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Truly a Redneck Today

June 18, 2012 by Ed Southern

Today I am a redneck, and I will be again tomorrow.

By Wednesday, it should start to peel.

While I was away, Duke Energy decided to cut down a tree in my front yard.  Fair enough; the tree was clearly dying, and they did so at no charge.  The crew they sent to do the job, though, left a mess of logs and limbs, matted grass and crushed flowers.

I decided to see not inconvenience, though, but opportunity.  For the last several years, I’ve read and written about the early Southern frontier, from Jamestown to the American Revolution and beyond.  Chopping, splitting, and hauling wood was a central fact of life through almost all of the South for three centuries, and it’s half-past high time that I try my hand at it.  Saturday morning, I went and got my ax and my maul out of the storage shed, spat on my palms, and got to work.

To make a long story short – actually, the story itself is short; it’s just the day that was long – I went to bed Saturday night blistered, calloused, sore and sunburnt.  I also, at some point during the day, had entertained the following thoughts (in no particular order):

  • Drop me – 2012 me, not some alternate 18th-century version of me – in the Southern backcountry before the invention of the chain saw and/or pre-fab housing, with my shelter dependent on my industry and skill with an ax, and I’m going to spend a lot of nights sleeping under the stars before I’ve chopped enough for a hovel, much less a cabin.
  • Alternate 18th-century me, though, would almost certainly have been raised to that kind of work, and would have had a rudimentary cabin built in a day or two.
  • My most glaring lack for this job wasn’t the strength or the stamina, but the skill – to find the cut lines where the wood will split easily, to strike those lines true with every swing, to spot and avoid the punky wood that won’t split no matter how hard or often you hit it.  I learned and improved as the day went on, but I would have saved lots of time and gallons of sweat if I’d known all that when I started.
  • Not that some more strength and stamina wouldn’t have come in handy.  In 1750, the average adult American male was half-a-foot shorter and about 50 pounds lighter than me, but I wouldn’t want to arm wrestle that guy if he worked like that on a regular basis.
  • Which makes me wonder about the early settlers who weren’t raised to that kind of work – the transported convicts and indentured city dwellers and skilled tradesmen who’d never had to use an ax or maul.  How often did – if not survival, then the course of the rest of their lives, depend on how quickly they learned; or how hard they were willing to work to overcome their handicaps; or whether or not they had kindly, knowledgeable neighbors?  If a settler needed two or three times as long to build a cabin before he could start to clear fields and plant crops, was he stuck behind the curve of prosperity, never able to catch up?
  • I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s astonishing how much wood comes from a single, medium-sized tree.  My tree (a red oak, by the way) was a toothpick compared to the oaks and maples of the great old-growth American forests the early settlers found.  Even so, one two-foot-long section produced enough split shingles for two wheelbarrow loads.  A friend of a friend who heats his home with a wood-burning stove has filled a cargo van three times, and there’s still at least two more van-loads in my yard.
  • Yet we almost deforested America, as the English did Ireland.
  • I have seen several log or half-timbered houses and barns that have managed to survive to the present day.  I have never been as impressed by their construction as I should have been.
  • David Hackett Fischer, citing the OED, says that ‘redneck’ was long used as “a slang word for religious dissenters in the north of England,” and quotes North Carolina’s Anne Royall, who in 1830 “noted that ‘red-neck’ was ‘a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians.’”
  • Others trace this use of the term back to the Presbyterian Covenanters of 17th century Scotland, who wore red scarves or collars.
  • Meanwhile, in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, F. N. Boney of the University of Georgia says the term ‘redneck’ “did not come into common usage until the 1930s,” and “is usually a negative expression describing a benighted white southerner.”  He locates the term’s origins in the blazing sun under which their ancestors worked.
  • I suspect that both meanings and histories of the word are correct, and interchangeable, since the populations described so often overlapped on the Southern frontier.  It’s also entirely possible, if not downright probable, that the first meaning was forgotten entirely over time, and the term re-invented with only the second meaning in mind.
  • Either way, it’s absolutely certain that any and all etymologies of the word were utterly irrelevant that Saturday evening, when the hot shower water hit my red neck.  Land o’ Goshen and my stars-and-garters, that hurt.

