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Something in the Water: A History of Music in Macon, Georgia, 1823–1980 by Ben Wynne (review)

2023; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2023.a903243

2325-6893

Kevin Greene,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: Something in the Water: A History of Music in Macon, Georgia, 1823–1980 by Ben Wynne Kevin Greene Something in the Water: A History of Music in Macon, Georgia, 1823–1980. By Ben Wynne. Music and the American South. ( Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2021. Pp. [x], 368. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8814-6802-1.) Music history and culture abound in famous American cities like New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, and Atlanta. Ben Wynne's Something in the Water: A History of Music in Macon, Georgia, 1823–1980 seeks to remind historians of American music there are many more spaces across the country where music history is often overlooked. This interesting and richly researched examination of Macon, Georgia, explores the city's incredibly deep and vibrant history as one of the South's (and the country's) forgotten music cities. With precision and detail, Wynne traces Macon's melodious heritage from the era of minstrelsy to the age of Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers Band, adroitly following each evolutionary phase of the city's long musical past. Wynne leaves no stone unturned. Readers are offered a front-row seat as the book untangles the tightly interconnected threads that made this wellspring of music possible in Macon. Wynne unveils the countless musicians and promoters, as well as the performance venues, music education programs, radio stations, and record labels, that functioned as the heartbeat of this pulsating musical playground. Moreover, he examines the period using analytical [End Page 613] and methodological approaches that shed light on elements of race and class in Macon's cultural and economic landscapes. The results offer a deep and fascinating dive into 150 years of music history in the city often called "The Heart of Georgia." Something in the Water is divided into six chapters with an introduction and epilogue. Using a temporal framework that unlocks the various twists and turns of Macon's music scene, these chapters span from the city's founding in 1823 to the implosion of Capricorn Records in the early 1980s. As the study moves through the second half of the twentieth century, the periodization in each chapter becomes shorter and more tightly focused on the postwar explosion of popular music in Macon and the country writ large. The last three chapters contain well-written vignettes of Macon luminaries such as "Little Richard" Penniman, James Brown, Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers Band, and the Marshall Tucker Band, all of whom played pivotal roles in Macon's musical past during their storied careers. Much of Wynne's more recent Macon history is well known to R&B, soul, and southern rock enthusiasts, collectors, and researchers. However, in this reviewer's assessment, Wynne's examination of a critically understudied and much earlier topic in the field—the "chitlin circuit"—has made a strong contribution to conversations highlighting tensions between segregation in the music industry and its impact on Black music and businesses (p. 80). Originally devised as a loose organization of strictly African American performance venues, by the postwar years the chitlin circuit had solidified into a strong network of Black theaters and clubs where Black performers and patrons could "share their collective culture away from the prying eyes of whites" (p. 80). In these spaces, live music and performance played a powerful role in Black community and identity formation, shaping Black life in one of the most segregated states in the United States. Wynne also makes a passing but important reference to the connection between the Theater Owners Booking Association, an organization that had controlled "the African American vaudeville circuit," and the organic growth of the chitlin circuit from those roots (p. 80). Here the author portends the need for deeper investigations into this formative vaudeville period, when Black businesses, artists, and consumers actively negotiated for what would be become an irreplaceable crucible of Black music well into the 1980s. Regrettably, Wynne does not offer readers a sufficient explanation for why this flourishing music scene emerged in Macon. The epilogue would have been the most obvious place to tackle such a difficult yet important question. Nevertheless, readers are most assuredly left with a...