From /Z Trovatore to the Crazy Mountaineers: The Rise and Fall of Elevated Culture on WBT-Charlotte, 1922-1930 Pamela Grundy On the evening of 27 April 1922, the sweet, romantic notes of Jules Massenet's "Pleurez, mes yeux," sung by Miss Kathleen Culbertson of the Carolina Concert Club, emanated from the Chamber of Commerce assembly hall in Charlotte, North Carolina, and spread out across the country. The all-opera concert, "the first musical program ever sent from Charlotte to the world by wireless," marked the most ambitious effort yet put forth in the seventeen days that radio station WBT, the South's first commercially licensed wireless operation, had been on the air. Compositions by Verdi and Gounod, by Handel and Saint-Saëns, traversed the distance between the assembly hall and the station's headquarters in the city's Realty Building, where a complicated set of tubes and wires launched them upon the airwaves. Boosters of the new technology hailed the service with enthusiasm, predicting a grand future of entertaining listeners and providing useful information , as well as "publishing Charlotte to the outside world and giving it a name even unto the isles of the sea."1 This initial concert, with its European-inspired program, must have seemed an ideal vehicle for such far-flung advertisement. Charlotte's early entry into the wireless field clearly demonstrated the technical prowess of the burgeoning New South city. Equally important, the city's ability to muster a performance of grand opera publicly declared that despite their recent arrival into the rarefied circles of the nation's economic aristocracy, this group of southerners had become thoroughly familiar with elite cultural priorities—ideas that placed European classical traditions well above other forms of artistic expression and defined both social position and individual worth in terms of the "refined" appreciation of such immortal works.2 WBT's potential for promoting Charlotte as a cultured urban center inspired rhapsodic praise from enthusiasts such as Charlotte News editor Julian Miller, who envisioned the station "lifting the melodies from voice and instrument in this city and handing them over to the wings of the wind." The station had been heard as far away as five hundred miles, Miller wrote in an admiring feature article, and these distant listeners would be treated to "the very best talent of the community," including "the best vocalists, the best instrumentalists, 52 Southern Cultures the best sermons, the best speeches, the best of everything that is delivered from the lips of the people of Charlotte."3 Like many other flights of booster fancy, the predictions for WBT would gradually descend to earth. Although radio broadcasts of classical music would become a cherished institution in many southern households , few of these performances would come from southern cities. Over the next decade, WBT's reach would shrink from distant ocean islands to the more modest area encompassing North and South Carolina. Much of its programming would eventually originate not in Charlotte but with the New York-based Columbia Broadcasting System. And the city's most influential musicians would turn out to belong not to the Carolina Concert Club but to working-class string bands with names such as the Briarhoppers and the Crazy Mountaineers. These changes, which reflected social splits within the South as well as the region's relationship to national institutions and ideals, help illuminate some of the many dilemmas that southerners faced as they worked to bring their region into a modern, industrial world.4 Hui Ht r/BT In the early days of radio broadcast, even a weak signal could travel hundreds of miles, sending civic boosters on flights of fancy about a station's potential for promoting a city's image. Reprinted from the Charlotte News, 27 April 1922. Cultivation and Refinement The use of arias from JV Trovatore and L'Africaine to christen WBT's musical programming reflected the extent to which Charlotte's middle- and upper-class residents had participated in the pronounced shift in cultural priorities that followed in the wake of nineteenth-century industrialization—a change that drew sharp distinctions between "high" art and "popular" entertainment, as well as among the individuals who frequented cultural events...
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Jan 1, 2004
R Pines 
Open Access