Posted in The South of the Mind | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Dixie Babble in the Big Apple

June 6, 2012 by Ed Southern

I’m Dixie Babbling in New York City this week, which isn’t as disorienting as you might think.*  Our first night in the city (again), my wife and I met some friends in the East Village for a dinner of “Ukrainian soul food.”  As we left I noticed a big BBQ sign down the street, and told how I once came to NYC for meetings and was taken for lunch to a place in Midtown offering “authentic Southern barbecue.”

It was a gracious, if misguided, gesture, and I wondered then – and again to our friends – why in New York you’d try to offer “authentic” barbecue.  To which our friend Matt replied, with great wisdom, “All I can say is there’s a Chinatown here.”

He could have reminded me that we just walked out of a Ukrainian restaurant, because the concept applies.  New York is not a city of immigrants; it’s THE city of immigrants, and that includes great waves of immigrants from within, from “flyover country,” from all those places that are most definitely not New York City.

So my Dixie Babbles aren’t that foreign in Manhattan.  No one has looked at me funny when I speak.  Mine is far from the only drawl in the borough.  I’ve known so many who have left the South for New York and, while retaining much of their Southernness, never looked back.*  An old and grand and thriving strand of American fiction rests on the notion.

And though there is no “Dixietown” or “Little Hicksville” neighborhood, New York City does have its own old enclave of transplanted Southerners: Harlem.  The African-Americans who left Dixie and found a home north of 110th Street rarely self-identified as Southerners – for damn good reasons – but the South’s culture was integrated long before its water fountains.  Try to imagine the South without front porches, okra, and the banjo – all of which have African roots.  If you find yourself in Manhattan and want a meal that will remind you of home, skip the Midtown barbecue and head to Harlem.

* I’ve been to New York more times than I can count, but still, every time I arrive, I have a momentary disruption that runs something like this: “Dear God, the people; all these people.  How can there be this many people, and how can they all be in one place for anything other than a football game?  And, oh Lord, this is only a tiny fraction of them.  Oh gracious God, please set me down in the middle of a nice quiet swamp before I go out of my mind.”

* Harold Hayes, the editor who turned Esquire into a cultural force in the 1960s, was the son of the Baptist preacher who was pastor of my great-grandparents’ church in my hometown.

Postscript: I’d written this post in my notebook during a break from sightseeing, then walked through Chinatown to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side.  In the midst of a fascinating if somewhat overpriced one-hour tour, the guide made reference to the South’s current struggles with Hispanic immigration – the South’s first experience with mass influx of non-English speakers since the 1700s, and one we haven’t handled especially well; we should own up to that.  She mentioned she’d lived in the South, but then hastened to add, “Don’t tell anyone that.”  Ha ha.  So glad to know we can still condescend toward the South and Southerners, even in a discussion of the evils of discrimination.

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May 29, 2012 by Ed Southern

The only problem with stories like this is that they make me hungry.

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“Saying ‘Southern Rock’ is like saying ‘Rock Rock’.”

May 28, 2012 by Ed Southern

So says Gregg Allman, so it must be true. 

The Huntsville Times compiled a list of nine Southland venues “every music lover” should visit.  I’ve been to four, and walked or driven past a couple of others, so maybe I’m just a music liker.

The article begins with Allman’s assertion (for the 1995 The History of Rock ‘N Roll documentary) that rock was born and raised in the South, so labeling some rock as ‘Southern’ is redundant.  The writer points out that St. Louis-born Chuck Berry might take exception to that, but especially with the University of Missouri in the SEC now, is St. Louis really all that un-Southern?

And since we’re not just talking about rock, why not mention that jazz, blues, and country all come from the South, as well?

This music is the fruit of the South’s long history of widespread oppression, exploitative economies, enthusiastic religion, and social repression.  You’re welcome, America.

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Not all of us who holler, hate

May 9, 2012 by Ed Southern

Not all of us who holler, hate.
Not everyone who drawls or twangs
Speaks hatefully, nor everyone
Who prays in stiff-backed pews demands

That God incline to those like us.
Not all of us who ache for fall,
For fishing and football think in thick
And arid ruts.  Not all of us.

Posted in The South of the Mind | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Levon Helm and The Right Stuff

April 21, 2012 by Ed Southern

I first encountered the late, great Levon Helm not through his music, but through The Right Stuff.  His voice opens the film: “There was a demon that lived in the air,” he says, as the camera speeds you through high clouds, and his narration sets the stage for the story of America’s entry into the Space Age.

