Focuses on the subtle constraints imposed on all rural African Americans in the segregated South and the central dilemma that defined their lives.

Sam and George are childhood friends, sharing a deep loyalty that is cemented when George, the older by three years, saves Sam from drowning. When George decides to enlist during Vietnam, and Sam’s first sexual experiences lead to a pregnancy, the stress and pressures are too much for Sam’s mind to process. He breaks and has his first experience of a psychiatric hospital. As he faces the stigma of mental illness, his girlfriend Delores is ostracized after having an abortion. The two run away to join a commune. When the consequences of their choices unfold, Sam faces the frailty of relationships, the danger of misplaced emotion, and a complete loss of control. Returning home again, Sam begins a long journey to regain a sense of what is real, what is true and what is his responsibility.

"I will get him a squirrel gun" A few days went by and one morning I got up out of bed before Mom and Dad did. I walked into the living room and quietly sat down. I could hear Mom and Dad talking in their bedroom. I heard Mom say to Dad, "You could buy Tony a good shot gun if you would do it." I heard Dad say back to Mom, "Now I just don't have the money." Mom told him, "It's a sin to lie." Dad said to her, "Well, you go buy him a gun if you can." Then Mom told him. 'I will get him a squirrel gun if it harelips old Billy Hell, you just wait and see if I don't."

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award On November 28, 1925, a white-bearded man sat before one of Nashville radio station WSM's newfangled carbon microphones to play a few old-time fiddle tunes. Uncle Jimmy Thompson played on the air for an hour that night, and throughout the region listeners at their old crystal sets suddenly perked up. Back in Nashville the response at the offices of National Life Insurance Company, which owned radio station WSM ("We Shield Millions"), was dramatic; phone calls and telegrams poured into the station, many of them making special requests. It was not long before station manager George D. Hay was besieged by pickers and fiddlers of every variety, as well as hoedown bands, singers, and comedians--all wanting their shot at the Saturday night airwaves. "We soon had a good-natured riot on our hands," Hay later recalled. And, thus, the Opry was born. Or so the story goes. In truth, the birth of the Opry was a far more complicated event than even Hay, "the solemn old Judge," remembered. The veteran performers of that era are all gone now, but since the 1970s pioneering country music historian Charles K. Wolfe has spent countless hours recording the oral history of the principals and their families and mining archival materials from the Country Music Foundation and elsewhere to understand just what those early days were like. The story that he has reconstructed is fascinating. Both a detailed history and a group biography of the Opry's early years, A Good-Natured Riot provides the first comprehensive and thoroughly researched account of the personalities, the music, and the social and cultural conditions that were such fertile ground for the growth of a radio show that was to become an essential part of American culture. Wolfe traces the unsure beginnings of the Opry through its many incarnations, through cast tours of the South, the Great Depression, commercial sponsorship by companies like Prince Albert Tobacco, and the first national radio linkups. He gives colorful and engaging portraits of the motley assembly of the first Opry casts--amateurs from the hills and valleys surrounding Nashville, like harmonica player Dr. Humphrey Bate ("Dean of the Opry") and fiddler Sid Harkreader, virtuoso string bands like the Dixieliners, colorful hoedown bands like the Gully Jumpers and the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the important African American performer DeFord Bailey, vaudeville acts and comedians like Lasses and Honey, through more professional groups such as the Vagabonds, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, and perennial favorite Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys. With dozens of wonderful photographs and a complete roster of every performer and performance of these early Opry years, A Good-Natured Riot gives a full and authoritative portrayal of the colorful beginnings of WSM's barn dance program up to 1940, by which time the Grand Ole Opry had found its national audience and was poised to become the legendary institution that it remains to this day.