Walk a little with me, won’t you carry a bit of my song.
I want to sing you a story about the place where I was born.
If I start slowin’ down and I throw in too many y’alls
Won’t you bear with me buddy ‘cause I think I’m feelin’ the cause
Sid Griffin – State of My Union *
For the record, I have never said the words “y’all”. Or is that just one word?
I am a son of the South, like Sid Griffin, singer and songwriter of the Long Ryders (who happens to live in England these days). Yet, living in the North now, I wrestle sometimes with the association. I am proud of many things about the South and my family’s history in it. I had ancestors who helped to settle the region. My grandmother claimed kinship with Daniel Boone; others were preachers who founded and led Presbyterian churches.
Border state
I am not from the Deep South, which comprises the cotton states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and typically also Georgia and South Carolina. I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, which is about as far north as you can get and still count as the South. Kentucky, West Virginia (which split off from Virginia when that state seceded), Maryland, and Missouri are border states between North and South. They are all former slave states, but because of their proximity to the North, they did not secede with the rest of the Confederacy in 1860/61.
Nonetheless, cross the Ohio River south into Kentucky and you will get a different vibe. There’s a warmth to Southern manners that emanates from a slower pace of life (relatively speaking, I know). Our Southern family definitely said “y’all,” and would greet us when we came to stay with a “Well, hi” that was so broad it sounded like the ha in hat.
They were not what you would call rednecks; they were for the most part urban and suburban businesspeople, but rural poverty was only a generation in their past. I had one great-uncle who still farmed a small patch – with mules, no less – and never owned a car, driving a horse-drawn wagon into town.
Southern turn of phrase
My father used to punctuate his speech with colorful Southern phrases like “Gol-durn” and “a right smart”. That last is a way of saying something is a lot – “a right smart helping of grits” or “a right smart piece”, a substantial distance to travel. He often used the words “cattywhompus” for a mess or a disorder, and “loblolly” for a muddy patch, which comes from the loblolly pine, a tree that grows throughout the South in marshy areas. My grandfather would say that someone was “as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs”. Someone who’s slothful is “slow as molasses in January”.
Does somebody have an idea that’s impractical or unworkable? I tell them, “That dog won’t hunt”. If the sky looks stormy, it might be “fixin’” to rain.
But my favorite, and one I use often myself, is “Six of one and a half dozen of the other”. UK readers probably know, it means something is the same either way. If you‘re given a choice between going bowling or to the movies and you’re fine with either one, it’s like saying you’ll take six of the powdered donuts and a half dozen of the jelly-filled.
Grits and groceries
Let me start by sayin’ that I don’t know just what you heard.
But I read a little about it and I don’t believe a word.
So let’s stroll to the kitchen where we start this meal from scratch.
I smell something cooking and I want right in at first batch. *
Yes, I do love grits. Grits are a Southern staple, and in restaurants in the South, the waitresses usually bring grits along with the standard glasses of water. Grits are made from hominy, which is corn treated with an alkali which makes the kernels swell up and get chewy. Dried and ground into a coarse meal, it becomes grits, and is usually an accompaniment to a meal, like mashed potatoes, with butter and salt, or for breakfast with eggs and bacon. You can add cheese for cheesy grits. Grits can also be fried, but it must be in bacon fat.
There’s an old Southern saying about the versatility of grits: “Grits is groceries”.
In the South, you almost cannot have Sunday dinner without country ham; and greens. Greens are usually spinach, kale, or collard (spring) greens. I won’t say no to creamed lima beans, green beans cooked with a ham hock, or sweet potato pie.
We never ate black-eyed peas, but biscuits and gravy are, as we would say, “mighty fine”. My favorite dessert by far is pecan pie, a Southern specialty. My grandfather did not care for sweets or desserts at all, saying, “If I had room for all that monkey food, I’d eat another plate of greens”.
In the South we take our country ham, bacon, pork chops, ribs, and sausage seriously. We like to say we “use everything except the squeal”. That’s “living high on the hog”.
