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.

This is due in large part to the sad fact that Reconstruction never quite ended.  The Southerner endures endless fusillades at his own heritage; never quite erudite enough, never quite progressive enough, always a little late to the party.  The Southerner is both curiosity and cancer, welcomed for comedic value but spurned for ideological rigidity.

Needless to say, it is difficult to learn about Southern culture in universities.  Such classes are a rarity and, when they do exist, focus entirely on the unforgivable brutishness of the plantation system.  There is, however, more to the South than slavery, plantations, and the Civil War.  So where do we go to actually learn about Southernness?  Good news, friends.  Here’s a list.

If you haven’t investigated the topic before, start here:

1.  The Big Three: The Basis of Your Education in Southernism

Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity

UGA’s James Cobb provides a compelling and comprehensive survey of Southern identity that pulls no punches where failures are concerned, yet does not shy away from the complex cultural history of the South.  Not overly academic, but more than deep enough for the novice.  Start here.

The Mind of the South

W.J. Cash’s mid-century masterpiece on the Southern psyche and its formative elements.  Read this next and enjoy the sensation of falling down a rabbit hole.  Cash’s assertions about the formation of Southern identity are as accurate today as they were prescient 60+ years ago.  A must have.

The Burden of Southern History

C. Vann Woodward’s work rounds out what I consider “The Big Three.”  Granted, I slightly despise this book.  Woodward’s primary thesis is that if you are a Southerner, you have a pathological difficulty interacting with the world.  He spends the better part of the book providing supporting material on why Southernism is a pathology rather than a culture.  Of course, he was at Yale at the time of its publication (1960), a time when doing pop-psych on the South was terribly en vogue.  So if I hate it so much, why do I recommend it?  Because it perfectly illustrates how the rest of America sees the South.  Enjoy your outrage.

2. A Deeper Understanding

Once you’ve passed through the Big 3 and are ready for some deeper reading, I recommend the following, in no certain order:

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism

Eugene Genovese’s slim volume on Southernism and its attendant spirit, a unique brand of agrarian conservatism (don’t mistake the term — it would be a complete stranger to today’s “conservatives”) is a fascinating and quick read through the genesis of the Southern political identity.

The Idea of the American South

Michael O’Brien’s book is not a page turner and is only recommended for the serious student of Southernism.  It’s not exactly engaging and its thesis is often elusive.   However, its contents are eminently useful for understanding a particularly formidable period in the South’s history. Not for the timid.

The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver

I hesitated to put this on the list.  Weaver is a highly polarizing figure commonly noted for his books on political theory (Ideas Have Consequences, Visions of Order) and his Southern Essays can be challenging and even maddening. Again, not for the timid — these essays require focus but are highly rewarding.  Certainly, some of the political stances are dated (at best).  Overlook these, and you’ll be highly rewarded for your efforts.

The Southern tradition certainly bears its share of the guilt.  It’s easy enough to play those same 3 chords over and over and grind out South-as-genre work until the cows come home.  The recent SIBA awards list bears this out — though there are rare moments of masterful literary fiction like Ron Rash’s Saints at the River (even this is hardly his best work), most of it is treacly, sappy pap like Marley and Me or Because of Winn Dixie.  Good God.

So what is the current state of Southern lit?  Let’s consider 3 prevalent archetypes:

Trendy scholarship: dime-a-dozen academic work obsessed with race, class, and violence.  It paints the South’s white population with the broad brush of guilt and regards Southernness as a kind of pathology to be studied and eradicated like a communicable disease.  But for the moment, let’s discount academia.  Its motivations are clear enough.  I spent long enough inside it to see the man behind the curtain — class issues never go out of style in academia, but violence and trauma are all the rage and the American South is a convenient and plentiful source.  The victims and perpetrators are clearly delineated and the least amount of thought is required to churn out something tenure-worthy.

