Small-town America and the modern world: Andy Griffith showed one to the other

By Ted Anthony
The Associated Press
The Province
http://www.theprovince.com/
July 4, 2012

Close your eyes and picture it: small-town America.

It has a little post office, of course. A general store, too, and a fishing hole. There's a barber who knows everyone — and knows about everyone. There's a friendly auto mechanic. The picture wouldn't be complete without several women who could be anyone's favourite older sister or aunt.

Kids scurry around at reasonable paces, making low-grade mischief while dirtying their short-sleeve plaid shirts or striped T-shirts. Quirky characters wander about in a landscape of picket fences and healthy storefronts. And the police officer in charge? He's tough but fair, community minded, the Solomon of his entire, geographically limited jurisdiction. He's Atticus Finch without any of the racial tension.

This is, today, the comforting script America often reaches for when it summons the vanished rural nation that so many say they long for. Not coincidentally, it is also the state of mind given to us by Andy Griffith and his long-running TV show.

More than anyone except perhaps Walt Disney, Griffith was the entertainment-world emblem of the 20th-century values Americans often like to say they prize most. He spread the notion, begun by no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson, that somehow the very best of us was contained in the rural life — in this case, the fictional tales of Mayberry that "The Andy Griffith Show" delivered for almost a decade.

"The show is kind of like a step back in time, especially for my generation," Molly Jones 24, of Raleigh, N.C., said after learning of Griffith's death Tuesday. "It's kind of like, 'Oh, this is how it used to be,' and 'Why isn't it this way still?' Things were so much simpler back then."

They certainly were in Mayberry, N.C. When Deputy Barney Fife wasn't arresting someone for jaywalking, little Opie was accidentally killing a bird with his slingshot and earnestly dealing with the moral fallout. Aunt Bee was usually either offering affection, feeling underappreciated or cooking ham. Goober and Gomer were causing disarray, and Floyd Lawson or Howard Sprague was dispensing quirky wisdom. (Come to think of it, that was true of everyone on the program.)

The reality of the age was somewhat different. Griffith's show, in a way, defied its times rather than captured them.

Though it felt like the 1950s in many ways, it was actually a product of the roller-coaster decade that followed. It debuted in 1960, four weeks before John F. Kennedy was elected, and ended its run on a spring evening in 1968 three nights before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis. While the country was tearing itself apart, Mayberry quietly endured, a Dick-and-Jane primer for an America yanked in every direction — a vision, during the Cold War, of friendly, unintruded-upon isolationism.

At the centre of it all was Griffith himself, a product of Mount Airy, N.C., who began his career doing comedic interpretations of yokels years before he honed his persona into the Sheriff Andy Taylor combination of avuncular community figure, doting father and common-sense Southerner. Though Griffith would later say the sheriff was the better angel of his nature, the perception was otherwise. "Andy was Mayberry, and Mayberry was Andy," Don Knotts, who played Barney Fife, said in 1999.

Griffith was a far more complicated figure than he appeared. As Sheriff Taylor, he effectively acted as a cultural interpreter for a fast-urbanizing nation reared on, and comforted by, Norman Rockwell imagery. Griffith's take on a post-Eisenhower "Our Town" made him, to television, what Woody Guthrie had been to music two decades earlier — a popularizer who came from authentic country roots, polished it all up, then fed Americans back a more digestible version of rural culture. It was an approach that coincided with a musical folk revival in which rural songs were being popularized by mainstream musicians like never before.

During the run of "The Andy Griffith Show," more rural and rural-urban sitcoms had emerged — broader, city-mouse-country-mouse affairs such as "The Beverly Hillbillies," ''Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres." The market for rural-themed comedy in America had grown so glutted by the dawn of the 1970s that there was actually a "rural purge" in which the networks scrapped most of their country comedies as irrelevant and out of sync with the more urgent times. The Griffith show's sequel, "Mayberry R.F.D.," was one victim, cancelled after three years.

