The American South has always been a mythic land of contrast and juxtaposition—black and white, rich and poor, mountaineer and planter, hospitality and violence, unregulated development and a sense of place, greed and grace, illiteracy and great writing—and it remains so today. One of the more intriguing paradoxes is the image of the South as the Bible Belt, a place where fundamentalist zealots constantly damn deviant behavior, and as the land of the honky-tonk, a place where good ole boys and girls push the limits of drinking, dancing, dalliance, and debauchery.
In the late 1940s, with support from the Rosenwald Fund and the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science, anthropologist John Gillin directed a series of southern community studies, including a remarkable study of York, South Carolina, a small town thirty miles south of Charlotte. In 1948 and 1949 three graduate students—one black, two white—moved to the town they called "Kent," and each immersed himself in one of York's three subcultures.