There are a ton of old tv commercials on YouTube, but they’re generally not locally specific. I’d like to start assembling vintage Atlanta tv commercials in a series for this blog. Vintage is an arbitrary term, but let’s just say anything produced before 1990. I certainly need help locating these commercials. If there’s an old Atlanta tv spot on YouTube (or some other video sharing site), please post the URL in the comments section and I’ll embed it on the site. If you have a copy of a commercial on disc, tape, or film and need some help digitizing and uploading it to the web, I’d be willing to assist.
The first video in this series is a commercial for the old Plaza Drugs on Ponce de Leon Avenue (in the first post of this blog, George Mitchell discussed Plaza Drugs). From the clothing and the look of the film stock, I’m guessing this commercial was produced in the late 60s or early 70s.
Four years ago I produced a short video with Jack Berry, who helps run a topographical mapping company. Jack was hired to make a map of a ten acre tract of land in west Cobb County, and I followed him as he obtained four GPS points around the county. As he explains in the video, his map compilers combine the GPS points he gathers with an aerial photograph to produce the detailed topographic map. This segment reveals the rapid pace of development in Cobb County in the past two decades.
In September 2000 the Hanson brothers asked me to come to Athens to help shoot a segment for their documentaryThe Earth Will Swallow You about the rock band Widespread Panic. I was happy to do so because the shoot featured Vic Chesnutt, who has collaborated with members of Panic for a couple of records under the name brute. I brought my 16mm camera and shot some little fragments of the guys playing and hanging out. I didn’t think the Hansons would use much of what I shot because it was raw and they had the action covered with a bunch of DV cams, but my footage ended up comprising a big chunk of the Vic Chesnutt segment.
For what it’s worth, there’s a really great documentary called Speed Racer that documents the early part of Chesnutt’s career, and it looks like this film will soon be released on DVD.
Ignacio Michaud was born and raised in Chile. In 2005 he moved to Atlanta. At night he paints and, during the day, he works as a translator at a farmers’ market on Buford Highway. In this segment he talks about the multicultural qualities of Buford Highway and compares the spatial layout of the street to a neighborhood in Santiago.
From 2004 to 2006, I produced videos for the online scholarly journal Southern Spaces. The journal’s editor Allen Tullos developed a special kind of video content for the site: poets reading their work at the locations in which their poems are set. Words remain the foundation, but images and sounds can add new resonance and connections. I helped Allen produce a few of these videos, and, in the past couple years, my friend Matt Miller has done a great job of expanding the project.
The most special “Poets in Place” performance I helped produce was for Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy for the Native Guards.” We met Natasha in Gulfport, Mississippi (her hometown) and traveled with her to Ship Island, where the Civil War-era Fort Massachusetts is located. This fort was home to the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first African-American combat units to fight in the Civil War. As we winded down our shooting with Natasha, a group of African-American Civil War re-enactors arrived on the island via the ferry boat. It was almost as if Natasha’s poem had conjured up the Native Guard soldiers.
A couple months after we shot the video, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Ship Island suffered major damage. The eastern part of the island was totally submerged, and the boardwalk, pier and visitor’s center next to the fort were destroyed.
In 2007 Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, which contains the poem “Elegy for the Native Guards.”
Undoubtedly, one of the most tragic incidents in Atlanta history is the Winecoff Hotel fire, which occurred on the morning of December 7, 1946. 119 people lost their lives, and it’s still the worst hotel fire in U.S. history.
Sam Heys and Allen Goodwin wrote the definitive book about the fire, The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Hotel Fire. Allen maintains a website about the fire and its aftermath, and the site contains lots of photos and anecdotes about the victims and survivors.
Sam graciously met me in front of the site of the old Winecoff Hotel to provide the basic story of the fire, including a discussion of the famous photos of the fire taken Georgia Tech grad student Arnold Hardy. After twenty-five years of neglect, the building re-opened in 2007 as the boutique Ellis Hotel.
A couple years ago I produced a short documentary about music archives and archivists. The following segment, which focuses on Kirk West and the Allman Brothers archive in Macon, was the first part of that film.
Thanks to Hibbotte for major production assistance with this piece.
I realized that I had some unused reels of black and white 16mm film, so I decided to go to Oakland Cemetery and do some old-fashioned shooting on celluloid. The cemetery is probably one the best places in town to bring a camera. The graves and old trees are beautiful and moody, and it’s all surrounded by great Atlanta sights (downtown, CSX rail lines, the Fulton mill, etc.).
The underlying music is an excerpt from the song “What a Day May Bring,” taken from Slang’s 2001 release The Bellwether Project, a record that my brother and I helped produce.
Five years ago I built a website about blues music in the lower Chattahoochee Valley for the online journal Southern Spaces. Here’s some of what I wrote in the intro:
The Lower Chattahoochee River Valley region has one of the richest traditions of blues music in America; but, apart from long-time residents of the region and a handful of blues aficionados, the blues legacy of the Lower Chattahoochee Valley is largely ignored. The region — defined here as the eighteen counties that hug the Chattahoochee River along the Georgia/Alabama border, along with three additional counties in Georgia that have traditionally been a hotbed for blues music — doesn’t have a revered blues reputation like the Mississippi Delta. That’s probably due to the fact that virtually no 78′s of country blues emerged from the Lower Chattahoochee Valley from the twenties through the forties and only a small number of Lower Chattahoochee blues 45′s, LP’s, and CD’s have been issued since the fifties.
One person has been largely responsible for documenting the rich blues tradition of the Lower Chattahoochee Valley: George Mitchell. From the late sixties through the eighties, Mitchell recorded dozens of nonprofessional blues artists, many of whom were old enough to have recorded before World War II. More than just an amazing portrait of talent and creativity, Mitchell’s recordings demonstrate that the region has developed a unique blues sound.
For my project, I interviewed George and taped performances by some of the region’s blues artists (Thanks to Jason Hibberd for production assistance).
I’ve assembled a couple video highlights from the project. Here is Precious Bryant playing the instrumental “Georgia Buck” at a club in Columbus:
And here is Precious playing the great Memphis Minnie tune “My Chaffeur” in her front yard:
George Mitchell discusses the unique sound of Lower Chattahoochee blues:
George Daniel delivers a raw performance of “Smokestack Lightning” in his front yard:
