Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio by Randal L. Hall (review)

Abstract

when he was director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. As Dallas curator and museum director John Lunsford knew from personal experience, “Jerry Bywaters was often adventuresome, frequently pioneering within museum-world parameters of his time, and sophisticated regarding world art traditions” (p. 23). He brought to Dallas during these years national exhibits such as Leonardo and His Time (1949), Religious Art of the Western World (1958), the Arts of Man Exhibit (1962–1963), and Indian Art of the Americas (1963), which drew thousands of visitors . He developed an exhibit policy within the limitations of existing budgets and staged events to attract new audiences. This was especially noteworthy in the promotion of local and regional exhibits that reflected the considerable range in style and focus that was found amongst resident artists. In sum, he built the museum’s reputation and increased the permanent collection, giving Dallas a successful exhibit record and making the museum one of considerable promise. Bywaters’s talent as an artist was best revealed in the range of pictures that form the core of this book. These paintings span his entire active career from the 1920s through the 1970s. In addition they explicitly show Bywaters’s connection to the social and geographical fabric of his world. Stylistically his influences were numerous, often combining a range of modernist techniques making use of the shapes, colors, and contrasts of the region. He relished the rich earth tones and the flattened perspectives of the muralists. By the 1930s and 1940s he was fully formed as an artist. He also revealed a firm hold on the ideas he wanted to explore. As Francine Carraro observed, “Bywaters painted what he saw, but he was interested in more than mere documentation. He wanted to characterize the region” (p. 38). Jerry Bywaters: Interpreter of the Southwest is a handsome book that clearly raises the national profile of Texan and Southwestern regional art as something worth further study. Cincinnati, Ohio Theodore W. Eversole Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio. By Randal L. Hall. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. 266. Black-and-white plates, notes, scripts. ISBN 978-0-81312-469-8. $40.00, cloth.) From 1931 to 1954, Chester Lauck and Findley Norris Goff appeared on radios throughout much of the United States as Lum and Abner, two Arkansas old-timers with a distinctive combination of homespun whimsy, goodwill, confusion , and dignity. Though they spoke in a deep rural dialect, they depicted life in the rural South in somewhat more respectful ways than outsiders who stereotyped the region and often demeaned rural life everywhere, especially in the South. Lauck and Goff wrote the scripts, played the title roles, and provided the voices for most of the population of Pine Ridge, a rural community based on their hometown of Waters, Arkansas. Far from offering another in a series of humiliations of backwoods life, Randal Hall says, Lum and Abner provided a corrective at a time when most radio listeners and advertisers were northeastern urban dwellers. As the popularity and availability of radio grew, southern and rural folk often found themselves embarrassed by their portrayal on many pro2009 Book Reviews 311 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 311 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...