Four decades later, the spirit of Mayberry lives on in the town that claims to be its muse. While it's widely believed that Griffith's childhood in Mount Airy inspired Mayberry, it's absolutely certain that Mayberry has inspired Mount Airy. Tourism has made the marketing of small-town flavour good business, and Griffith's hometown has taken the ball and run with it.

Everywhere you turn in the community, there is a Mayberry reference, explicit or otherwise. The names of businesses downtown — Mayberry Trading Post. Mayberry's Music Center. Mayberry Memories, Barney's Cafe — are testament to the exuberant opportunism Griffith made possible. An annual fall festival, Mayberry Days, draws tens of thousands of people to Mount Airy.

And at 129 North Main St., the owner of the six-decade-old City Barber Shop even added the word "Floyd's" at the front of its name two decades ago to evoke the TV show's Calvin Coolidge-loving tonsorial expert.

Melvin Miles, 69, of Mount Airy, has an idea why people are so attracted to this stuff. Miles works for Squad Car Tours, which owns five Ford Galaxys, replicas of the cars used on the show. He remembers a town where people gathered on porches and — lacking Facebook or 300 channels — just visited.

"The people long for the simple way of life," Miles says. "And that does not exist in too many areas anymore."

Mayberry today is shorthand for a shiny America that may or may not have existed at all, yet endures. Just whistle the theme from the show and Griffith's vision is summoned. Listen to politicians talking about traditional values, and Mayberry is there. Eat at a Cracker Barrel restaurant anywhere in the republic and walk through its "general store," replete with striped candy sticks, jars of apple butter and rocking chairs priced to move, and Andy Taylor is lurking. Try and watch the movie "Pleasantville" without thinking of Mayberry.

Like the folks in "Pleasantville," ''The Andy Griffith Show" eventually moved from black and white to colour. Its final episode in 1968 begins at Mayberry's bucolic railroad depot. But the arriving train brings a chaotic, voluble Italian family to town — or, if you're looking for symbolism, the larger world arrives. There is no going back.

Americans loved, and still love, the notion of the small town as a manageable, nonthreatening, friendly, finite community — an idea all but upended in the 21st century, where the truly isolated town is, for all practical purposes, no more. The black-and-white world that Andy Griffith shaped so masterfully is there for our perusal from a distance, but it is not coming back — either on television or anywhere else.

EDITOR'S NOTE — AP writers Martha Waggoner and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report. Ted Anthony, who writes about American culture for The Associated Press, can be followed at www.twitter.com/anthonyted .

Today's Laugh Track: SCTV Andy Griffith Merv Griffin spoof

Andy Griffith, A Champion of Bluegrass

By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/
July 3, 2012

Andy Griffith’s background as a singer and guitarist were obvious during the long run of “The Andy Griffith Show,” in which he would periodically pull out a guitar to strum and sing a bit. He also welcomed the opportunity to incorporate other bona-fide musicians onto the set when producers invited the Dillards bluegrass group from the Ozark Mountains to portray a family band called the Darlings.

The Dillards -- fronted by brothers Douglas and Rodney Dillard -- had moved to Los Angeles from Missouri in the early '60s looking to broaden their audience. Rodney Dillard recently told The Times that they chose Los Angeles over Nashville because “we felt people were more open-minded, creative-wise. Nashville was formula cut-and-dried at the time.”

After signing with Elektra Records in 1962, they were hired to perform on “The Andy Griffith Show,” which was filmed in Hollywood.

“Andy Griffith became more than an icon,” Dillard said in a statement issued Tuesday. “He represented American family values and has given comfort and hope in these uncertain times. He gave The Dillards [The Darlings] an opportunity to be part of this. Andy was kind, generous and patient with an inexperienced group of pickers from the Ozark Mountains.”

Here’s a video of Griffith and actor Denver Pyle, who played the patriarch of the Darling clan, singing the gospel song “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”:



“Because of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and the exposure that music brought, it gave an introduction to bluegrass to a lot of people who never, ever would have gotten to it," Rodney said. "They found others like Flatt & Scruggs and the Osborne Brothers, and found this whole world of the classic form of traditional music.”

