Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture by Grace Elizabeth Hale (review)

Why have different art, literary, and music scenes emerged when and where they have? Think, for instance, of New Orleans in the 1910s, Harlem and Paris in the 1920s, Memphis in the 1950s, or the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. Any such list of this kind would be incomplete without Athens, Georgia, in the period of the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations.

In her new book on the creative nexus of art, pop music, folk traditions, and regional identity, Grace Elizabeth Hale explores the many ways that young bohemians in Athens, home to the University of Georgia, developed a lively alternative culture. Hale examines the role played by place, race, gender, and sexuality. The indie culture that developed in Athens had a powerful influence not only on the rest of the nation but also on the world as a whole. Bands like R.E.M. and the B-52’s won fans, as well as chart and sales success, around the globe. However, these two were just the most well known of a wide array of musicians, artists, writers, and others who made up this scene.

Hale is well suited to tell this story. She was an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Georgia in the 1980s and 1990s. She also played in the art-rock Athens band Cordy Lon and operated a local café, music venue, and gallery space called the Downstairs. Hale brings to this project the keen insights of a talented historian and deep personal knowledge. Her previous books have explored postwar American culture, politics, and racial identity in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South. Other scholars— including Beth Bailey, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and Blake Gumprecht— have studied the fascinating social settings of college towns. However, Hale’s microhistory stands out for its deep insight into how Athens became such a hub for bohemianism, indie rock, and a new type of alternative southern identity. Her source work itself is staggering. Hale draws on student publications and zines, eighty interviews, photos, videos, songs, national reporting, and an array of scholarship.

Hale’s charting of the streams of influence that influenced Athens’s bohemian culture is particularly interesting. Some of the earliest participants in the Athens scene came under the influence of New York City’s vibrant underground music and experimental art world. Music heads and bands in Athens took in the proto-punk of the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, along with the punk of the Ramones, Patti Smith, and the Talking Heads. Fans in Georgia read rock magazines based in New York City and London, and some older bohemians in Athens, such as Jerry Ayers, brought the styles, tastes, and drag culture of New York back to the South. At the same time, older folk musicians and artists like Howard Finster lent the scene a measure of rural authenticity. The circle was completed when Athens artists like the B-52’s, R.E.M., Pylon, Love Tractor, and Vic Chesnutt played to adoring fans in New York and won praise in the Village Voice and the New York Rocker. Such national publications were quick to comment on regional accents and southern themes, real or imagined. Athens bohemians drew on rich cultural resources. “In Athens,” Hale notes, “those resources were the gay community, the art school and other spaces and libraries on offer at the University of Georgia, the rich culture of the rural South, a low cost of living, and old houses and other buildings that could be rented for cheap” (p. 12).

Hale offers some poignant criticism about certain limits and constraints. In a section titled “Alt White,” she asks, “If the scene was really ‘alternative,’ why did its expansive sense that anything was possible mostly just work...