This oral history project was initiated at a significant time in the city’s music scene. The growing popularity of indie, postpunk rock had broken down the barriers of geographic location and business infrastructure that had hindered Alabama musicians’ breakout into the national scene in previous decades. It had also inspired a wave of indie bands, attracting the attention of talent agents and record companies. So at this point in Birmingham’s musical history, optimism was widespread about the possibility of a breakthrough — a national hit on a major label — that would propel a local band into the center of America’s popular music scene and reflect well on their city’s cultural reputation. Several Birmingham bands had just snagged the all-important record contract with a major record company, and several seemed on the cusp of doing so, and this drove local pride and gave hope that a local band would make it big, thus validating both the city and its music, as it had done recently to other cities in the New South, such as Austin and Athens. Aaron Beam and his many friends in the Birmingham music scene agreed that this was the right time to uncover the history of Birmingham’s leading rock bands, make it part of the permanent record of popular music in the South, and give credit where credit was due. It was, in Beam’s words, giving “proper recognition” to a music scene and local musicians.
The first step of this project was to identify these bands. The people who compiled the list of musicians to be interviewed based those decisions on how inspired or impressed they had been by each band’s performances. The oral histories were not intended to provide a complete and unbiased narrative of rock music in Birmingham, nor were they intended as a hagiography of those successful musicians who had left Birmingham for greener pastures; it was more a compendium of everyone’s favorite local bands. Aaron Beam said, “The focus of the book is more about the music scene in Birmingham and the people, and I personally want to have a lot about the people who are still here.” The history gathered was essentially a narrative about who formed these bands, and their performances, recordings, and personnel changes. In this way the project was to be as much taxonomy as history: following the convoluted paths of musicians joining and leaving bands turned out to be a major endeavor, one that took up most of the time of interpreting the transcriptions of the interviews. Interviewing musicians began as a means to identify what bands they had played in and then use this data to build up a picture of where the major bands came from and how they evolved over time. The final product was intended to be a guide, organized by bands and containing their individual histories and vital information. This sort of approach had been pioneered by record collectors who had built up their own histories of their favorite bands based on the recordings they made. There were also books like C. S. Fuqua’s informative Alabama Musicians: Musical Heritage from the Heart of Dixie, which comprises short biographies of musicians listed alphabetically.1 Aaron Beam’s project aimed at covering bands from more than one genre within rock ’n’ roll (the record collectors histories had been largely confined to 1960s garage bands) and building up a flow chart that chronicled the birth, death, and resurrection of the important bands. At the very beginning of this ambitious project we agreed that it would be impossible to interview everybody, and as the pile of interviews grew larger and larger, we discovered that, as Aaron said, “the universe of what we don’t know is getting smaller.”
Aaron Beam agreed with many of his colleagues and customers that the city of Birmingham had not received its due as a center of southern music. They were all convinced that Birmingham was undervalued as a cultural center in the New South and that there was a need to set the record straight and put Birmingham up there on the pantheon of southern music, perhaps not as high as Memphis, New Orleans, and Nashville, but definitely up there with cities like Atlanta and Chattanooga. Beam’s associates in the music business (who tended to be mobile as well as entrepreneurial) believed that Birmingham had not only produced great musicians but also had a local music scene as good as anything in the New South. Birmingham’s bar bands had cultivated a loyal audience who were convinced that the music they heard every weekend was as authentic and virtuosic southern rock ’n’ roll as one could hear anywhere. There was a consensus that Birmingham’s music scene was on the rise and that it deserved some sort of written record. A better understanding of the musical history of the city would also be useful in the continual comparison of Birmingham with other cities of the New South, a process that covered culture as well as politics, the economy, traffic, food, and lifestyles.
The sense of being overlooked and undervalued fit in perfectly with the overall mind-set of a city with an inferiority complex. Birmingham was only one of the new cities in the New South, but it was known as the “Magic City” because of its rapid growth, and expectations that it would be the greatest city of the New South were always unreasonably high. Its inhabitants were always mindful of the competition to become the leading economic and cultural center of this self-conscious and well-publicized urban movement to modernize the South. Music is only one part of the social makeup of an urban community, but it punches well above its weight in assessing the quality of life and in determining a cultural identity. The lack of a musical identity to compare with some of Birmingham’s neighbors in the New South, or even an acknowledgment that there was a local music scene, struck longtime residents as another injustice — the final straw after fifty years of bad press and unwarranted criticism. Memphis claims rock ’n’ roll, New Orleans sells itself as the birthplace of jazz, Nashville means country music, and even Vicksburg can claim to be the “key” to Mississippi music. But Birmingham has nothing to claim despite the impressive list of great musicians who had once called the town home. The 1990s was a decade of rapid economic growth and raised expectations in Birmingham. The town’s self-esteem was buoyed by the outstanding performance of its new service, health, and communication industries. Its elevation in the media to the status of an attractive, livable city and a “best-kept secret” was the source of immense pride to its inhabitants used to finding themselves at the bottom of every list. Aaron Beam was one of the founders of HealthSouth, one of the fastest-growing and most profitable businesses in the nation, and his outlook reflected a new confidence in the future of a city that had previously failed to live up to every one of its New South promises. Birmingham was moving forward on a wave of local pride and record earnings reports, and expecting even greater things as the millennium approached. A history of rock music in Birmingham would be a timely reminder that the city could provide entertainment that was not as bad as everybody thought, and that this was something to be proud of in a community reasserting itself into the cultural life of the South.
The entrepreneurs who founded the city had great ambitions for culture as well as the production of iron. They wanted to give the new city the veneer of high culture, and chose to import “classical” symphonic music as the means to accomplish this goal. The people who started this oral history project also chose the classics to demonstrate the cultural accomplishments of their community, but in this case it was classic rock, southern rock, and all its offshoots into country rock, folk rock, art rock, and so on. I think it was Duke Ellington who said that there were only two sorts of music: the good music and all the other music. The definition of “good,” however, is highly subjective. By the 1980s the term “classic rock” was considered pejorative in some quarters, but positive in others. The young musicians of the New Wave had criticized the aesthetic and pretensions of 1970s rock ’n’ roll much more effectively than any parent or minister had done in the 1950s. In turn professional musicians with a decade or two of experience on the road laughed at the amateurism and pretensions of the New Wave. The direction the oral history took depended on who was asked, and this in turn reflected the musical knowledge and tastes of the people arranging the interviews. Even a small city like Birmingham produces too many musicians to include everyone in an oral history, so there was never any intention, or commitment, to provide an inclusive and complete history, although this was the standard often expected of it.
“Birmingham: Greatest City in Alabama / You can go across this entire land, but there ain’t no place like Birmingham.”
When I joined the project in the mid-1990s, it had stalled in its efforts to create a taxonomy of popular rock bands because there was far too much information to be easily digested and too many discrepancies in the information gathered in the interviews. The context of the