As it turns out, comparing Stillwater to Mount Pilot was not column suicide. And further proof of our local good nature, many readers were amused when I recently mentioned Mount Pilot and Mayberry, fictional locales in “The Andy Griffith Show.”
It's because so many of us Baby Boomers love “The Andy Griffith Show” and Mayberry, based on Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina. Academics are fascinated by the situation comedy’s popularity and morality. I check both boxes: I’m a “TAGS” fan who's also written scholarly research about the program. More on that later.
“The Andy Griffith Show” ran on CBS from 1960 to 1968, going off the air while still No. 1. Mayberry is as much a character as Sheriff Andy Taylor and his son Opie, his Aunt Bee and Deputy Barney Fife. Unlike other sitcoms of its era, the show was often filmed outside and out of sequence. Because it didn’t have a live studio audience, its writers could simmer the humor gently. They purposely avoided contemporary references while channeling Depression era vibes.
The playfulness and gentle demeanor of Andy (Griffith), the sheriff without a gun, complemented the over-the-top incompetence of Barney (Don Knotts), the deputy usually banned from loading his one bullet into his sidearm.
Fife is a metaphor for many things. Steve Daniels, host of The Morning Scramble radio show, recently talked about his father being in the Navy after World War II. His dad called himself Barney Fife because he was often on guard duty with a gun but no bullets. Sadly, I thought of Barney Fife this past spring, after the Tulsa volunteer deputy confused his gun with a Taser and killed an unarmed suspect.
The best episodes are in black and white, the first five seasons. Then Knotts left the permanent cast before the 1965 season. Despite two Jack Nicholson sightings, skip the color episodes. Andy is grumpy, there’s too much Goober, and when Barney makes a guest appearance, we see him bullied by the world outside Mayberry's city limits.
I'm often asked about knowing so much about “The Andy Griffith Show.” Implied but left unsaid is why does a black woman who’s never been hunting, fishing or camping care about the program?
It's a fair question, with no profound answer. I started watching TBS reruns during the 1980s and was struck by the quality of the acting and writing, which made the show more authentic than “Green Acres” or “Beverly Hillbillies.”
Authentic to a point. The Mayberry of “The Andy Griffith Show” had no black residents. You can spot a black extra here or there – my favorite is a woman clapping enthusiastically as the Freddy Fleet musicians masquerade as Mayberry’s tone-deaf marching band (1962). Griffith, one of the show’s producers, regretted he couldn’t incorporate a black character. Only one episode had an African American with a speaking role, Rockne Tarkington portraying a piano-playing football coach in the seventh of its eight seasons.
But American culture has always been good at compartmentalizing. On March 7, 1965, TV networks interrupted their programming to show live shots of Sheriff Jim Clark beating Civil Rights protesters in Selma, Alabama. The next evening, TV viewers watched fictional Sheriff Andy Taylor gently deal with an attractive houseguest.
Leonard Pitts Jr., whose column regularly appears in this space (every Tuesday), wrote about Mayberry after Griffith died in 2012 and called himself a proud resident. So did other black columnists, who each noted that Mayberry was impossibly white but Andy Taylor was morally satisfying because he insisted on justice and dignity for the have-nots.
After reading columns and reader comments in which African Americans praised and imagined themselves in all-white Mayberry, I saw an opportunity to pair my affection for the show with my interest in race, media and identity. The result was a scholarly labor of love published in the journal Memory Studies. I wrote that the show “is a beloved reconstruction of Southern history, memory and identity that spurs nostalgic notions of community even from African Americans shut out of its original narrative.”
It’s a fancy way of saying it’s easier to fantasize about being in Mayberry than actually watching Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.”
But mainly, it’s a darn good show. Two of my favorite episodes feature Aunt Bee, played by Frances Bavier – sweet but feisty in character, prickly off camera. “The Pickle Story” (1961), which was also Knotts’ favorite, and “The Bed Jacket” (1962) each address the virtues and consequences of lying to protect the ones you love.
By the way, don’t watch the debut episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” as an accurate origin story. Bee is inept at running the household and Andy calls Barney his cousin. Subsequent episodes pretend such plot points never happened.
In Neal Brower’s “Mayberry 101: Behind the Scenes of a TV Classic” (1998), one writer is quoted as saying: “It was not a contemporary show, so time was malleable. Furthermore, when a character became a series regular, they seemed to be granted an endless past.” Which fed the show’s enduring charm.
Among the many “TAGS” books, I recommend Brower’s because it details how classic episodes were written and produced and “The Definitive Andy Griffith Show Reference” (2004) by Dale Robinson and David Fernandes. “Andy & Don” by Daniel De Vise, Knotts' brother-in-law, was just published in November. It’s about the lifelong friendship between Griffith and Knotts, whose actual personalities contradicted with the Mayberry roles they so expertly played.
If you don’t believe Griffith can act, watch him in “A Face in the Crowd,” Elia Kazan's 1957 film. Griffith alternates between subtle and bombastic, earnest and conniving; the film is a reminder that politics, media and demagoguery are nothing new.
For a less intense dose of Griffith, I recently listened to Season 2 episodes via my Netflix app while raking leaves and gathering fallen pecans. Nothing like whistling “The Andy Griffith Show” theme song while you work.
Kathleen McElroy is an assistant professor at the Oklahoma State University School of Media and Strategic Communications.
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