Parsons, Tennessee’s TOBY SHOW
Dana Everts-Boehm, Folklife Program Assistant
Parsons, Tennessee’s Toby Show is a modern day revitalization of 19th & early 20th century folk theater once performed by traveling troupes that visited rural towns throughout the Midwest and the South, erecting a tent on a vacant lot and presenting melodramas, music, vaudeville and other forms of popular entertainment to eager crowds. According to the Rivertime Players’ website :
“For over 100 years, traveling tent repertory theater companies represented an integral chapter of American theater history. At their peak in the first two decades of the twentieth century, these traveling troupes numbered between seven and eight hundred. One thing that many of the tent shows shared in common was a character named Toby: a naïve, mischievous rube character with red hair, freckles, blacked out front tooth, ragged clothing and homespun humor. Hitching up his britches, he would employ slapstick, winks, facial contortions and theatrical gymnastics to the delight of the audience. Although not all tent shows performed Toby shows, the ones that survived after World War II were all Tobys.”
According to Wikipedia, “Toby Tolliver” is one of the “most enduring theatrical figures in American theater.” Jere Mickel concurs in his article “The Genesis of Toby: A Folk Hero of the American Hero” (Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 80, No. 318, pp. 334-340), in which he claims to pinpoint the actual moment in which the character’s name and physical features coalesced in 1911:
The conventional American rube comic was established in the American theater and had definite audience appeal in small towns. Toby himself, with his own name and characteristics, crystallized from a factual incident. The sudden popularity of (actor) Fred Wilson and the subsequent demand of audiences that this role be played with (Wilson’s) features – red hair and freckles – and the name Toby, established the basic conventions of this part.
The advent of radio and television heralded the demise of the once prolific traveling tent shows, which had basically trickled out by the late 1950s, early 60s. But the enduring “Toby” persona, far from disappearing, appears to have morphed into a number of avatars, from Alfalfa in “The Little Rascals”/”Our Gang,” to the red haired freckle faced puppet of the “Howdy Doody Show,” to Alfred E. Newman of Mad Magazine, to, arguably, Ronald MacDonald of MacDonald’s Hamburger chain.
The tiny town of Parsons in West Tennessee’s Decatur County (population 2,349 in 2013) claims to be one of the sole places in the U.S. today that presents a Toby Show. Crucial elements of this show’s material culture and literature – including a 45’ x 90’ tent, three 1942 stake trucks, 300-400 original scripts, costumes, painted drops (some 100 years old) – were donated to the Parsons Arts Council in November, 2006 by Dr. Dawn Larsen. Larsen had received this tent show in 1997 from the widow of Harold Rosier, manager of the Rosier Players. The Rosier Players were originally known as the Henderson Stock Company, which was formed in Michigan in 1898.
Thus, by serendipity, the Henderson Stock Company/Rosier Player’s Toby Show ended up in Parsons, TN, in the hands of local non-profit 501c3 the Rivertime Players. Rivertime Players Artistic Director, Shane Bridges, directs today’s Toby Shows and stars as Toby. Bridges’ loving attention to traditionality was rewarded when, in 2015, he was inducted into the 2015 Toby Hall of Fame.
This incarnation of the Toby Show is not Parson’s first experience with it. A touring troupe out of Memphis, Bisbee’s Comedians, brought the Toby Show to Parsons every year from 1927 to 1964. The program notes explain:
Several people in Decatur County remember the excitement when the Bisbee’s rolled into town. Bisbee’s Comedians entertained thousands as they travelled from Memphis through Tennessee and Kentucky. The tour began every April, with Parsons being the second stop.
In fact, Mr. Bridges and several audience members let me know that some surviving members of Bisbee’s Comedians were expected to attend the show the following weekend, as invited guests and onstage participants.
The 2015 tent show, entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Toby,” is an adaptation of an earlier script. Bridges explains:
This show was originally presented as “Sputters” many years ago, then rewritten and retitled “Sundown at Honeymoon Ranch” some time after that, then it was “Hopalong Toby” later on. And in that proud Toby tradition, we’ve put our own treatment on this old script.
I arrived in Parsons on a Friday night, cruising the main drag in search of the massive tent put up for the first night of the three week Toby Show run. Naturally I drove right past it, and stopped to inquire for the whereabouts of “the tent show” from a cashier at a gas station on the outskirts of town. A young boy standing behind me with his mother blurted out “Do you mean the Toby Show?” He and his mother gave me these directions – “It’s right behind the car wash!” – and an enthusiastic endorsement: “We go to them every year! You’re gonna love it!”
Right past the car wash, as directed, stood the big tent with two antique trucks parked alongside it and a huge poster by the road announcing “TOBY SHOW TONIGHT!” with an arrow pointing to the tent. A welcome table outside the tent displayed the Tennessee Arts Commission’s license plate brochures. When I mentioned discreetly to the ladies taking tickets that I was from the Arts Commission, one of them jumped up and yelled “Toby – get on over here!” Toby instantly materialized – painted on freckles, goofy hat, torn red shirt and all. Shane Bridges never broke character as he pumped my hand, declaring “We’re just so tickled y’all could make it!” As Toby, Bridges wandered through the crowd greeting people, joshing around, making funny faces, in an apparently effortless incarnation of the endearing, archetypical country bumpkin. The tent filled up quickly and it was clear that the Toby Show has massive local support.