Absurd nostalgia: cutesy, South-as-genre work with all the trimmings.  Familiar tropes here are the placid simplicity of country life, the superior values of the pre-industrial South, and that the South never was all that racist to begin with and everyone’s just exaggerating.  Nostalgia for the Old South began almost as soon as the Old South itself had ended.  One of the earliest perpetrators was Thomas Nelson Page, who once declaimed that the Old South was “the purest, sweetest life ever lived” and that it “made men noble, gentle, and brave and women tender and pure.”  This, of course, is utter bullshit but it sold like hotcakes in the wake of Reconstruction as Southerners looked for a Golden Age on which to cling in order to maintain identity in the tumult of the South’s rapid industrialization.   Sadly, it didn’t end there.  C. Vann Woodward noted that the New South’s “most significant invention” was the Old South, and what an enduring invention it was.  We are still bombarded with antebellum romance, as well as nostalgia pieces reaching throughout the early to mid 20th century.  Think Fried Green Tomatoes.*

Lampoon: Ah, this old chestnut.  Some hapless out-of-towner lands in some small Southern burg. Hijinks ensue.  The South itself is a foil, and the locals enjoy having puckish fun at the confused (usually northern) traveler.  The reverse is also prevalent;  a Southerner finds himself elsewhere and completely incapable of acclimating.  As Ray McKinnon in The Accountant says, “Gomer, Goober, Cletus, Enos, Jethro, Ellie May, Billy Bob?  Don’t insult my intelligence.”  The list of dim-witted, slow speaking Southerners in literature and film is endless and shows no signs of abating.

The intention of this post is not to enumerate the ways in which the South abashes itself literarily, but rather to ask “why do we keep doing it?”  Certainly, it’s profitable.  People find some measure of comfort or romance in the Old South, despite its heavily constructed identity and this is mostly harmless.  Similarly, people enjoy laughing at the dimwitted hillbilly or the unschooled redneck.  The problem here is that South-as-genre work is no more reflective of the actual South than the Dukes of Hazard (filmed in California, of course).   The plantations are long gone.   The internet et al has done more to homogenize the US than Reconstruction ever dreamed of.  There are no more country stores,  no more old men playing checkers and going on about the weather.  There are strip malls and interstate highways. There is Applebees and Target.

The South that South-as-genre fiction describes no longer exists.  And yet Southerners are complicit in its creation, reveling in both the glorification and humiliation that it brings.  Why?  I suspect the answer is very simple: we wish it did exist and genre fiction, no matter how poorly done, can resurrect it, if only momentarily.

*I quote here from James Cobb’s Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.

“Reading the South” will be an ongoing series about beginning an understanding of the South through literature, music, and art.

A reader wrote me this week inquiring about a number of things, and where to find good Southern writing was at the top of his list.  My answer was long and, I admit, a bit of a tirade.  However, he brings up a good point: where does one go to find good Southern writing?  And what qualifies as Southern writing, anyway?

The first thing one has to do is shake off the idea of “The South” as a monolith.  There are an infinite number of Souths, and we each experience them differently.  The man who operates a shrimp boat in Bayou le Batre has a specific South.  The dentist in the suburbs of Alpharetta has a South of his own, too.  A chemistry teacher in Chattanooga, a lawyer in Gulfport — all varied existenses in a mulitude of subcultures, but united by something we call the South.  But what is it?

In his seminal Mind of the South (stay with me now — this is where it gets deep), WJ Cash opens by asserting that there is “a profound coviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity.”  Simply, when Southerners identify themselves as Southerners, they are setting themselves in opposition to everything un-Southern.  We assume that the description alone carries with it a description of our values and even hints at our personalities.  Of course, Cash puts it better:

Nevertheless, if it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South.  That is to say, it is easy to trace throughout the region…a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern — a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and associations of ideas.

In short, we are bound less by a common experience than a common idea of the South, and that idea is changing rapidly.  The South changes and is changing, and we change with it, if only imperceptibly.

So how do we meet Southerness head on?  How do we engage with it, grapple with it, and ultimately claim some understanding of it?  The answer is that we probably can’t, but we can damn well try.  We are an expressive and expansive people, and our art is the best place to start.  Here are a few places to begin reading the South as it stands, alive and breathing:

The Chattahoochee Review: a great journal with varied content, much of which is available online.  Of note is their “Podcasts” section, which contains interviews with authors, as well as lectures if you feel like making your commute educational.

Black Warrior Review: Experimental and definitely not just regional, BWR contains some highly innovative work.  Well worth checking out.

StorySouth: Self-Explanatory.  A great online hub for reading current authors.

The Louisiana Review: A much more regional thing.  Online content is scarce, but back issues are cheap.

Reading the South is an experiment.  It’s about working through what it means to be Southern and to be engaged with Southern arts and letters.  Let’s talk it out.  Tell me what you think.  We’re just getting warmed up.