His on-screen role as Ridley, Chuck Yeager’s flight engineer and sidekick, is small, even if he does have two of the movie’s best lines.1  But as narrator, Helm’s distinctive Arkansas twang bookends the movie.  Choosing him to narrate was counterintuitive and brilliant, because The Right Stuff is as much about the closing of an older America as it is about the opening of space.  Ridley and Yeager and the flyboys at Edwards Air Force Base seem to have wandered off a John Ford set, out there in the high desert, dressed in leather jackets and khaki, drinking whiskey and beer in a rattletrap saloon, even riding horses.2  In the movie’s second half, as the Mercury space program begins and works towards its climax with the John Glenn orbit, the light changes from sunburnt browns to cool indoor blues, and the NASA men wear gray flannel suits or clean white smocks when they’re not in their shiny synthetic space suits.  They live in pre-fab houses and drive fiberglass Corvettes.

The next-to-last scene, though, takes place back in and above the high desert, back with Yeager and Ridley, and then, just before the credits roll, Helm’s narration comes back to bring the story to a close.  You can watch the ending as a triumphant assertion of the ongoing need for old-school guts in a plastic world, or you can watch it as the last hurrah of the last cowboys before they’ve all crashed and burned.  Either way, Levon Helm’s voice is the landmark, the monument from a wilder world.

Which is more or less how Helm came to fame in the first place, as the drummer, singer, and living link for The Band.  An Arkansas farm kid in a band full of Canadians, backing a Jewish folkie from Minnesota, Helm grew up listening the old country and folk – before such music was known by either name – on the Grand Ole Opry and the King Biscuit Flour Hour and his family’s front porch.  When The Band – first with Dylan in that West Saugerties basement, then on their own – set about re-imagining and re-animating the American folk tradition, rescuing it from its biggest fans and would-be curators, Levon Helm was the foundation.  He was the foundation musically, as any good drummer should be, and he was the foundation spiritually, as the honest-to-God down-home country boy, who’d been among the last in the Western world to learn indigenous music in the manner that got it called “folk” in the first place.

1 The first is when Ridley, Yeager, and the press liaison officer are talking about the test-flight program in their hangout, and the officer asks – half-rhetorically – “You know what makes these birds go up?”  Without missing a beat, Ridley the engineer replies, “Hell, the aerodynamics alone would take hours to explain . . .”

The second is the last line of the next-to-last scene, when Yeager has taken a new jet to the very limits of the atmosphere before being forced to eject.  Ridley’s with the ambulance driver hurrying through the desert toward the column of black smoke when the driver sees a solitary figure in the distance.  “Sir, over there,” he says.  “Is that a man?”  Ridley looks, sees Yeager striding away from the wreckage, and says, “Yeah, you damn right it is.”

2 I’m referring only to the movie here, not to Tom Wolfe’s book, much less to the real history of Yeager, Edwards, and the test-flight program.

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Tell About the South

April 15, 2012 by Ed Southern

Tell about the South, Shreve said, but what’s still there to tell?  That we eat at Hardee’s and Krystal instead of Carl’s Jr. and White Castle?  That we watch the Braves on SportsSouth instead of the Red Sox on NESN?  That we feel a little outraged when we have to specify “sweet tea”?

Ever since the colonists moved inland from the Chesapeake and the Low Country, the American South’s been more an idea, an imagining, than a concrete place, especially since the culture has always seeped so, across the Potomac, the Ohio, the Arkansas.  Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri were slave states that stayed in the Union.  People from rural Indiana live and talk almost exactly like people from rural Kentucky or Tennessee do.  Are Texas and Oklahoma the West, or the South?  How about Arkansas?  A native once told me that New Orleans isn’t a Southern city, it’s a Caribbean city.

Many if not most of the contemporary ideas – coming from inside and outside the region – of what the American South is and was are, to be blunt, ridiculous.  Hal Crowther says so, so it must be true.  He and his wife Lee Smith spoke recently at the “Okra to Opera” conference at Converse College in Spartanburg, a conference that saw fit to ask if Southern culture has vanished.

