“America is just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” Hunter S. Thompson
You may not be familiar with Lake City, Tennessee, which has a somewhat interesting history. The town was originally named Coal Creek, Tennessee. In the early 1890s, the coal companies grew weary of actually paying miners money to perform work and started using free prison labor to do their bidding. This lead to an armed uprising, known as the Coal Creek War, by the free miners who, as our internet history tells us, “continuously attacked and burned prison stockades and company buildings.” In 1896, the state of Tennessee ended its glory days and terminated their leased convict program. In the early 1930s, this community approximately a half an hour from Knoxville changed its name to Lake City. The fact that there is no lake in the town was no impediment to the name change.
Like many small towns in America, Lake City has seen its population slowly decrease over the past several decades as more Americans transition to urban settings. The town currently has approximately 1,800 residents, a 25% decrease since 1980. Over 98% of the citizens are white and over 30% of the townspeople live in poverty. The last census reported a median income of less than $15,000. To solve their economic woes, Lake City has decided to change its name again – this time to Rocky Top, Tennessee. One guesses that Dirt Lung, Tennessee would have been a less appealing option.
The song “Rocky Top” was penned, not in the 1920s by unkempt Appalachian banjo players, but in 1967 by the husband and wife songwriting duo Boudleaux Bryant and Felice Bryant, whose credits include “Love Hurts,” “All I Have to Do is Dream,” “Wake Up, Little Susie,” “Bye Bye, Love,” and “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” (which certainly needed some justification). The bluegrass act the Osbourne Brothers had a minor country hit with “Rocky Top” in 1967. Lynn Anderson, who sports one of the internet’s best celebrity prison mug shots, had a bigger hit with her 1970 version and the song has been performed by the University of Tennessee’s marching band since the early ‘70s.
House of Bryant, the publishing company that owns the rights to “Rocky Top,” started smelling the slow burn of copyright infringement on the cool mountain breeze and submitted a lawsuit to stop the name change. However, an East Tennessee judge did not rule in their favor. Using the sort of logic that makes calm citizens everywhere want to strangle doddering old men in robes, District Judge Thomas Varlan ruled “that Lake City likely would not infringe on House of Bryant’s copyright because the town does not intend to use the name for commercial purposes.” This decision came in spite of developer’s plans to build a tourist complex based on the Rocky Top theme. Regarding the tourist complex, Varlan explained with lyrical finesse, “It is unknown to what extent, if at all, the developer defendants have secured the millions of dollars in funding required for their purported plans. Therefore, though we know that ‘corn won’t grow at all on Rocky Top,’ it is yet to be determined whether an ambitious, wide-ranging development will.”
In the early 1970s, the previously mentioned Hunter S. Thompson was running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado and one of his proposals, an anti-marketing campaign, was to change the name of the community to “Fat City.” He wanted it to remain a small, peaceful town that local residents could enjoy, rather than an endless tourist hub. The city council of Lake City has yet to formally vote on the name change, but that is most likely a mere formality. “Rocky Top,” a tune written in ten minutes to celebrate an idyllic, fictional Tennessee lifestyle will soon morph into a manufactured, t-shirt selling tourist trap. I bet Hooter’s is already looking for property.
