Birmingham was founded by steel and coal barons from Pittsburgh, who -- in an attempt to ameliorate the worldwide perception of American southerners as being dumb as dirt, backwoods, genetic retreads, too-ignorant-to-hit-the-ground-with-their-own-piss yokels -- christened their colonial creation with the name Birmingham, in order to brand it with a proper "city of industry" cachet. 

Subsequently, the bloodsucking, Yankee bastards (I mean, visionary captains of capitalism) who were known in Birmingham as the "Big Mules" went about the business of exploiting (of course, they would say, giving gainful employment to…) every dumb as dirt, backwoods, genetic retread, too-ignorant-to-hit-the-ground-with-his-own-piss yokel who had the requisite physical stamina and motor skills required to sacrifice their bodies and souls for substandard wages.

As the riches, plundered from the Appalachian Hills, flowed northward to Pittsburgh, what the laboring classes received in return was a life of ceaseless toil and perpetual debt. These harsh realities made the people of Birmingham hard and mean. In the early nineteen-sixties, the city was unofficially re-christened "Bombingham."
 
Birmingham was one hateful, little colonial outpost. If a white man complained about low wages and poor working conditions, the bosses told him, "If you don't like your job -- there are ten niggers who will take it for a fraction of your pay." It's self-evident why Birmingham was not exactly known as a beckon of racial harmony.

When my family left Birmingham, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia: a city (or more precisely, a contrived collection of corrupt zoning practices and real estate developer larcenies) that also bears a contrived name and was (and remains) a center-devoid simulacrum of a city, inhabited by a citizenry (who, for the most part) personal styles and cultural sentiments reflect Atlanta's phony name to a fault.
 
Whereas Birmingham's fraudulent name was meant to evoke an aura of industry, Atlanta's was meant to conjure an image of the ancient grandeur of a great city of antiquity. Call it: Classical Age Cracker.

Illustrative of the cultural confabulation and communal delusions that Atlanta residents term as their way of life are the lives, fates, and legacies of two famous residents of the city, Blind Willie McTell and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom resided there in overlapping intervals during the first half of the twentieth century.

I first heard the music of Blind Willie McTell, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when in tow of my father, I visited friends of his who comprised the half dozen or so members of Atlanta's "beatnik" community.

They were flopped in a run-down, mafia-owned building at the intersection of Peachtree and Tenth Street, bizarrely enough, in the building that contained the apartment that Margaret Mitchell had christened "The Dump" -- the location where she had conceived and written Gone With The Wind.

Upon the turntable of a battered record player, belonging to the building's resident manager, the late Bud Foote, a professor at Georgia Tech., author, poet, musician, and all around Beat polymath, spun rare and exquisite LPs. It was at The Dump, I first heard the works of Mctell and other Blues, Folk, and Jazz greats.

The building was located a short distance from where, according to local bohemian (all seven of them) lore had it, an aging, increasingly disconsolate from poverty, racism, and his own obscurity, McTell used to busk for change from redneck Babbits and country-come-to-town parvenus, shortly before he gave up playing the blues and took up lay preaching and gospel music.

The Margaret Mitchell House, as it has been subsequently dubbed by the Atlanta Tourism Board, is now a city landmark. Both obtuse locals and gullible tourists seem oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the building, thrice burned to the ground and rebuilt by the city, doesn't, at present, in any way, shape, or form resemble the original structure where the epic racist, bodice-ripper, Gone With The Wind, was hallucinated and inflicted onto the page.

Not far down the road exists a bar named Blind Willy's, a place that, on any given night, is populated by the sort of folks, who, had they lived in McTell's era, would have ignored or spat upon him when he was busking on Ponce De Leon Avenue.

The irony shields of the city of Atlanta are impenetrable when there are dollars to be made from the creation of a safe, business-friendly, false mythology out of the stuff of the city's racist and tawdry history.