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Vol. 16, No. 4: Winter 2010

  //  winter 2010

In the Winter Issue, Hal Crowther takes on H. L. Mencken, blackberries become currency after the Civil War, Cowboy Troy’s “hick-hop” lights up Texas, experts rethink North/South boundaries, and we visit the visionary architecture of Reverend H. D. Dennis.

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Front Porch: Winter 2010

by Harry L. Watson
“The South’s diversity not only has room for ‘High Culture,’ it also shelters a range of vernacular cultures that Mencken barely recognized. As a result, the meaning of ‘southern cultures’ is far more fluid and unpredictable than he and many others recognize.” I never knew my mother’s mother, a woman so distant from me that »
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The View from Mencken’s Tomb

by Hal Crowther
“He was a verbal bully with a bully pulpit, more entertainer than sly persuader; in terms of reach and impact, a modern equivalent would be someone like Rush Limbaugh, although Mencken’s demographic share was predominantly young and intelligent while Limbaugh’s is old and stupid.” Forgive me if I date myself by exhuming H. L. Mencken. »
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“A recourse that could be depended upon”

Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War

by Bruce E. Baker
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War “Nineteenth-century newspaper accounts tell of snake attacks. Hornets, as my brother could tell you, can be a problem, and bears are not unheard of.” One day last year, at the end of July, I walked down to Runnymede, alongside the River Thames, and picked a mess »
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Playing Chicken With the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West

by Adam Gussow
“‘My belt buckle is my bling-bling. It’s just going to keep getting bigger.'” There was no necessary reason why Cowboy Troy’s country-rap single, “I Play Chicken With the Train,” should have caused such an uproar among country music fans when it was released in the spring of 2005. The song itself is a sonic Rorschach »
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Getting There

by Peter Makuck
“After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.” After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.
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Rethinking the Boundaries of the South

by H. Gibbs Knotts, Christopher A. Cooper
“We can place the South into three categories: ‘southern to the core,’ ‘pretty darn southern,’ and ‘sorta southern.'” Some states just don’t feel all that southern anymore. Take Virginia as an example. Virginia is the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and the capital of the Confederacy. Two hundred years ago there was little doubt that »
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Home of the Double-Headed Eagle: The Visionary Vernacular Architecture of Reverend H.D. Dennis and Margaret Dennis

by Ali Colleen Neff
“In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passerby.” The Gibraltar of the Confederacy erupts gloriously from the southern tip-edge of the flat Delta flood plain to guard the lush »
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