Language has long been thought to mark off the South as separate, but the Southern vocabulary and accent has always been varied if not jumbled, a veritable Dixie Babel (get it?).  Mental Floss looked through the latest edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English last week, and came up with “19 Regional Words All Americans Should Adopt Immediately.”  I’m a big fan of regional and archaic words, and of not letting them die.  That’s the reason I occasionally sound like a half-wit historical re-enactor.  Well, part of the reason.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Times, this article opens by acknowledging that there is no single Appalachian dialect, that immigrants from many places brought their own speech ways into the mountains, and that those speech ways survived haphazardly into our own highly mobile present (a statement that’s true for all of the South).  The writer then goes on to “define” how them “mountain people” (her phrase) talk, which makes me wonder how and why I grew up in the Piedmont suburbs saying, and surrounded by people who said, that we were fixin’ to cut off the lights and change a tair to go see a movie at the (if my father was talking) thee-ATE-r or the (if I was talking) THEE-uh-tur.

I knew a girl who grew up 20 miles from where I did, but she carried her groceries home in a sack, while I used a bag.  My Alabama-born wife waters the yard with a hose pipe.  Will Blythe’s father insisted that in the South you make a pie with puh-kahns, but some South Carolinians say PEE-cans, and Allan Gurganus – about as North Carolinian as you can get – says pee-CAHNs.  In parts of eastern North Carolina, a mildly pleasant past experience is described as “It warn’t bad.”

It’s almost enough to make you think that the South isn’t as monolithic as the stereotypes would have you believe, as CNN (born and based in Atlanta, by the way) admits.

Posted in The South of the Mind, Y'all | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

I Want to Hate the Masters

April 7, 2012 by Ed Southern

Lord, how my rational, progressive mind wants to hate the Masters.

But my hidebound, history-laden heart does love it so.

The players who made the cut are out on the course, the sun is shining over Augusta National, and soon Jim Nantz once again will manage to gush while whispering, rhapsodizing pine trees and azaleas and “a tradition unlike any other” into a right vision of heaven.1

Nantz has been doing his thing over at CBS for so long that we now have a parallel Masters-week tradition of pre-emptive anti-Nantz narrative, pinpricking the pompous reverence Augusta National demands of those who would broadcast their one public event.

Augusta National and the Masters are easy to prick, impossible (so far) to puncture: a bunch of (extremely) rich, (mostly) old, (almost entirely) white guys in ugly blazers hanging out in their own gated He-Man Woman-Haters Club (as far as we know) whose clubhouse was once an antebellum “big house” on a Georgia rice plantation.  They couldn’t make themselves an easier target, short of burning a cross on Magnolia Drive.

The volume’s been turned up a notch this year, thanks to Ginni Rometti’s ascension at IBM, a long-time tournament sponsor whose CEO traditionally becomes an honorary member, as well as the general fat-cats-bad unrest in the nation.

Not surprisingly, Grantland offers a couple of creative takes to the annual pile-on.  Wright Thompson leaves Augusta National in search of James Brown’s Augusta, exploring “the Terry,” the rough neighborhood where Brown grew up (in his aunt’s brothel).

At a greater remove, Brian Phillips compares the Masters to Mad Men, both selling “poisonous nostalgia” for a gone America we’re better off without.

Phillips’s critique of the Masters mystique is interesting: “the Masters is essentially Mad Men, season 51,” he writes, and he imagines an octogenarian Don Draper musing, “The golf course made sense.  The careful plan of the fairways, the pimento cheese sandwiches2, the creek.  This was order, civilization, tradition.  A place where a man commanded respect.  The kids would never understand this.”

The crux of Phillips’s argument is a question he asks about the tournament, but that applies equally to the TV show: “Why is something so clearly redolent of a past no one seriously wants to go back to capable of inspiring so much goofy affection?”

Let’s admit, first of all, that there are among us troglodytes who do, in fact, “seriously” want to go back to that past, part and parcel, and have long since been seduced by Augusta National’s vision of a world where the gals and the blacks are kept firmly in their places.3

Leaving those asshats out of the discussion, let’s now admit that the Masters inspires “so much goofy affection” in many of us because, apart from the regular occurrence of breathtakingly great golf, Augusta National thinks to wrap their sandwiches in green paper.

I’m serious.  Quit looking at me like that.

Please understand that in order to pass through the gates of Augusta National, you first have to pass along Washington Road, passing the pay-day check cashers, the Hooters, the TGI Friday’s.  Washington Road is the vomit of late 20th-century sprawl, all fast food and quickie marts.  If Augusta National is the last bastion of the “clubby, genteel” postwar America4 that otherwise died off in the early 1970s, then Washington Road is the apotheosis of what most of the rest of America has become: cheaply built and mass produced; baldly, anonymously commercial; disposable and impermanent and tacky.  It’s a four-lane insult to the American citizen, a congested, spluttering scoff at any notion of democratic taste or intelligence.

