Poetry
Sartoris Resartus
by Charles JoynerThe South is an enigma,Secret and sacred.
All Articles
Poetry
Reflections on Southern Intellectuals
by Richard H. KingMore than twenty-five years on, the distinction Willie Morris once drew between the formative influences shaping New York intellectuals and southern intellectuals still strikes a resonant chord. As Morris wrote in North toward Home (1967): With the Eastern Jewish intellectuals … the struggle as they grew up in the 1930s was for one set of »
“Sweet Home Alabama”: Southern Culture and the American Search for Community
by Paul Harvey“The baby boomers are having children (creating the so-called ‘baby boomlet’), returning to church in great numbers, and (not coincidentally) finding in country music (especially ‘suburban country’) a musical expression for their increasingly conservative tastes.” People magazine, that indispensable source for vital information on Americana, has once again sniffed out the Zeitgeist. In a recent »
“How ’bout a Hand for the Hog”: The Enduring Nature of the Swine as a Cultural Symbol in the South
by S. Jonathan Bass“Both symbolically and in reality the hog has become ingrained in the culture of the South.” The “King of the Road,” Roger Miller, had a genuine understanding of the southern fondness for hogs. “In the scheme of things, in the way things go,” wrote Miller, “you might get bit by the old Fido, but not »
The Front Porch: Spring 1995
by Harry L. Watson, John Shelton ReedWhich is more “southern”: a Faulkner symposium or a barbecue joint? From this porch swing, there’s no easy answer because everybody we know agrees that southern cultures range widely, embracing everything from literature to down-home cooking, from the highbrow to the lowlife and back again.
Porch-Sitting as a Creative Southern Tradition
by Trudier Harris, Roland L. FreemanI have recently been reflecting on the significance of the porch in the South, on what that space allows and what it means. I have been thinking about the history of sharing and interaction that characterizes porch space in southern culture, about the voices that bring the space to life, about what this space meant »
Swampland Jewels: Louisiana’s Goldband Collection Comes to the University of North Carolina
by Steve Green“A firsthand look at the artisitc and business records of south Louisiana’s Goldband enterprises.” In spring 1995 the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acquired a rich group of archival records from Goldband Recording Corporation, a small but important recording studio that has operated out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, »
Happy New Year!
by John Shelton Reed“Examining the persistence of a pyrotechnic custom.” Like the Chinese, southerners have long been inclined to welcome the New Year with fireworks or, lacking those, with gunfire. When the Southern Focus Poll asked, “Have you ever set off fireworks or fired a gun to celebrate New Year’s Eve?” 60 percent of native southerners acknowledged having »
The Novel as Social History: Erskine Caldwell’s “God’s Little Acre” and Class Relations in the New South
by Bryant Simon“The author explores deep divisions between early-twentieth-century South Carolina’s farmers and mill hands as seen in the work of Erskine Caldwell and in recent labor history.” Will Thompson is a worker, a white southern mill worker. He is not a tenant farmer turned mill worker; he is a lifelong mill worker. “The sight of the »
The Affable Journalist as Social Critic: Ben Robertson and the Early Twentieth-Century South
by Lacy K. Ford“The distinguished South Carolina journalist grappled with the issues of class, race, and industrialization in the South of the 1930s and 1940s.” In the summer of 1939, Ben Robertson, former White House correspondent for the Associated Press, traveled from Clemson to Atlanta hoping to write a feature on Margaret Mitchell, the newly famous author whose »
“Where the Sun Set Crimson and the Moon Rose Red”: Writing Appalachia and the Kentucky Mountain Feuds
by Dwight K. Billings, Kathleen M. BleeConvinved in advance that mountain people were benighted and degenerate, outsiders shaped the lore of feuding to suit their own purposes. In his 1901 essay “The Kentucky Mountaineer,” novelist John Fox, Jr., inscribed the mythic image of the southern mountaineers: “proud, sensitive, kindly, obliging in an unreckoning way that is almost pathetic, honest, loyal, in »
Twistin’ at the Fais Do-Do: The Roots of South Louisiana’s Swamp Pop Music
by Shane K. Bernard“Like zydeco and Cajun music, swamp pop is vital to the cultural identity of Cajun and Creole country.” Swamp pop music is a rhythm and blues idiom that combines elements of New Orleans rhythm and blues, country and western, and Cajun and black Creole music. Highly emotional, colorful lyrics, tripleting honky-tonk pianos, bellowing horn sections, »