By Maya Harrington
In 1969, in Bethel, New York, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was advertised as “3 days of peace and music.” More than 400,000 people showed up, causing traffic throughout the state, all to see what would go on to be legendary performances by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who performed together for only the second time, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joan Baez, and Santana. Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary on the music festival further cemented its legacy in American history.
Just a month before, many of the artists that performed at Woodstock, including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, had performed at the Atlanta International Pop Festival. Though its legacy was not quite as lasting as that of the Woodstock festival, its local influence endures to this day.
The Atlanta International Pop Festival happened again in 1970, this time in Byron, Georgia, taking its slogan of “Three days of peace, love, and music” from Woodstock’s slogan the year prior. Between 150,000 to 600,000 people attended the festival, where nudity and drug use abounded. Police, knowing they were hugely outnumbered by the festival-goers, employed a “hands-off” policy, allowing the behavior to continue.
This greatly displeased Georgia’s then-governor Lester Maddox, who was already unhappy with the amount of “hippies” coming to his state. He attempted to prevent the 1970 festival from happening altogether. When that ultimately failed, he passed a law that barred outdoor music festivals. The 1970 festival would be the last of its kind until Maddox’s law was repealed more than a decade later. Today, the hugely successful Shaky Knees festival and Music Midtown both owe their history to the Atlanta International Pop Festival.
“[The festivals are] something that brings people to the state,” said University of Georgia’s Music Exhibitor Ryan Lewis. “And it’s a good opportunity for mid-size bands in the state to play for bigger audiences”
Music festivals have long been a way for underground artists to get their break, as bigname headliners draw crowds of hundreds of thousands of people, increasing the visibility for the underground artists that perform. Over the years, big names like Billie Eilish, Drake, Elton John, and Lenny Kravitz have performed at Music Midtown.
Huge names have also come out of Atlanta, among them the likes of TLC, CeeLo Green, Outkast, Migos, T.I., Lil Nas X, and this year’s Superbowl halftime show headliner, Usher. “Atlanta has had one of the bigger influential scenes as far Black music goes,” Lewis said. And this dates back to the early twentieth century when gospel and blues — a genre derived from the songs and chants of enslaved people by the mouth of the Mississippi River — reigned supreme in the area.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, Atlanta’s blues scene was at its peak. Though much less prominent than the blues scenes in nearby Memphis or New Orleans, Atlanta’s scene was where many important blues musicians got their start, including Ma Rainey, Buddy Moss, and Blind Willie McTell, the latter of which gave his name to Blind Willie’s, which today is the most prominent blues club in the city. Born in Columbus, Ma Rainey, whose life was recently adapted into the play and movie “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” was the earliest and perhaps most influential blues singer to come out of Georgia.
At the same time that blues was finding its footing in Atlanta, so too was country music. The song “Little Log Cabin in the Lane,” recorded in 1923 by fiddling legend and Georgia resident Fiddlin’ John Carson, is widely considered the first country song ever recorded. It marked a transition from Appalachian folk music to country, which fused folk music with inspiration from blues and gospel music, creating a unique blend and a whole new sound. “It’s always been a melting pot state,” Lewis notes, repurposing an oft-used phrase about the United States at large and applying it specifically to Atlanta’s music scene.
Atlanta would remain the country’s center for country music through the 1930s, after which Nashville would take hold of that title. An emerging preference for “upscale” music further discouraged the blues scene, and that in tandem with a lack of opportunity for aspiring Black musicians and white flight turning Atlanta into a majority Black city would effectively shutter any chance of Atlanta’s blues scene ever rivaling that of Memphis’.
“Segregation and racial issues were certainly some of the biggest impediments to music and the music industry,” said Lewis. “[Segregation laws] kept people from being able to perform in certain places… [they] kept the audience from being able to see certain artists they wanted to see.”
However, Georgia was famously home to a number of venues that were part of the Chitlin Circuit — the name given to the group of venues throughout the country that allowed Black performers to play. There was the Royal Peacock in Atlanta, formerly known as the Top Hat Club, a nightclub at which the likes of Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong, and Marvin Gaye played and where civil rights legend Martin Luther King Jr. frequented, while Macon was home to the Capitol Theatre.
Georgia native James Brown was a hugely influential figure, both in music and in the civil rights movement, and is perhaps the personification of the overlap between the two. His song “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” became one of the defining symbols of the movement, though Brown would later state his complicated feelings on the piece, saying he feared it may worsen separatism. On the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when riots were breaking out in cities all over the country, Brown is widely credited with preventing similar riots from breaking out in Boston by broadcasting his scheduled concert on television, calming some of the public outrage induced by King’s death. This story is chronicled in the documentary “The Night James Brown Saved Boston.”
“Music is incredibly powerful,” said Lewis. Throughout history, music has long been used as a tool for resistance — a symbolic power that can unite a people. From Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” resistance through song has been an easy way to get across the message of a movement to a wider audience. As for Atlanta’s current role in music, Lewis said, “We’ve continued to push the boundaries. I think it’s still very relevant.”