Now back in print, this is the first book to tell the whole story of the sleepy Southern college town that changed the face of American rock and roll. (Music)

Party out of Bounds

Arts & Photography

Brown, Rodger Lyle

Music

Plume

Originally published in 1991, Rodger Lyle Brown’s Party Out of Bounds is a cult classic that offers an insider’s look at the underground rock music culture that sprang from a lazy Georgia college town. Brown uses half-remembered stories, local anecdotes, and legendary lore to chronicle the 1970s and 1980s and the spawning of Athens bands such as the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M. Their creative momentum helped to usher in a new wave of music on a national and international level, putting Athens, Georgia, on the map.
Brown takes the reader on a heady, keg-beer-fueled romp from the South’s dirty back roads and all-night porch parties to the precipice of rock superstardom. This twenty-fifth-anniversary edition includes new and rarely seen photographs by locals on the scene; a foreword by Charles Aaron, former longtime editor and writer at SPIN magazine; and an afterword by producer/engineer and musician David Barbe, drawn from an essay originally published in the Oxford American’s 2015 music issue.

Party Out of Bounds: The B-52's, R.E.M., and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia (Music of the American South)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Georgia Press

Everybody knows about community festivals that celebrate the good ol' days--events like Rattlesnake Roundup, Peanut Days, and Mule Day. Countless towns around the South stage them. They set aside one weekend a year, rope off some parking, and celebrate some local them on the courthouse lawn or in a nearby pasture, touting lost days of imagined glory.The phenomenon is rapidly proliferating across the region, but until now the deeper significance of these hometown events has not been explored. InGhost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit, Rodger Brown takes the reader on a road trip across the South. He visits many festivals and unweaves their webs to find the meaning that underlies them. Contrary to popular interpretation of them as times of celebration and fund-raising, Brown discerns them to be times of mourning. Behind the scrim of jolly sideshows he finds communities responding to economic restructuring and cultural change.As he travels across the South, he absorbs vivid impressions of boosterism and cornball symbolism. Along this comical trail that he terms the "cracker circuit" he perceives how these seasonal events are staged by white sponsors attempting to resurrect a splendid past that actually never existed. He likens them to legendary Indians "ghost dancing" in ceremonial performances staged to conjure up a lost paradise.In chapters with such titles as "Stuffing Sin in a Lard Bucket" and "Aunt Bee's Death Certificate" Brown not only sketches intriguing portraits of people and places but also makes fascinating revelations--the political meaning ofGreen Acres and Gilligan's Island, the real story behind the Hatfield and McCoy feud, and the surprising role ofThe Andy Griffith Show in contemporary southern mythography.Brown's adventurous, good-natured inspection of this pervasive cultural curiosity discloses the state of the South at the turn of the millennium.

Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture of Festivals in the American South

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

A look into deep communal meanings that emerge as small towns stage their annual festivals.

Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit

Now back in print, this is the first book to tell the whole story of the sleepy Southern college town that changed the face of American rock and roll. (Music)

Party Out Of Bounds: The B-52's, R.e.m., And The Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia

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