In 1995, 24-year-old Robyn Tannehill had recently been made director of the Oxford Tourism Council and was making waves in a somnolent Oxford.
“I decided when I became tourism director that I really thought that Oxford should have a festival,” Tannehill said. “Oxford was just primed and ready to explode. I wanted to do something to be a showcase.”
Tannehill said she wanted to exemplify the three things that characterized Oxford to her.
“I wanted it to showcase music, food and art and I wanted it to be good music, food and art,” Tannehill said. “I knew we needed something that would brand it as an Oxford thing, and we had just gotten the double-decker bus.”
That year, Tannehill and her team organized the first Double Decker Arts Festival.
There were problems with her plan, of course. Though she knew the community would welcome an event that displayed Oxford’s talents, the mayor and the majority of the board of aldermen didn’t think it was a good idea.
“There were several that said ‘Okay, little girl.’ They didn’t buy in completely,” Tannehill said. “Pat was one of the few who agreed wholeheartedly.”
Pat Patterson, current mayor of Oxford and owner of University Sporting Goods, was a member of the board at that time. The board began to support it more, Patterson said, once the local businesses were made aware of how lucrative it could be for them.
“A stroke of genius was letting the Square businesses sell merchandise out on the sidewalk,” Patterson said. “When the businesses started backing it, the political opposition headed for the hills.”
After convincing the board that she could handle the task of organizing such an affair, Tannehill was faced with the daunting prospect of living up to her promise.
“I knew I could do it. I was so young and dumb; I just knew I could do it,” Tannehill said. “We way underestimated what this festival was going to be from so many aspects.”
The first issue was that of money or, rather, the lack thereof. The first festival only had two sponsors, A&B Distributors and Coca-Cola, each of whom gave $10,000 to the festival. This could only buy so much, however, and a stage wasn’t in the budget.If Tannehill wanted to have music, she had to have a stage. Luckily, the man she put in charge of entertainment, Bill Russell, had a solution, albeit a peculiar one.
“Bill Russell had friends that drove 18-wheelers. So, he talked them into dropping the flatbed of the truck on the Square,” Tannehill said. “Then I spent a ridiculous number of hours staple gunning burlap around them so it wouldn’t look like we couldn’t afford a stage.”
Coca-Cola donated large, unmarked plastic signs to the festival for advertisement purposes. Tannehill didn’t have the money to get anything printed on them.
“So, I used Sharpie markers and made all the signs that said ‘Square Fair,’ ‘Stage one,’ ‘Sponsored by whatever,’” Tannehill said.
Then came other issues, such as stagehands.
“I had Bubba Bonds – he was a good friend of my little brother’s,” Tannehill said. “I talked him into us paying him minimum wage and he managed all the stagehands. It was all Ole Miss football players.”
Despite the money troubles, Tannehill refused to allow an admission fee. The only revenue the festival made was from selling Coca-Colas, t-shirts and posters.
“I was determined that it would be a free festival – that it would be something that anybody that wanted to come could come,” Tannehill said. “They didn’t have to pay anything; it was open to everybody.”
Finally, after months of planning, the first Double Decker Arts Festival opened in the spring of 1996.
“We thought that we’d have a thousand or two people,” Tannehill said. “We had over 9,000 people. It was a lot more than we had envisioned.”
The festival had other unforeseen repercussions – an explosion of neon colored feathers in the courthouse courtesy of the first headlining band, Bo Dollis Jr. and the Wild Magnolias; an unexpected shortage of change for the vendors; and, perhaps the most vexing, the realization that they had forgotten to hire a cleaning crew. The latter resulted in Tannehill and four others staying until 4 a.m. that night to clean the Square.
Despite this, Patterson and Tannehill agree that the festival didn’t suffer any major setbacks.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a serious problem,” Patterson said, knocking on the wood of his desk. “We’ve been so lucky.”
Tannehill said the first festival – and those thereafter – couldn’t have worked without the support Oxford gave.
“Everybody in the community supported it. We had so many volunteers. Everything was manned with volunteers,” Tannehill said. “I would venture to say we had one to 200 community volunteers that made it happen.”
At one point, Tannehill said she found herself on the balcony of First National Bank looking out at the crowd.
“I remember standing on the corner of that balcony and just being like ‘Oh my goodness, we did it!’” Tannehill said. “I remember that as my snapshot of the day.”
This year, the Double Decker Arts Festival is projected to host 60,00 people with nearly two hundred art vendors for it’s twentieth annual event. The fest stretches over two days and requires far more than triple what the first budget allowed. It’s grown to be the biggest event that Oxford hosts all year – next to some of the more prolific football matches, perhaps. Tannehill, too, has grown. After years of running Double Decker, she is now Alderman of Ward II in Oxford. But that’s not how it started.
“It’s so funny to look back now at how it’s grown,” Tannehill said. “It could have panned out like a lot of other communities festivals. There are a lot of them that start and barely inch along for three years. We had to prove ourselves.”
Patterson, who sold cokes in one of the booths that day, said he remembers how hard Tannehill worked on that first festival.
“So much of the credit goes to her,” Patterson said. “This is so trite to say, but I’m not sure it wasn’t better then.”
