• The Appalachian Photographers Project features 18 photographers from the Southern Appalachian states.  Their work is a broad and varied view of the Appalachian South.  Our own Maury Gortemiller is represented.

• It’s a great month for music. Both Southern Cultures and Oxford American have produced Southern music issues and both are accompanied by CDs filled with gems.  “Well Whatever” by The Kingsbury Manx is currently at the top of my playlist.

Cracker Culture is McWhiney’s most well-formed manifestation of his Celtic thesis.  Other books, like the slim and morbid Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, rely on it but don’t explore the idea in full.  Cracker Culture draws on 3 main points to link early Southern culture with Celtic heritage:

1. Early Southern people liked to get drunk.  Irish and Scottish people like to get drunk.
2. Early Southern people didn’t like to work and preferred to rely on herded cattle and swine to make a living, since it was easier than tilling and raising crops.  Same for Celtic peoples.
3. Early Southern people liked to have fun (see #1) and valued leisure above prosperity.  Same for the Celts.

Yes, these things are generally true.  And yes, much of Celtic culture that is lost even to Europe survives (or at least survived) in the Deep South.  In the chapter on hospitality, McWhiney quotes a Yankee traveler “The food generally amounts to no more than fried fatback and cornbread.”  And a Northerner noted ” that dyspepsia was a common complaint in Kentucky, as God knows it ought to be.”  That could describe the meals my grandparents spoke of and still ate into the 1990s.  Cornbread (which no one but Southerners truly know how to make — try ordering it elsewhere, and you get a vile, sweet yellow stuff unfit for human consumption), pork, buttermilk, field peas, and collards were a typical meal for my grandparents.

Celtic folk music also survives in the Deep South and informs Old Time and Bluegrass music to this day.

Yes, many if not most Caucasian Southerners are of Celtic extraction.  However, what McWhiney misses is that the Deep South is an extremely cosmopolitan place.  McWhiney loves to contrast the Celtic Southerners, with their love of whiskey, horse races, and knife fights, with the staid Ango-Saxon Northerners, with their pasty complexions and general love of industry and hatred of all things fun.  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

The first problem here is that Southern culture (specifically music and cuisine) owes a great deal to African culture.  The banjo, after all, is derived from an African lute.  McWhiney also glosses over German, Dutch and English settlers and especially over the heavy population of French who settled the Southern Gulf coast (fun fact: Demopolis, AL was founded by French exiles from the Napoleonic Wars).

The second problem is that many of the attributes he ascribes to Southerners are endemic to basically all people.  People of all stripes enjoy fun and will generally avoid work if possible.  Were early Southerners primarily Celtic in descent?  Yes.  Does a Southerner’s distaste for work and love of fun equate a connection with Celtic culture?  Not in the least.

McWhiney’s idea is valuable in that it illustrates the connection between the New World and Old Europe as it pertains to the Deep South.  It’s certainly worth a read.  However, it also neglects large swathes of Southern culture and goes to great length to connect the slimmest of threads from Dixie to the Celtic hinterland.  Does it deserve a place on your bookshelf?  Sure.  Does it deserve to be taken as gospel?  Not a chance in hell.

But this sort of thing can be dangerous.  Or perhaps “hazardous” is the word I’m looking for.  Were it not so well done, The Queen Family could easily sway veer into parody (a la The Dancing Outlaw) or dime-store nostalgia for “a simpler time.”  The casual viewer (does this sort of thing have casual viewers?) could easily smirk at the dialect and reminiscences for a group of people whom the 21st century has yet to impact (the trailer [below] seems sadly geared toward that very demographic).  At hazard is a reinforcement of stereotypes, but the reward is something far more valuable — a snapshot of a family whose musical traditions are as deep as they are genuine.

• Oxford American dedicates some space to some particularly wonderful Southern cheese.  Sweet Home Farm in Elberta, Alabama is a particular favorite of our very own Arts Editor, Brannon.  She grew up just miles away in Daphne, but has yet to share any with me.

• I had a birthday recently (28 — keeping 30 steadily at bay), and a friend, knowing my predilection for that venerable Southern cocktail sent me this, along with an excellent bottle of bourbon.  I look forward to enjoying it this weekend.  Now, if only I could find a poem about the Old Fashioned (I enjoy mine with rye, however — is that heresy?)

• Hailing from Appalachian North Carolina, the Red Fox Chasers were made up of four neighbors. A.P. “Fonzie” Thompson and Bob Cranford grew up making music together in the early 1900’s, and learned the basics of harmony from shape note singing, also known as Fa So La or Sacred Harp. Guy Brooks grew up in a nearby county with Paul Miles, who learned to play the banjo at the age of 5 on a homemade instrument crafted from a meal sifter and a groundhog hide. “I’m Going Down to North Carolina – The Complete Recordings of the Red Fox Chasers [1928 - 1931]” will be released on August 18, by Tompkins Square Records. You can get a preview of it here.

• The Mississippi Museum of Art’s new exhibition entitled “Name Change: One Artist – Twelve Personas – Thirty-Five Years” displays the work of Hattiesburg-born artist Ed McGowin.  McGowin notably believed that his work did not fit neatly into the orderly pages of art history, which demand that an artist produce a coherent and linear body of work. To demonstrate his point, McGowin has legally changed his name twelve different times over the past thirty-five years, and has produced varying bodies of work under each name, before changing his name back to the one he was born with – William Edward McGowin.

Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories isn’t new.  It’s a couple of years old, but it wears them well.  Rash is a professsor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, and his title should give you some indication of his subject matter.  He is a prolific writer of poetry (poetry, of course, is always dicey and never having read it, can’t comment either way) and fiction.  You might know the name from more successful novels like Saints at the River and The World Made Straight.

The short form style of Chemistry gives Rash the chance to explore a broader Appalachia and populate it with figures who are equal parts tragic, exuberant, and  punishingly honest.  The titular story depicts a family struggling with a father’s terminal illness and his patiently abiding interest in a remote, evangelical church.  Other gems like “Speckled Trout,” (winner of the 2005 O. Henry prize) “The Projectionist’s Wife” and the seemingly out-of-place “Honesty” are well worth the effort.  Rash works in an Appalachia whose traditions and struggles aren’t dying or dead but are very much alive, despite the soft fatalism of his oeuvre.

Chemistry is also exceptional in the way it deftly avoids cliche, which the Appalachians are particularly full of.  Martin Amis once said a writer’s primary work is to do battle with cliche, and Rash has succeeded where scores have failed.  Though the characters are familiar — old men gossip about a legendary fish, an abusive husband consoles his recently-assaulted wife — they aren’t tired, trite, or predictable.  His characters share a sort of fatalistic resignation, and it may be just that soft note of defeat that resonates so familiarly with those of us who know Appalachia intimately.