Upcoming events
Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle WA
“Playtime: What indie youth in Athens, Georgia can teach us about changing the world” at the Pop Con Music Conference at the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle
Fire Hall No. 2, Athens, GA
Grace Elizabeth Hale is Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. Her talk is presented in partnership with the UGA Special Collections Libraries, the Russell Library Oral History Program, the Honors Program, the Athens Music Project, and Avid Bookshop.
Hale’s Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched the Alternative Scene and Changed American Culture will be the first book published under the Ferris and Ferris Books imprint of the University of North Carolina Press in March 2020. Her previous books include A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (2011) and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (1999).
Today, UGA claims the Athens music scene in its advertising to potential students and through its Music Business Certificate Program and the Athens Music Project. But in the late 1970s and 1980s, UGA actually played a major role in the lives of the curious kids who created the first Athens bands of that era. In her talk, Hale uses this history to offer a kind of manifesto for the value of big public universities in nurturing egalitarianism and generating creativity and intellectual imagination in the era before college rankings and skyrocketing tuition.
A public reception and book signing will follow the talk, with sales by Avid Bookshop.
Highland Inn Ballroom Lounge, Atlanta, GA
As a student, small-business owner, and band member, author Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the seminal Athens, Georgia music scene of the 80s firsthand. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the story of the small college town's resourceful networks of bands, artists, and friends who made a new art of the possible, transforming American culture and alternative music along the way.
Hale will appear in conversation to discuss her new book, “Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture” with Tony Paris, Managing Editor of Creative Loafing Atlanta.
This event is free and open to the public.
Oxford Conference for the Book
Music in the South Session
Natalie Hopkinson, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, Brian Foster and Darren Grem, moderators
Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics
interview on “Tell Me Every Everything with John Fugelsang”
Appearing on “Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang” on Sirius XM’s Progress Channel (#127)
Politics and Prose, Washington DC
In the late 1970s, Athens, Georgia, might have seemed an unlikely source for the next waves of alternative culture, but as Hale shows in this vivid study, on the eve of Reagan’s America, the smallish southern college town was a dynamic hub of creative ferment. Using her expertise as Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia, Hale guides us through the Athens she knew as a student, small-business owner, and band member, tracking the advent of pioneering bands like the B-52s, R.E.M., and Pylon as well as the work of the many experimental artists and progressive innovators who created new kinds of art and made lasting changes to mainstream American culture. Hale will be in conversation with Jack Hamilton, author of Just Around Midnight.
Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, VA
Cultural Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale Explores the Athens' Music Scene of the 80s
In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboardcharts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities.
In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.
Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. Her previous books include A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940.
CANCELLED: Solarium at the Colonnade Club, University of Virginia
Q&A with Karl Hagstrom Miller (Chair and Associate Professor of Music at UVA)
sponsored by the Corcoran Department of History; co-sponsored by American Studies, Music, and GAGE
CANCELLED: New Dominion Bookshop, Richmond, VA
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