Actress Maggie Peterson, who played Charlene Darling from 1963 to 1968, said in a statement issued Tuesday: “The Darling family was treated with such respect on the show. These could have been ridiculous characters without Andy’s respectful reaction to us. Everyone will truly miss him. Thank God we have those beautiful episodes to keep us company.”

Others guested on the show as well, including Roland and Clarence White as “The Country Boys,” with a performance of “Whoa Mule” for which Andy joined in when an Alan Lomax-like character showed up to record some backwoods music:

It was also Griffith’s persona as an unflappable source of common sense and gentle wisdom that prompted country singer Brad Paisley to seek him out when he made the music video for his 2008 single “Waitin’ on a Woman,” Griffith taking the role of Paisley’s mentor in the ways of male-female relationships. The song starts whimsically, examining a man’s frustration with his partner’s tardiness, then segues into a sweetly philosophical take on the subject.

Here’s the video for “Waitin’ on a Woman”:



“Few people in this world will ever have more influence on our lives than Andy Griffith,” Paisley said in a statement issued Tuesday. “An actor who never looked like he was acting, a moral compass who saved as many souls as most preachers, and an entertainer who put smiles on more faces than almost anyone; this was as successful a life as is pretty much possible. Andy Griffith made the world a better place, and I was so proud to call him a friend.”

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Photos: Andy Griffith, 1926-2012

Obit: TV Sherrif Andy Griffith dies at 86

Andy Griffith: Iconic actor carried a musical spirit

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

 

 

North Carolina legend Andy Griffith dies at 86

By Dennis Rogers
The News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
July 4, 2012

Andy Griffith greets Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison after the unveiling of a statue of Griffith and Ron Howard as their characters, Andy and Opie Taylor, from Griffith's television show in Raleigh's Pullen Park. The statue, taken from the show's opening sequence, shows Andy and Opie walking to their fishing hole. (Scott Lewis - newsobserver.com)

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/07/03/2340745/andy-griffith-070312.html#storylink=cpy

Andy Griffith’s broad shoulders carried a heavy load for more than 50 years. In 1960, he created an iconic fictional character so noble that today, church groups still seek moral guidance in Sheriff Andy Taylor’s every televised word, deed and gesture.

And over the years, when Griffith insisted that Mayberry, the perfect little town he invented, was absolutely not based on his hometown of Mount Airy, N.C., fans nodded, winked, said “Sure, Andy, whatever you say,” and went right on believing what they wanted to believe.

What they wanted to believe was that around the next bend or over the next hill was a place like Mayberry and a man as fair, wise and decent as Sheriff Andy.
   
Griffith died Tuesday at 86 at his home on Roanoke Island. The Dare County sheriff said Griffith was laid to rest later Tuesday.

“Andy was a person of incredibly strong Christian faith and was prepared for the day he would be called home to his lord,” his wife, Cindi Griffith, said in a statement. “He is the love of my life, my constant companion, my partner, and my best friend. I cannot imagine life without Andy, but I take comfort and strength in God’s Grace and in the knowledge that Andy is at peace and with God.”
Bill Friday, former UNC system president and a longtime friend, said: “Andy Griffith was uniquely an American institution, all by himself. He made you and me want to be the very best we could be, and he never ceased in telling us really how fortunate we were as Americans.”

‘White trash’

There is no tougher role in show business than living up to the persona you created. Those who live in the public’s adoring and unrelenting gaze quickly learn they are expected to always be the character the public loves. Woe unto the one who deviates from that script. Andy Griffith found that lovable Andy Taylor was a tough act to follow.

Andrew (or Andy, as some of the reference sources insist) Samuel Griffith was born the son of a furniture factory worker, Carl Lee Griffith, and his wife, Geneva Nunn Griffith, on June 1, 1926, the same day as Marilyn Monroe. He grew up with other hardscrabble mill kids on the wrong side of the tracks at 711 Haymore St. in Mount Airy.