On the other side of those gates, though, someone thought to wrap those concession sandwiches in green paper, so that if a wrapper doesn’t make it to the proper receptacle, it won’t wander glaringly white or silver across the fairways in front of the TV cameras.  On the other side of the gates, the visitors who’ve paid (or finagled) their way in to see the tournament are patrons, not fans; they hold badges, not tickets; they abide by the strictest code of conduct this side of a Richmond cotillion.

You can call this as stuffy as Roger Sterling’s three-piece suits, as fussy as Pete Campbell’s tie clips, but there’s a reason why official Mad Men collections and clearly Mad Men-inspired designs are showing up in shopping malls across the country.  You can regret how Augusta National’s concern for aesthetic veers hard right into the unfortunate (all caddies, each of whom is a highly paid professional, must wear matching white jumpsuits and green Masters caps during the tournament), while appreciating the appeal of its effect.

The particular draw of the Masters and Augusta National isn’t always aspirational or exclusionary in nature and essence.  The draw is not some idea of an older, more hierarchical civilization, but an old civility, in which attention is paid to the little things, to appearances, and through which all – not just old, rich, white men – inherently are shown respect.  For some of us, the four days of the Masters isn’t a trip back to the “good old days” of discrimination and patriarchy; it’s a respite from the hollow, soul-leeching, offensive postmodernity of Washington Road.

1 In all fairness to Nantz, have you seen the course at Augusta National?  I mean, damn, y’all.
2 Which really are delicious, by the way.
3 What’s especially funny about these morons is that they never quite grasp that in that past they long for, they and theirs were kept firmly in their place, as well.  Idiots.
4 I don’t know that “postwar” America is what Augusta National’s going for.  If it is, it’s for a version of postwar America that was itself going for an imagined version of pre-Depression, post-Reconstruction America that saw the rise of the first and second of the four New Souths, in which textile and tobacco barons, bankers, and professional men were riding the crest of a new prosperity (Augusta National opened in 1933).  That era was, in many of its ways, going for the look and feel and codes of an imagined antebellum culture of moonlight and magnolias and mint juleps, which was itself – insofar as it ever existed at all – going for what it knew of the earlier plantation culture of the Low Country and the Virginia Tidewater, which was in turn trying to replicate a late-medieval European society that never really was, in the first place.  Thank you for entering the Dixie Babble Hall of Mirrors; we hope you enjoyed your trip.

Posted in Deacon Blue, The South of the Mind | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Smile when you say that . . .

April 6, 2012 by Ed Southern

A small sample of what others are saying about the South:

From AlterNet, Kristin Rawls exposes the “5 Big Media Stereotypes About the South.”  To which I say, only 5?

Raise your lighters and holler “Free Bird” for the new BBC4 documentary Sweet Home Alabama, about the rise of Southern rock, reviewed in the Guardian’s music blog.

And tomorrow night, the USA Network will air a 50th anniversary broadcast of To Kill a Mockingbird, with a special introduction by the President of these United States.  Now excuse me while I make sure my mother has stocked up on tissues.

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Nothing more to say

April 4, 2012 by Ed Southern

I wish I had some insight, some wisdom to share, but I don’t.  Too much has been said already by too many who know no more about Trayvon Martin’s killing than I do, which is to say, not much.  We’ve heard a lot, much of it speculation and assumption, and we can speculate and assume on our own, but we don’t know much more than that a young man is dead for no good reason.

Yesterday Isabel Wilkerson was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to discuss Martin’s death in the context of Florida’s history of racial violence.  Wilkerson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Warmth of Other Suns, about the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North, asks the valid question of whether or not central Florida is still part of the South, culturally, and notes how much the region has changed in the last few decades.  In both the interview and her column for CNN.com, she then goes on to describe just a few of the most horrid episodes from Florida’s past, establishing that – whether or not Florida below Gainesville is still Southern – the state was as fervently and violently racist as the rest of the Jim Crow South.

Central Florida’s Southland status is up for debate and entirely beside the point.  Southerners should never forget, deny, or excuse the sins of slavery and Jim Crow – or pretend that racism is a thing of the past – but, today of all days, we should face up to the fact that racial violence is, as Wilkerson says, “a moral challenge not for just one state but for America.”

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