Former Dodd Chair, Paul Pfeiffer Plays Pivotal Role in Changing the Culture of UGA Football

In an announcement posted on social media in June, acting director of the University of Georgia Redcoat Band, Brett Bawcum, revealed the band’s decision to replace their football post game concert opener “Tara’s Theme,” which comes from the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind,” with “Georgia on My Mind,” popularized by Ray Charles in 1960. As Brett Bawcum explains: 

Last week, I notified Hodgson School of Music director Dr. Pete Jutras and Redcoat Band Alumni Association president Dave Hanson that we are ending performances of “Tara’s Theme,” effective immediately, and replacing it as our signature with “Georgia on My Mind.” Though the tradition has been under discussion for months within the band, the current social climate has highlighted the urgency of addressing it and made me conscious of the message that could be interpreted by delay. To be clear, the issue with the tradition is not the motivation of those who have embraced it, but rather the possibilities it may limit in those who haven’t. I value tradition, but I value creating a welcoming environment much more. I love the Redcoat Band. But it is incomplete. It’s past time that we made it right. 

Bawcum’s decision comes on the heels of the band’s performance at the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem as part of former Dodd Chair Paul Pfeiffer’s contribution to the 8th edition of the Performa Biennial, an important festival dedicated to live performance.  A key element in Pfeiffer’s ambitious project, fifty Redcoat members—who normally perform during the breaks in play at UGA’s Sanford Stadium, home of the Georgia Bulldogs football team—performed live at the Apollo Theater, recreating a two-and-a-half-hour musical score from a typical college football game, using both front and back of house of the theatre as their performance space. Simultaneously, the rest of the 400 strong band performed the exact same musical score inside the empty Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia, which was live streamed into the Apollo, contrasting the architectures of stadium and theater. As Pfeiffer explained:  

Sanford Stadium was a central object of study during my time at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. It was the focus of an extended classroom experiment in which a group of students, faculty, staff, and myself explored the stadium in its capacity as a massive broadcast studio and home to one of America’s most popular mass rituals. In this context, I was particularly drawn to the UGA Redcoat Band and its role as the live soundtrack and musical generator of crowd affect during the games. That this research and eventual collaboration with the Redcoat Band would dovetail with the current national reckoning over the historical foundations of racial injustice in America is not entirely unexpected given the formative relationship of that history to the everyday reality we inhabit today.

The change of the Redcoat Band’s post game concert opener to “Georgia on My Mind” acknowledges problematic realities within UGA, highlighted in Pfeiffer’s work. As stated in the background information of “Amazing Grace,” Paul Pfeiffer’s two-part commission for Performa 19:

Since its founding in 1785, as the nation’s first state-supported university, Georgia has been a predominately white institution with a history of segregation, violently contested desegregation, and a contemporary student body that continues to be disproportionately white. As recently as 2018, less than 10% of students enrolled at Georgia identified as African American. Yet, the Georgia football team—formed in 1892 and the first of its kind in the Deep South—is predominantly African American. Moreover, these football players comprise almost half of the intercollegiate athletes at Georgia, most of whom attend on scholarship. University of Georgia offered 541 Athletic Scholarships for the 2017-18 academic year, totaling over $12 million. In 2019, the university reported a profit of $84.1 million in football revenue alone.