Student Issue, 1964—Image of Hootenanny

ABC’s nationally televised Hootenanny show held two performances in the Brehm Arena in January 1964. Students circulated petitions protesting the “hillbilly” image, which they believed would attach to the university, and threatened a picket line and a boycott. When the request of show producers that students wear calico dresses and blue jeans and the plan to have the audience sitting on hay bales were scrapped, the organizers of the protest decided to neither boycott nor picket and not to send the petitions to the show’s producer. (UT officials nixed the dress requirement, and the hay bales were scrapped because they took up too much room.)