Popcorn, soda, hot dogs and coffee were sold at the concessions stand, as well as fans sporting a picture of Toby and the words “I’m a Toby fan!” The Tennessee Arts Commission logo was prominently featured at the ticket counter, in the program and over the stage.
I sat in in front Victor Scott Evans, an erstwhile Toby show actor who had been cast in a couple of previous shows. He told me that Toby is a great guy, that the shows are fantastic and I was going to love it. Throughout the evening, he frequently leaned forward to inquire if I liked it, and grinned knowingly when I said I loved it. I could feel his approval behind me every time I laughed or clapped. Everyone, in fact, who I talked to referred to Bridges as “Toby,” as if Toby were the real genius behind all of this and not Bridges. This tendency of the character to usurp the identity of the actor playing him was evident back in the early days of the tent shows, as noted by Mickel:
Wherever Wilson played, no matter what part he was playing, he was called Toby. When the boys and girls and even the grown-ups saw him offstage, they would invariably greet him as Toby. And so Toby’s name and personal characteristics were stamped upon Fred Wilson forever by his audiences.
“Toby” introduced the show in front of the curtain, referring to its history and traditional characteristics, thanking the Arts Commission and other sponsors, without ever breaking character. He deftly took care of these required duties while avoiding any appearance of officiousness, keeping the audience on his side with good natured, self-deprecating jokes. The plot of “The Good, the Bad and the Toby” was a classic damsel-in-distress melodrama: a young heiress running a ranch in Arizona is fending off the unwanted marital intentions of a menacing foreman. Two suspicious city slickers with car trouble appear on the scene and start to spy around the place. Comic relief comes in the form of three children; the evil foreman’s ridiculous sidekick named “Rowdy Stench;” a stereotypically tyrannical, indecipherable German housekeeper named “Broomhilda;” and Toby himself, whose presence is taken for granted and never explained, even though he’s neither a cowboy nor a ranch hand. He’s just there, commenting on everything and reacting to the other characters and drawing laughs – sometimes by force – from the audience. When one of his jokes got a lukewarm response, he exhorted the audience, “You better laugh harder than that! This is about as good as it gets!”
All of the characters are stereotypes – the country bumpkin, the damsel in distress, the menacing foreman, the city slickers – as well as ethnic stereotypes such as the German housekeeper. Commentary in the program notes by a Toby Show veteran from South Carolina, points to the values represented in these shows:
These shows represented and reflected the rural American. Attending a Toby Show was akin to watching representations of themselves and what they believed acted out onstage. The values represented in the plays were the same values the patrons espoused. Toby Show plays, often called “mother, home and heaven shows,” stressed traditional rural ideologies including integrity, honesty and responsibility.
It is evident that the Toby shows were and are today crafted with a very specific audience in mind, and that audience feels at home with the content. Mickel comments:
Toby came along during a period of crisis in American social life. The norm of American life as a fundamentally rural society…changed with great rapidity during the first thirty years of (the twentieth) century. City life became the ideal. Those who stayed behind felt that they must justify their actions. In all the plays written for the rural audience, one generalization is understood: that country life is essentially virtuous. When Toby triumphed, they themselves triumphed.
Rural life continues to face daunting challenges in this country: poverty, unemployment, depopulation, the youth moving away. The in-group feeling of this tradition, its historical pedigree, resonance, and the disarming character of Toby himself, lend the Toby Show its inherent charm and perhaps attest to this enduring function of holding up a positive mirror to rural communities.
During intermission the actors mingled with the audience to sell packages of home-made taffy, a wildly popular item due to the fact that hidden in one of these packages was a ring worth $150. Children and teens were buying up to ten or twenty packages at a time and madly ripping them apart to find the ring. The lucky girl who found it was invited on stage to take a bow. Actors selling boxes of candy with a hidden “diamond ring,” “charm,” or “trinket” inside is yet another time honored facet of the traveling tent shows, as noted here by Bill Wundram in the “Quad City Times”:
True to tradition, the actors this year worked the audience with a candy pitch. They sold boxes of “Delicious Caroline Confection” (salt water taffy). Every box contained a prize, as in Cracker Jacks. A lucky few had coupons to be redeemed for bigger prizes. Long ago, prizes were dishes, dolls, wrist watches.
Before the curtain parted for the second act, Toby and the cast members told a series of jokes and performed comic dances to live music, adding a distinctly vaudeville element to the show. These routines were tacked on following the end of the play, as well; a standard trait of the traditional tent shows, according to Andy Reddick :
From the moment the curtain opened until it closed two hours later, the crowds were kept laughing or entranced in suspense due to the crazy antics presented on stage. In between acts singers, dancers and vaudeville artists delighted the audience.
The play started at 7:30 and we didn’t leave the tent until after 10:00, a stretch of time the audience seemed quite comfortable with as they were expecting it. Audience response throughout was spirited and enthusiastic – Toby and company had the attendees in the palm of their hands. These well tested elements of American touring folk drama apparently still have the capacity to enchant audiences through strict adherence to a classic mix of archetypical melodramas, stock characters, comic song and dance routines, candy sales driven by hidden prizes, and first and foremost, the beloved country rube himself. The Rivertime Players, led by Artistic Director Shane Bridges and Executive Director Mark Tubbs, have succeeded in making this long dormant rural American art form feel spontaneous, fresh, and vital and, by so doing, bringing it back home.
