tobacco road

[After Tobacco Road, a novel by Erskine Caldwell.]

Tobacco Road (1933), a play by Jack Kirkland. [Masque Theatre, 3,182 perf.] The Lesters are a shabby, worthless family of sharecroppers who have lost the land their ancestors had long farmed in a desultory fashion. Jeeter Lester (Henry Hull) is the shiftless head of the family. He has sold his oldest daughter for seven dollars, and when her husband, Lov Besney (Dean Jagger), comes to complain that she will not consummate the marriage, Jeeter allows his other daughter, Ellie May (Ruth Hunter), to run off with Lov. His son, Dude (Sam Byrd), marries a neighbor who has enough money to let him buy an old car. When Dude's mother, Ada (Margaret Wycherly), berates her son, he runs her over and kills her. Jeeter seems indifferent to all this, just sitting on his stoop and rubbing dirt with his hand. Based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell, the play was assailed by almost every critic. Richard Lockridge of the Sun typified much of the revulsion when he referred to the work as “a play that achieves the repulsive and seldom falls below the faintly sickening.” To the surprise of the show‐wise, the play became the longest‐running drama up to its time. Recent revivals tend to play the old play for laughs. Jack KIRKLAND (1902–69) was born in St. Louis and was represented on Broadway as author and/or producer of ten plays. His only other success was I Must Love Someone (1939), a fictionalized account of the famous Florodora girls, written with Leyle Georgie.

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For other uses, see Tobacco Road (disambiguation).

Tobacco Road refers to the tobacco-producing area of North Carolina and is often used when referring to sports (particularly basketball) played among rival North Carolina universities. The phrase actually originated as the title of a novel set in Georgia, but it naturally migrated to North Carolina because of the state's primacy in tobacco production.

The usual universities referred to by the moniker "Tobacco Road" are the following:

• Duke University (Blue Devils), located in Durham, North Carolina
• North Carolina State University (Wolfpack), located in Raleigh, North Carolina
• University of North Carolina (Tar Heels), located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
• Wake Forest University (Demon Deacons), located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Three of the schools (Duke, UNC, and NC State) are separated by no more than 25 miles (40 km) and Wake Forest lies about 100 miles (160 km) west of the other three. It was formerly much closer to the other three, having originally been located in the town of Wake Forest, North Carolina until 1946. All four are no more than 6 miles (9.7 km) from Interstate 40; the road is sometimes informally known as the "Tobacco Road". The proximity of these schools to one another and the membership of each school in the Atlantic Coast Conference have created a natural rivalry among students and alumni.

These four universities are also known in the state as the "Big Four" and competed in the Dixie Classic tournament from 1949-1961 and the Big Four Tournament in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 1971-1981.

North Carolina State University's Red and White Song mentions each of the four universities in its lyrics.

See also

• Carolina-Duke rivalry
• Carolina-NC State rivalry

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