While he enjoyed the usual small-town summer delights of rock-kicking, cloud-counting and such, there were enough hard times and spirit-crushing prejudice in that blue-collar Surry County town that once he left, his return visits were few.

He once told show-business biographer Lee Pfeiffer, author of “The Official Andy Griffith Show Scrapbook,” “I cannot deny that the person I am was born and raised in Mount Airy, and I was influenced in many ways by that town. I will tell you that it was not all positive. I was actually called ‘white trash’ at one point. That was said by a young girl I was stuck on and she probably wasn’t thinking. And we did come from the wrong side of the tracks. But when she said ‘Get away from me, white trash,’ I did.

“I was only in the fourth grade, and that remark has stuck with me my entire life.”

Boost from a pastor

Not all of his Mount Airy memories were that painful. The Rev. Ed Mickey was pastor of the local Moravian church. One day the gawky kid with the heart-melting grin showed up wanting to learn to play a trombone he’d bought with $6 he had earned from a part-time job with the Depression-era National Youth Administration. Moravians were known for their brass bands. In two months, the youngster was good enough to play “Moonlight Sonata” in church.

Mickey, recognizing he had a talent on his hands, taught the boy to sing. Soon he was singing all over town, sometimes picking up $5 a show. Mickey went on to recommend him for a scholarship to UNC-Chapel Hill.

No one, at least to his face, would call Andy Griffith “white trash” again.

Griffith, like Thomas Wolfe and legions of other talented small-town kids from this state, invented himself at Carolina. He put aside intentions to become a Moravian minister like his mentor and changed his major to music. He was elected president of his fraternity and met Barbara Bray Edwards, from Troy.

They graduated and were married in 1949 and settled down as teachers in Goldsboro. The couple spent summers performing in “The Lost Colony” outdoor drama on Roanoke Island, in which Griffith was a popular Sir Walter Raleigh. He loved the island so much he bought land and would later build a 63-acre estate there.

Whether they needed the money or just needed to perform, the Griffiths created a musical act and traveled the area, playing any small-town civic club that would spring for dinner and a few bucks for gas money. As Andy later told the story, one night Barbara booked them to play a civic club where they had already performed. Problem was, they only had one routine.

“On the way over to the job, I made up a monologue about a country fellow’s first experience seeing a football game and not knowing what was going on,” Griffith said. “And it scored – heavy. So I kept doing it.”

Did he ever. What it was, was “What It Was, Was Football,” a now-classic comedy monologue that ranks with the nonsense of the Marx Brothers and the witty wordplay of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First.” Orville Campbell, publisher of The Chapel Hill Weekly, heard Griffith do his hilarious cornpone routine and offered to have it recorded.

It was the break Griffith needed. He was ready to shake the sandy loam of Eastern North Carolina off his country brogans and head for the bright lights of New York City. Capitol Records bought out his contract with Campbell, and he and Barbara worked up new material for the nightclub circuit, including his follow-up record, a hillbilly retelling of “Romeo and Juliet.”

A taste of early Andy: “If you’ve got a boy that courts a gal you don’t like or the other way around, and if you don’t want the expense of a funeral on you, the best thing to do is let ’em have a cheap wedding.”

‘First TV job’

Then came the chance a new comic in town could only dream about: an offer to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” For those born since the invention of Velcro, imagine the clout of Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and David Letterman all rolled into one. The Sullivan show was that important in its day. There was a lot riding on the country boy’s first shot on national television.

“It was the first TV job I ever had,” Griffith later told Pfeiffer. “When Ed Sullivan first heard of my record, he wanted to tie me up for 18 guest shots. William Morris (his agent) would only give him four. After my first appearance, he called and wanted out of the next three.

“I never got a single laugh. I just died that night. I absolutely died. I can still go in that theater now and get an upset stomach.”

The Sullivan show was not Griffith’s only disappointment. The hayseed act that wowed ’em back at the Rotary Clubs didn’t exactly catch fire in the nightclubs of New York, New Jersey and Long Island. The couple headed back home to regroup. That’s when Griffith saw a notice that “No Time for Sergeants,” a popular book by author Mac Hyman, was being turned into a television show for the United States Steel Hour. He just knew he was right for the part and headed back to Manhattan to try out.