Southern cuisine is also regional. You won’t find jambalaya on the table in Kentucky, and barbecue sauce is different depending on the area: smoky and spicy in Tennessee and Mississippi (Texas counts, too), sweet and savoury in the low country of Georgia and the Carolinas.
Southern rock
We gave you blues and jazz and country and western, too.
We oughta ask for ‘em back after what you put ‘em through. *
I have always thought the term “Southern rock” is redundant. Rock and roll is Southern by definition. It sprang up in two places, in New Orleans and Memphis, a synthesis of rhythm and blues and gospel born from the Black experience in the slave South with white country and western and bluegrass from the Appalachian Mountains, rooted in the ballads and reels brought over by Irish and Scottish immigrants. In fact, it was called mountain music before it became commercialized and institutionalized in Nashville. If you’ve seen the movie Sinners, you will realize that this music is, in its essence, white blues.
But I find much of today’s mainstream country music too self-conscious, even verging on the MAGA-political. Jason Aldean a few years back invited controversy with a song called Try That in a Small Town which attempted to justify communities that “have each other’s back” during the height of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests. To me, contemporary paeans to the virtues of down-home living and religion by the likes of Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs have the ring of smug self-righteousness. But you can find “three chords and the truth” ** in the music of Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, and Steve Earle.
Jazz has been called America’s only native art form. It originated in the South, and its roots are in African American rhythms, blues, and spirituals, but it also drew from white European song forms. Scott Joplin, the composer of classic ragtime tunes, even wrote an opera, Treemonisha, which blended African American music and themes with the classical European form, although it was never performed in his lifetime.
Nostalgia
Cornbread, stock cars, minor league baseball, too.
Woods full of creatures where the alligators chomp on you.
We’ve got lakes and rivers, lots of fields and streams.
Maybe it ain’t exactly heaven but it’s certainly part of my dreams. *
It’s hard to resist those images of the Old South: the antebellum mansions (Natchez, Mississippi is almost a Hollywood backlot with its carefully preserved Gone With the Wind-era manses), Spanish moss and cypress swamps, cotton fields and peanut plantations, catfish and crawdads, Uncle Remus, Huck Finn, paddlewheel steamers, Robert Johnson at the crossroads.
Much of the South’s allure is in the nostalgia it evokes. It has never let go of its history, for better or worse. William Faulkner famously said, “The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past”.
The Southern system, despite its pretensions to aristocratic superiority, was built on cruelty, not just against Black people (slaves and free) but against the lower orders of white people as well. Its prison system was, and is, far harsher than anywhere else in the country. The cities and suburbs may be more diverse and progressive now, but the heart of the South is still in those picturesque town squares, piney woods, and the memory of plantations.
Progress?
In fact, the plantation mentality is still with us. Even among my own family, I used to hear grudging acknowledgement that, Yes, “Negroes” have made progress, and yes, integration will happen and it should happen, but are they ready to be fully equal with whites yet? And if the outsiders would just let us handle this our own way, it was implied, it will all be fine.
Some are starting again to refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, arguing that it was the Union’s invasion of the South that started the war, conveniently ignoring that it was the Confederacy’s secession that was unconstitutional in the first place.
It’s been argued that the South actually won the war in the long run. It short-circuited Reconstruction through political deviousness, rejuvenated its bigotry with Jim Crow, and is now openly attempting to disenfranchise Black voters. I’ll go so far as to say that the South is actively rebuilding its Confederacy in everything but name.
Slavery has left its indelible mark for all time, I’m afraid. The South is the blueprint for the MAGA movement, its spiritual birthplace. It is the archetypal social hierarchy. The South refuses to confront this shameful past (and present) in any meaningful way and seems unlikely to ever do so.
And that makes me a little less proud.
*Griffin / Sowders, Huevos Rancheros Music – lyrics used with permission.
**Coined by Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard and the title of a 1997 book by Lawrence Leamer
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