Don't Touch That Dial Carolina Radio Since the 1920s (review)

gives it almost mythic power. We see it both from the air (aboard Charlie's private Gulfstream-5 ) and from the ground (people spend a lot oftime in this book driving ). Both familiar and largely unknown parts ofthe city are vividly realized. Anyone who knows the place—and even Stuckey's cashiers go to conventions there—will see it with new eyes after reading Wolfe's descriptions of the palazzos , fitness centers, and trendy restaurants ofBuckhead, the gleaming office towers of Midtown, the southern-style slums of South Adanta, the Asian quarter of Chamblee ("Chambodia"), even the seedy apartment complex of "Normandy Lea." The city's sodailandscape is also revealed in marvelous set-pieces: the black collegiate celebration of "Freaknik," a political rally at the Church of the Sheltering Arms, a reception at the Piedmont Driving Club, an Atlanta Symphony concert , the opening of a show of homoerotic art at the High Museum (where the curator baffles Charlie by going on about "Michelle Fookoe"). . . . The list continues , and the temptation to quote at length is almost overpowering. Description like this just has to be good for any city—good for its soul, and maybe even for its pocketbook. As one perceptive booster told theJournal-Constitution , "If you look at what happened with Savannah and Midnight in the Garden of GoodandEvil, the way it promoted tourism ... I think the same thing could happen here." Now that's the old Atlanta spirit! Don't Touch That Dial Carolina Radio Since the 1920s An Exhibition at the Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, 1998 Reviewed by Lisa Yarger, curator of Community History at the North Carolina Museum of History and co-curator of the museum's new exhibit, Health and Healing Experiences in North Carolina. According to her own account, fiddler and banjo player Lily May Ledford balked in 1937 when her manager, John Lair, named her hillbilly band die Coon Creek Girls after a creek nowhere near her rural Kentucky home. Lair, a consummate showman who had cut his teeth at Chicago's influential radio station wls, assured Ledford that her audience "out in radio land" wouldn't know the difference. above: A visitor reads over a description ofaudio selections offeredin the exhibit's 19j6 Chevy BelAir. Photograph by Nancy Pierce. 96 Reviews Almost from the birth of the American radio industry in the early 1920s, promoters of this new mode of communication had used special language to describe its listeners. Never mind that those who tuned into radio's tasteful programs of classical music might be the regular opera-going crowd, or that those who delighted in the sounds of Briarhopper Time might be the very same who flocked to traveling medicine shows. By bending their ears to the radio, they somehow became citizens of an altogether different place. But what was, and what is, the "radio land" that John Lair spoke of? Who created it, and who inhabits it still? And is diere a southern corner? If there is a Radio Land, North Carolina, then the Museum of the New South brought it to life with Don't Touch ThatDial: CarolinaRadio Since the 1920s. Using historical materials, audio recordings, and a series of recreated period settings, the exhibit explored the ways in which radio has both reflected and influenced Tar Heel culture. Guest curator Pamela Grundy and Jean P Johnson, curator of exhibits at the Museum of the New South, made sure that the exhibit was not only meaty but also fun. Anyone who has spent time in a museum knows the allure of activities that involve pushing a button, and this exhibit capitalized on that draw, setting visitor-activated audio stations within recreated environments that allowed visitors to sway to dance band music by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies while perched on the edge of an upholstered sofa in a 1920s parlor, to rock to Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" while seated in a sleek black and red 1956 Chevy Bel Air (although the pre-set volume on the Chevy's "radio" was a tad low for serious rockin'), or to sing along (depending on the tolerance ofone's companions) to the Suprêmes while...