urban South and the ways in which southerners navigated those changes. Chapter 2 explores Nashville's economic growth. The city's business leadership saw in Middle Tennessee the raw materials and markets to build the city into a major manufacturing and commercial metropolis. While the city's economic development failed to live up to boosters' expectations, the industries that did thrive, such as lumber and wood-products, flour-milling, and meatpacking, did so thanks to access to markets and raw materials in the city's hinterland.

Chapter 3 examines Middle Tennessee agriculture and the mounting pressures on farm families. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the 1920s, the diversified agricultural regime that characterized most of Middle Tennessee entered a period of sustained crisis. However, this crisis did not stem from market pressures generated by a commercialization of agriculture. Instead, increasing population pressures and shrinking acreage undermined small farms in Middle Tennessee and dissuaded more and more young adults from entering farming Middle Tennessee farm families responded in two ways to these pressures. As shown in Chapter 4, they first turned to new products of field and forest, shifting to truck and fruit crops, poultry, dairy products, and livestock. They also logged the remaining old-growth forests for the city's lumber and wood-products manufacturers. Rather than being oppressed by the cash economy, Middle Tennessee farm families also took advantage of new market linkages between Nashville and the countryside to bolster their livelihoods, especially after 1900. In this way, Nashville's development helped serve as a prop for many Middle Tennessee farm families.

The viability of these linkages was short-lived, however. Chapters 5 and 6 show how the interactions of city and countryside led to migration to Nashville. Chapter 5 shows how moving was a well-established response to economic change, and young, unmarried men had long worked as migrant timber or agricultural workers before returning to their communities to marry and settle down to farm as tenants or owners. Attempts by progressive reformers to stem the flow from the farms through public school reforms and highway construction in the 1910s and 1920s were unsuccessful and hastened the movement. Chapter 6 shows how these circular migration patterns came to include work in northern cities, as well as southern cities like Nashville. Mobilization during World War I drew thousands of rural people to Nashville, particularly women, to labor in war-related industries. By the 1920s, migration from Middle Tennessee had become an exodus, and rural men and women poured into the city.

This study concludes by examining critical facets of rural migrants' urban experience. Chapter 7 examines the relationship between Nashville's labor market and migration, showing how rural migrants' support for organized labor influenced the rise and fall of trade unions during and immediately after World War I. Chapter 8 explores the experiences of the female migrants that flooded into Nashville in the 1920s seeking some measure of independence from the travails of rural life.