Big Thicket People: Larry Jene Fisher’s Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier by Thad Sitton, C. E. Hunt (review)

grams such as Moonshine and Honeysuckle and Cracker Barrel Congress. Especially galling to many southern African Americans was the most famous of such programs , Amos ’n’ Andy, which mostly portrayed southern blacks who moved to the city as, by turns, foolish and gullible or conniving and untrustworthy. As Hall says in his seventy-four-page introduction and notes to this very helpful volume of Lum and Abner scripts, Lauck and Goff succeeded commercially through a long run of national prominence and lucrative sponsorship but also kept their integrity largely intact and, to a great extent, the honor of their place of origin. Lum and Abner “countered images of rural depravity” by introducing “listeners to two gentle old-timers who embraced economic growth and change” (p. 4). Though Lauck and Goff knew audiences yearned for representations of the nation’s fading rural past, they “played with [this] developing sense of nostalgia and introduced rural values in step with the twentieth century and the Main Street middle-class mainstream” (p. 4). The two friends, in fact, came from the middle class, having grown up in families Hall characterizes as “New South entrepreneurs ” (p. 5). Lauck and Goff began as amateur comedians and moved to the professional ranks through an appearance on KTHS–Hot Springs, Arkansas, in early 1931. In those unregulated days of radio, listeners from coast to coast heard them during the early phases of what became their standard Lum and Abner characters. They attracted the attention of NBC, but their efforts to catch on with a national audience foundered until they began appearing on WFAA–Dallas and WBAP–Forth Worth. From there they managed to go national, creating a loyal audience and a long-lasting influence on radio and on regionally based comedy. Hall’s essay introducing scripts from 1932 to 1934 intriguingly sets their work in several contexts: the rise of radio, the dominance of the form by comedians, the growing popularity of complex wordplay, the mixed views of southerners by people from the rest of the country and by themselves, and the social and economic transformations the South and Midwest underwent from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. Most of the book consists of scripts of Lum and Abner routines, which, especially when read aloud, give a sense of the rhythm and pacing of two gifted comedians and social observers. The dialect can make for slow reading, but the window these sources offer on an often misunderstood slice of life in the United States at a crucial time in its development is quite valuable. Randal Hall is a perceptive interpreter and introducer of the lessons one can see—or hear—by opening that window. Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Little Rock David Stricklin Big Thicket People: Larry Jene Fisher’s Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier. By Thad Sitton and C. E. Hunt. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Pp. 156. Black-and-white plates, notes, bibliography. ISBN 978-0-29271-782-4. $29.95, cloth.) The “Big Thicket” is located in the southern part of East Texas between the cities of Beaumont and Jasper and contains some of the last virgin forests and 312 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 312 wetlands in the state. Much of it is now protected within the 84,500-acre Big Thicket National Preserve, established in 1974. What the preserve could not protect were the southern folkways that existed there until the mid-twentieth century . During the 1930s and 1940s, photographer Larry Jene Fisher used his craft to record the lifestyles and folkways of the “plain folk” of the Big Thicket. Big Thicket People: Larry Jene Fisher’s Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier focuses on over eighty of Fisher’s photographs depicting the area’s people engaged in various crafts once common throughout the South but now largely lost. Fisher’s goal was to preserve those traditional crafts and practices for posterity. In Big Thicket People, Sitton and Hunt present Fisher’s work along with explanatory essays to the public—thus fulfilling the photographer’s goal. In the book’s introduction, Thad Sitton notes that Fisher realized that the Big Thicket constituted...