Maybe this sounds strange to say of a haggard, bewhiskered man who hasn't been seen walking the planet in seven score and three years, but Elvis Wilson knows it to be true: Chicks dig Abraham Lincoln. Take the night Wilson found himself honky-tonkin' on Lower Broad, in the company of a Nashville man named Mike Cox. On weekend nights downtown, you can often find Cox turning heads, even in the roiling, tumultuous street theater that makes up the city's tourist district. Just look for the guy in the stovepipe hat.
"Abe!" squealed a woman from inside Robert's Western Wear. Another ran out and begged him to come in—her friend was way too shy to admit her king-size crush on the Illinois Rail Splitter. Cox, in whiskers and longcoat the spitting image of Honest Abe, was happy to oblige. He's practically royalty on Lower Broad. Onstage in Robert's front window, Brazilbilly struck up "Hail to the Chief," and moments later Lincoln was whisking a lady around the dance floor.
Wilson, an art director at Gish Sherwood turned filmmaker, says he's seen all kinds of women run out to get their pictures taken with the ersatz Abe—out-of-towners, regulars, even giggly babes embracing the 16th president still dangling necklaces of dildos from a bachelorette party. And yet old times here are not forgotten. With the War of Northern Aggression still fresh on some folks' minds after nearly 150 years, nobody makes a taller lightning rod for that resentment. Just as vividly, Wilson remembers a drunk woman who lunged toward Cox once and leered, "Aren't you proud of yourself for freein' all those niggers?"
Whether he's seen as the man who drove Old Dixie down or an infallible Great White Father, the strong opinions people have about Abraham Lincoln only intensify when his facsimile appears in the flesh. In the lighthearted documentary Being Lincoln: Men With Hats, which screens at The Belcourt next Wednesday—the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address—Wilson delves into a nationwide subculture of men who dress, re-create and comport themselves at public appearances as Lincoln.
Do not call them "impersonators." They are Abraham Lincoln presenters, well aware that they are not the Great Man. Nevertheless, when they don the iconic ensemble—the hat, the whiskers, the full-length coat, sometimes even a strategically glued pencil eraser for his facial mole—each tends to assume great responsibility.
"If there's a little Lincoln inside you," says Dennis Boggs, one of Wilson's subjects, "he'll draw you in."
Boggs is among the more than 160 members of the Association of Lincoln Presenters (ALP), a national organization of living historians in 38 states for whom "being Lincoln" is more a calling than a hobby. For surreal sights, it's hard to top their conventions: a penguin colony of men in identical frock coats and bristling beards amid a sea of stovepipe hats. (Top it Wilson does, though, when he catches Cox commiserating on Lower Broad with an ersatz Elvis.) It's like the celebrity impersonators' Eden of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, except everyone's a Lincoln.
The idea for the film came from Victoria Radford, Wilson's wife and producer. Radford, a Metro schoolteacher, edited a 2003 book called Meeting Mr. Lincoln that assembled firsthand accounts from people who had known or encountered the 16th president. In her research, she discovered the ALP, and she and Wilson were fascinated. Their digging led to Boggs, Cox and John Mansfield, a retired Nashville home inspector whose humble quest to win top honors at a Lincoln look-alike contest is one of the doc's central threads.
Many presenters, like Boggs, are simply playing the hand nature dealt them. Tall and gaunt, with ready-made craggy features, Boggs was in a play at Old Hickory's Lakewood Theatre Company when a director told him he'd make a natural Lincoln. That was 1992. Today, the grateful Boggs makes his living by donning his $400 hat and performing some 250 programs a year, whether to an assemblage including Dick Cheney or to gaping schoolkids.
Other Lincolns are drawn by curiosity, companionship or kicks, and Wilson says some hardcore presenters tut-tut whether people who just want to play Abe for a day are tainting the group. Some are die-hard Republicans; some are liberal firebrands. Nearly all, though, mention how a casual interest in the fallen president became a desire to get to know the man behind the whiskers—a shrewd, sophisticated leader whose complicated inner views on race and politics are largely misunderstood even by his admirers.
"He didn't think the same way about a black man in 1863 that he did in 1837," explains Boggs, who's regarded by Wilson as the dean of Lincoln presenters for his diligence and research. Like most, he calls his historical doppelganger "Mr. Lincoln." "[Back then] he did not believe the black man was equal in intellect. Lo and behold, the Lord put some intellectual black men in his path, like Frederick Douglass. If you could show him his thinking pattern was wrong, he would change."
Yet Boggs, like his fellow presenters and filmmaker Wilson, can see the humor in re-creating so iconic a figure. He says they are fully aware that what glory they get comes from projecting the Great Man's image, even if the awestruck looks on people's faces trigger an undeniable rush. "If I get to the point I believe I'm him," Boggs deadpans, "I'm in trouble."
