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An old Stetson, and the shadowy origins of Vol as Hillbilly

by Jack Neely

Well, it’s UT Homecoming, and I was casting around for something footballish to write about, and I remembered this hat. It was a gray felt Stetson that had belonged to my great-grandfather who died in the 1930s. His initials were tooled into the interior hat band.

In the ’60s, it always sat in the top of the coat closet, an oddball hat with a high, round crown, like the cowboy hat Hoss wore on Bonanza, but with a smaller brim. It looked goofy, but it was fun to wear. All you had to do was put it on and you’d feel like a hillbilly. You’d run around hootin’ and hollerin’ and petitionin’ ‘bout lowerin’ taxes.

I discovered it wasn’t what it seemed. Playing with it once I dropped it upside down, and the crown collapsed. I picked it up, and found it suddenly looked like the hats private eyes and gangsters and G-men wore in movies. It looked just like a fedora, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Astonished at the transformation, I showed it to dad. He pushed the crown back out and said, “Don’t you think it looks better like that?”

I discovered that guys who grew up in an era when all men wore fedoras don’t take them very seriously. My dad, who hasn’t worn a brimmed hat since the Kennedy administration, doesn’t. When fedoras came back during the Bogart revival of the ’70s, I began wearing the old Stetson in its original shape. People would admire it, ask to look at it, try it on, impressed it wasn’t one of the authentic fedora reproductions from the mall.

Once, in college, I wore it to my dad’s house, and he picked it up and pushed out the crown and said, “Don’t you think it looks better like that?”

Eventually I found out why he liked it that way. It was a fond part of his youth in a way that a fedora could never be.

Dad’s not one who dwells on his own past much, and his memory of that time, half a century ago, is pretty vague. But what became of him, and the hat, and a hound dog, has something to do with UT’s changing postwar image of itself.

Until the 1950s, UT’s icons were Napoleonic soldiers and the betogaed Greek Volunteer. UT’s pep songs were borrowed from Ivy League schools. When UT had an animal mascot, it was the regal Tennessee Walking Horse.

But somebody in the impertinent postwar years apparently had enough of all that, and rethought the mascot as a blue-tick hound. I’m not sure who. Dad thinks maybe it was the campus YMCA; some accounts credit the UT Pep Club.

You couldn’t just get the dog and let it run loose on the field. Somebody’d have to walk it. What they needed was a hillbilly.

I’m not sure what it was about one particular engineering student that filled the bill, but Dad was a tall guy, over six feet, and he owned some overalls.

So Dad put on the overalls and found his grandfather’s old Stetson, unworn as a fedora for 20 years, and pushed out the crown into a round shape, to look something like cartoon hillbillies wore.

Maybe it was the popularity of Snuffy Smith and Pa Kettle, maybe the impudence of that generation that also coughed up Elvis: but in the ’50s, The Volunteer re-emerged as hillbilly.

Dad doesn’t remember what year he first led Smoky out onto the field. He’s in the 1955 annual, posing with Smoky in his hat and overalls, proving he performed that duty during the 1954 season. Some sources suggest the first year Smoky appeared was 1953, and Dad says maybe so.

He says the dog belonged to the Rev. Willie Brooks who, besides being a man of God, also ran a brake and clutch shop just east of town. The original Smoky was a hunting dog, but not necessarily a very good one. “We took him coon-hunting a couple of times” in the woods near Brooks’ home, Dad recalls. “He wouldn’t leave the circle of the flashlight.”

That dog wouldn’t hunt. But he behaved himself well on the field, rarely baying or barking. Dad doesn’t even remember having to clean up after him.

“He was a nice dog,” he says. When that Smoky was hit by a car and killed, Mr. Brooks had a replacement handy.

The new mascot wasn’t endorsed by the authorities. “The administration didn’t pick up on it,” Dad says. “They ignored it, didn’t see any relevance to football.” The administration at that time was led by Dr. C.E. Brehm. I’ve seen pictures of him. He wore a fedora, without the top punched out.

“I heard somebody say the Tennessee Walking Horse was a better mascot,” Dad recalls. “Classier, I think.”

Smoky wasn’t immediate good luck for the team. In 1953, just after Bob Neyland’s retirement as coach, new coach Harvey Robinson, a tailback from Neyland’s early days, led the Vols to a lackluster 6-4-1 record. In ’54, despite the presence of Tom “The Bomb” Tracey and then-unknown tailback Johnny Majors, the Vols went 4-6, losing all their major games, ending the season with a miserable 26-0 loss to Vanderbilt. Athletic Director Neyland fired Coach Robinson at the end of the season and hired former Vol hero Bowden Wyatt, who had better luck.

Dad graduated, got married, and went into the service, eventually stationed on an Air Force base in Japan. But the hillbilly thing carried on, even in the absence of that original hillbilly. “Someone picked up on the concept and supported it after I had graduated,” Dad says.

A 1955 Knoxville Journal football feature presents the Vol as a slothful barefoot hillbilly, in big hat and long beard, lolling in the grass, surrounded by flies, but clutching a football as if maybe he’s going to do something with it.

The same issue features a cartoon apparently drawn by Fred Lasswell himself, in which Snuffy Smith himself says, “I’m goin’ down to Knoxville and warn that varmint Bowden Wyatt if he don’t win ever blesset game this year, I’ll bounce a rifle-ball off’n his punkin haid.”

In the late ’60s “Rocky Top” emerged as an alternate UT fight song, with its implications of Vol-as-Hillbilly. And Smoky, introduced to Neyland Stadium by a Bearden-raised hillbilly half a century ago, survived.

September 23, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 39 © 2004 Metro Pulse