“No Time for Sergeants,” starring Andy Griffith as the innocently goofy Will Stockdale, aired in March 1955. It was on Broadway by October of that year. It featured an unknown actor named Don Knotts as a character named Manual Dexterity.

The show ran on Broadway for 796 performances and earned Griffith a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actor. Most of the Broadway cast followed the show to Hollywood, where it was reborn as a movie in 1958.

It was not Griffith’s first movie role, however. In 1957, director Elia Kazan had tapped the unknown and unpolished Griffith to play a country singer and egomaniacal psychopath named Lonesome Rhodes in the gut-wrenching drama, “A Face in the Crowd.” It is the story of a wildly popular entertainer who becomes too big too fast and is corrupted beyond salvation. His fall from grace is even faster than his sudden rise from anonymity.

Griffith nailed it. He was dead-on brilliant. His demonic anger and barely controlled energy were difficult to watch, however, and the public stayed away in droves. Today, film buffs consider it a classic. But when it was released, only critics seemed to approve.

Nightclub comedian Danny Thomas had a popular television sitcom in the late 1950s. In 1959, he hit on an idea for an episode that seemed amusing: The fast-talking and often abrasive New York comic he portrayed would be driving his family through the rural South. They’d get pulled over in some hick town by a redneck cop. Hilarity, and a healthy dose of offensive regional stereotyping, would ensue.

“Name ain’t Clem. It’s Andy, Andy Taylor” were the first words spoken by the character who was on the verge of an eight-year reign in television’s Top Ten.

Griffith may have perfected the bumpkin bit, but when it came time to negotiate a contract for a spinoff series based on the country lawman he’d created, he and agent Richard O. Linke played big-city tough. They held out for a deal that gave a rookie series actor 50 percent of what became “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Good, popular, wholesome

Through 249 episodes, from the Oct. 3, 1960, black-and-white debut, when Aunt Bee replaced Rose as the family’s housekeeper, to the color finale on Sept. 22, 1968, when an Italian family moved to Mayberry to help town councilman Sam Jones work his farm, “The Andy Griffith Show” was about as good, popular and wholesome as television ever got.

The show ripened smoothly from its early days, when the ah-shucks, hee-haw Griffith tried too hard to be funny with his over-the-top Southern shtick. It was in the second year when he became the straight man and turned the day-to-day comedy labors over to his band of merry madcaps like rock-chunkin’ Ernest T. Bass, town drunk Otis Campbell, the weirdly Zen-like barber Floyd Lawson and sweet Aunt Bee.

Griffith was a stickler for authenticity. The North Carolina he created on the show would be the North Carolina he knew and the one he wanted the world to see. A typical Griffith decision: The occasional state highway patrolman who stopped by the Mayberry jail wore authentic North Carolina Highway Patrol insignia.

Oh, and there was a deputy named Barney. Don Knotts won the Emmy award as best supporting actor for five straight years for his hijinks. No one ever did that before.

But you already know all there is to know about North Carolina’s all-time most favorite show, don’t you? And if you don’t, it’s still on television every day, 52 years after its debut.

“The Andy Griffith Show” set a standard for excellence that would prove difficult for Griffith to equal. It was so popular – it was No. 1 the day it left the air – that anything that came after it had to be a disappointment. And so it was with Griffith’s career. It would be charitable to say the ’70s were not his favorite decade.

He tried with three series in the 1970s: “The Headmaster,” “The New Andy Griffith Show” and “Salvage One.” Each had its moments but no audience.

And then there were the awful made-for television movies with titles like “Winter Kill,” “Street Killing,” “Deadly Game” and the one that was so bad it is almost funny, “Pray for the Wildcats.” The former sheriff of Mayberry was now a motorcycle-riding psychopath in Baja, Calif.

