Books by Tim Hollis
Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records
Around the world there are grandparents, parents, and children who can still sing ditties by Tigger or Baloo the Bear or the Seven Dwarves. This staying power and global reach is in large part a testimony to the pizzazz of performers, songwriters, and other creative artists who worked with Walt Disney Records.
Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records chronicles for the first time the fifty-year history of the Disney recording companies launched by Walt Disney and Roy Disney in the mid-1950s, when Disneyland Park, Davy Crockett, and the Mickey Mouse Club were taking the world by storm. The book provides a perspective on all-time Disney favorites and features anecdotes, reminiscences, and biographies of the artists who brought Disney magic to audio.
Authors Tim Hollis and Greg Ehrbar go behind the scenes at the Walt Disney Studios and discover that in the early days Walt Disney and Roy Disney resisted going into the record business before the success of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" ignited the in-house label. Along the way, the book traces the recording adventures of such Disney favorites as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Cinderella, Bambi, Jiminy Cricket, Winnie the Pooh, and even Walt Disney himself. Mouse Tracks reveals the struggles, major successes, and occasional misfires. Included are impressions and details of teen-pop princesses Annette Funicello and Hayley Mills, the Mary Poppins phenomenon, a Disney-style "British Invasion," and a low period when sagging sales forced Walt Disney to suggest closing the division down.
Complementing each chapter are brief performer biographies, reproductions of album covers and art, and facsimiles of related promotional material. Mouse Tracks is a collector's bonanza of information on this little-analyzed side of the Disney empire.
Learn more about the book and the authors at www.mousetracksonline.com.
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The Land of the Smokies: Great Mountain Memories
by Tim Hollis
From Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where the Tweetsie Railroad boards to Lookout Mountain, on the Tennessee and Georgia border, "the Land of the Smokies" attracts thousands of tourists each year. Some come to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; many others delight in the sometimes quirky but always alluring attractions along the highways.
In The Land of the Smokies, Tim Hollis wields his wit, his passion for detail, and almost 200 classic illustrations to produce an incomparable history of fun in the mountains. Hollis shows how the national park was created out of former farms and homesteads. He charts the development of Gatlinburg's crafts industry and examines the many types of restaurants and motels. Through photographs, postcards, brochures, and historiography, he explores popular destinations including Christus Gardens, Rock City, and Ruby Falls, as well as more obscure though no less bewitching stops such as the Tour Through Hell, Magic World, and Santa's Land.
Hollis does not settle for mere nostalgia but also treats the many contemporary celebrities who set up their own theaters and theme parks, such as Dollywood. And what visit to the Smokies would be complete without a round at the many miniature golf courses that line highways to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg?
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Ain't That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century
by Tim Hollis
There was a time when rural comedians drew most of their humor from tales of farmers' daughters, hogs, hens, and hill country high jinks. Lum and Abner and Ma and Pa Kettle might not have toured happily under the "Redneck" marquee, but they were its precursors.
In Ain't That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century, author Tim Hollis traces the evolution of this classic American form of humor in the mass media, beginning with the golden age of radio, when such comedians as Bob Burns, Judy Canova, and Lum and Abner kept listeners laughing. The book then moves into the motion pictures of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when the established radio stars enjoyed second careers on the silver screen and were joined by live-action renditions of the comic strip characters Li'l Abner and Snuffy Smith, along with the much-loved Ma and Pa Kettle series of films. Hollis explores such rural sitcoms as The Real McCoys in the late 1950s and from the 1960s, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee Haw, and many others. Along the way, readers are taken on side trips into the world of animated cartoons and television commercials that succeeded through a distinctly rural sense of fun.
While rural comedy fell out of vogue and networks sacked shows in the early 1970s, the emergence of such hits as The Dukes of Hazzard brought the genre whooping back to the mainstream. Hollis concludes with a brief look at the current state of rural humor, which manifests itself in a more suburban, redneck brand of standup comedy.
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