Vol. 10, No. 2: Summer 2004

Vol. 10, No. 2: Summer 2004

Cosmopolitan southern belle Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dollard’s famous southern sojourn, John Henry’s hammer, God’s field of snow, Indian schools, Cold Mountain and southern community, and O Brother and the folk fadThis is Summer 2004!

Front Porch: Summer 2004

by Harry L. Watson

"Some southern traditions don't pretend to be liberating."

John Dollard: Caste and Class Revisited

by William R. Ferris

"That whole church would be a riot of the most beautiful songs. To be in the middle of it was for me an ecstasy, one of the greatest experiences of my life. I found it heavenly and unbelievably delightful, freeing and liberating. An odd thing about it was that the singing would never completely die down."

Zelda Sayre, Belle

by Linda Wagner-Martin

"There are few more memorable wives in twentieth-century American culture than Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who was married to the successful young author F. Scott Fitzgerald."

O Brother, What Next?: Making Sense of the Folk Fad

by Benjamin Filene

"Think of the tale of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and an enraged Alan Lomax trying to pin Dylan's manager to the ground while Pete Seeger hunted for an ax to cut the cables."

Aspiration and Varieties of Religious Experience

by Lynn Powell

"I saw God, my son once told me. He lives in a field of snow. What could you see? Just snow. And footprints."

John Henry: “Take this hammer, it won’t kill you”

by John Douglas

"John Henry and his shaker apparently kept hammering and drilling, hour after hour, while the steam-powered drill got tangled up in the hard rock. Years later, a hammer with the initials 'J. H.' was found in the tunnel."

John Hardy: A desperate little man

by John Douglas

It's hard to believe, but one of the puzzles that early-twentieth-century folklorists spent time sorting out was whether John Henry and John Hardy were the same man.

Hopes for John Henry Park

by John Douglas

Today, the community of Talcott, West Virginia, bases its fledgling tourism industry on John Henry.

What is Progress?: Desegregating an Indian School in Robeson County, North Carolina

by Malinda Maynor, James Arthur Jones

"But I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids' parents, because I taught a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, 'Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?'"

Globalization, Southern Style: Ways of Dixie Win in Latin America from New York Times, August 8, 1926

by James C. Cobb

In addition to a common preference for a less hurried and direct approach to business and commerce, given their "inherited paternalism," who better than the descendants of the South's old slaveholding class to commiserate with their kindred spirits south of the border about the intricacies of sweating peons and Jamaican labor without breaking a sweat yourself?

Ways of Dixie Win in Latin America

by Helen Bullitt Lowry

The Southerners who have gone North have had to drop their drawl and their restful afternoons and the ceremonious manners their mothers taught them, because the North thinks such manners an affectation in business hours. They have had to become Go-Getters and some have become Babbitts of the worst order.

Cold Mountain (Review)

by Edward D. C. Campbell

"This is a world in complete turmoil -- a civilization falling to pieces -- and one seldom so strongly presented in Civil War films. And yet, in the end, there is a regeneration of southern family and community."

Sodom Laurel Album (Review)

by Cary Fowler

University of North Carolina Press, in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2002.

Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (Review)

by Melton Alonza McLaurin

Beacon Press, 2003.

A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (Review)

by S. Willoughby Anderson

W. W. Norton, 2003.