In 1972, Andy Griffith and Barbara Edwards were divorced. He married Solica Cassuto in 1973 and divorced her 1981. In 1983, with his career going nowhere and his personal life in shambles, Griffith was stricken with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder.

The disease paralyzed him, and for a time it seemed he would never walk again. But the bad career choices, the failed marriages, the illness and even the drug-related death of his son Sam at age 36 would soon be put behind him.

In 1983 he married Cindi Knight. In 1984, he was given the role that would lead to his redemption.

Ben Matlock

Griffith was cast as federal prosecutor Victor Worheide in the made-for-television blockbuster, “Fatal Vision.” It was the story of the famous Jeffrey MacDonald/Green Beret murders at Fort Bragg, and those who knew the real-life principals knew how on-target Griffith’s meaty portrayal of Worheide was. It was the best straight acting he’d done since Lonesome Rhodes almost 30 years earlier.

That role led to his rebirth as a television icon, this time as a Southern lawyer in a rumpled seersucker suit named Ben Matlock. Off and on from 1986 to 1995, Griffith’s Matlock was wise, cranky, stubborn, funny and 100 percent Andy. Those who knew the actor said he was much closer to Matlock’s persona than he ever was to TV’s beloved sheriff.

It was also a favorite of fans of the old show who tuned in to catch the sly Mayberry-related asides Griffith would slip into the dialogue. Don Knotts was also a frequent guest, playing Matlock’s neighbor.

Griffith came home to North Carolina in the 1980s, at peace with his life and career. He moved “Matlock” production to Wilmington and still took a few outside acting jobs when they suited him.

He also became heavily involved in recording gospel music. He won a Grammy Award in 1997 for “I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns.” Political observers even give him a share of the credit for the 2000 election of former Attorney General Mike Easley as governor. They say the commercials Griffith made for the low-profile Easley gave him the credibility needed to win. If Andy was for him, the thinking went, that was good enough for the rest of us.

Griffith mellowed in his later years. His reputation for a hot temper faded with his youth. He quietly and without fanfare seemed to forgive Mount Airy for its slights by showing up for the dedication of U.S. 52 as the Andy Griffith Parkway in 2002. It was the first time he had returned to his hometown in 45 years. He and Cindi even spent the night in his boyhood home.

During the dedication ceremony, Griffith, then 76, said, “I’m proud to be from the great state of North Carolina. I’m proud to be from Mount Airy. I think of you often, and I won’t be such a stranger from here on out.”

Then he said what the home folks had wanted to hear for a long time. “People started saying that Mayberry was based on Mount Airy,” he said with a smile. “It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?”
Also in 2002, a statue of Sheriff Andy Taylor and son Opie was erected in Raleigh’s Pullen Park. The inscription is the perfect summation of the show they made famous and, in many ways, the role the public demanded Andy Griffith play for the rest of his life: “The Andy Griffith Show – A simpler time, a sweeter place, a lesson, a laugh, a father and a son.”

In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Griffith the Presidential Medal of Freedom for, well, just being Andy.

That same year, Griffith was interviewed by Beverly Keel for the online magazine American Profile. In the interview, he talked about the difficulty of life in the shadow of Sheriff Andy Taylor:
“Don’t pay any attention to that, that is a persona,” he said. “I am not any favorite dad; I am not any kind of all-American person. I am just a 79-year-old person. I worship, and I am kind of private.
“I have many failings. My son died of an overdose when he was 36. I was not a good father to him. So I have failed in many ways. I am a man, like any other man.”

Andy Griffith never won an Oscar, an Emmy or a Tony for his acting. But then, around here we never thought of him as an actor. He was just our friend and neighbor, and we were so proud of him we couldn’t hardly stand it.

And if the rest of the world happened to tune in to his popular shows and just happened to assume folks in North Carolina were anywhere near as good-hearted as Andy Taylor, Ben Matlock or the good people of Mayberry, well, that was OK with us, too.

Brooke Cain of The News & Observer and Mark Washburn of The Charlotte Observer contributed to this report.