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South clings like kudzu to identity
Even as times change, those roots run deep
By Michael Lollar
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November 24, 2005
SOUTHERN IDENTITY
First of five parts
Today: Are Southerners losing their distinct identity? Maybe, maybe not.
Friday: Black and Southern, a label of pride, tinged with pain.
Saturday: So, did your mama raise you in a barn?
Sunday: Oxford - where literature and illiteracy collide.
Monday: Turning the ‘Southern’ accent off, or on.
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Singer-songwriter Kate Campbell sings of a "dual-edged" South in which the joys of chasing lightning bugs and smelling "sweet magnolia blossoms" as a child are tempered with memories of separate lines for brown-skinned children at the local Dairy Dip.
But the "train of change was coming," she sings in "Crazy in Alabama," joining a chorus of Southerners who see a new South, different from the past but also different from the rest of the country.
It's a South they say is still Southern, surviving everything from air-conditioning to mass-market TV to maintain a "sense of place" with a language rich in rural tradition, a pace people like to call "slow as molasses" and a menu so daring it could be a yearning subplot in a Faulkner novel.
"Place frames it all," says Bill Ferris, former director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Ferris, who later became director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, now teaches history and folklore at the University of North Carolina and is senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South.
"People want to know where you're from if you're from the South. They want roots they can connect to," says Ferris, who grew up in Vicksburg and spent summers working in Memphis before devoting himself to the South for 18 years at Ole Miss.
It is a South people long ago predicted would never rise again. With the spread of air-conditioning and mass-market TV in the 1950s, social scientists, linguists and others predicted it was only a matter of time before the South and the rest of the nation arrived at a homogenized oneness. Air-conditioning was the "great leveler," literally ending migration to escape sticky soul-sapping summers from New Orleans to Memphis. Not only did it mean fewer people leaving but the arrival of people who drank "pop" instead of "Cokes" and called people "you guys" instead of "y'all." Soon, people from Maine to Mississippi would hear Johnny Carson on TV, and everyone would talk like someone from Iowa or Nebraska. The Midwestern patois of CNN, launched in 1980, would be the knockout blow.
Leap ahead to the 1990s. Imagine his fellow Rhodes scholars' reactions when Arkansan Bill Clinton promised to make Republicans "squeal like a pig stuck under a gate." At the 1992 convention, Clinton drawled to his Democrat supporters he'd fight with them "till the last dog dies." At the Republican National Convention, GOP committee chairman Haley Barbour, a Mississippian, said bringing competing elements of the party into a single platform is like "trying to load dogs into a wheelbarrow."
"Southern speech is alive and well," says Dr. Cynthia Bernstein, English professor and linguistics specialist at the University of Memphis. A former New Yorker who lived in Texas and Alabama before moving to Memphis, Bernstein says Southern speech has changed slightly, but only slightly. "Over the last three generations, Southerners have picked up more R's in their speech, like in mother or farm (vs. "mutha" or "fahm."), but other forms of pronunciation still exist. "There is even some evidence that people who move to the South pick it up."
Neither Johnny Carson nor CNN has altered the quintessential Southerness and subtle implications of Southern dialect, including such phrases as "fixing to," she says. "It expresses your intention, meaning, 'It's not going to happen right away.' "
Like Cajun and Gullah, dialects within dialects aren't fixing to disappear anytime soon, including the intent of widespread Southern "modals" such as, "I might could," or even the occasional, "I may can."
Ask a former outsider if the South is still the South, and you may get an answer that sounds like a cross between a "Beverly Hillbillies" put-on and a worry-about-it-tomorrow response indicating you don't want to be bothered while perusing a Southern Living story on reupholstering the white wicker on your veranda-like porch.
"Oh, gracious, yes. Absolutely, the South exists," says Gayle Rose, a former Iowan who moved to Memphis in 1979. "Now when I go to the Midwest they think I sound Southern." Rose, who co-founded the Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis, says the Memphis she found in the 1970s was a city that ran on almost aristocratic fumes with a class-conscious Cotton Carnival and an upper crust. "They had been here most of their lives and really ran the community, socially and economically. Within that, there was a refinement, an appreciation of fine things. There was also an exclusivity about it."
In 25 years, Rose says the emergence of black leadership, economic development and the arrival of outsiders weakened that network of "exclusivity and privilege." Cotton Carnival, a vestige of the Old South, has "morphed into a more meaningful organization."
What did not morph was what Southern scholars see as the defining elements of any region. For Rose, part of that was a recent dinner that included butterbeans flavored with bacon.
"If you had to pick one thing that defines the South, it would probably be food," says Charles Wilson, successor to Bill Ferris as head of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. "It's not about ideology or politics. It's about so much of the culture. It's about inherited ways of cooking. It's about how mama made biscuits. It's about cookbooks."
It's also about a diet that sometimes flirts with danger. It's often a deep-fried diet that has helped land Memphis in the No. 1 spot in several rankings of unhealthiest city in the nation with abnormally high rates of circulatory diseases, diabetes and obesity.
Inevitably, diet, like other staples of the region, will change, says Wilson. Already, the South "is more like the United States than ever before. We have a global connection economically. Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama have Japanese auto plants. We have Hispanic workers throughout the region."
But Wilson says it is not just the South that has changed. "If you define the South as the way it was in 1930, then there isn't as much of the South as there used to be at all. But that's like defining American Indians as people who wear headdresses. Everything changes, but there is still a Southern identity."
What once was a Southern penchant for fried chicken has slowly become an obsession with pork barbecue. Jerry Clower has been displaced by Jeff Foxworthy. Islam has moved next door to the Southern Baptists.
But the South, like its music, has remained a distinctive place. "That music is the most significant music of the 20th Century," says music producer Jim Dickinson of Tate County, Miss. From the blues to jazz to country to rock, the South was a crucible for change from W.C. Handy to Elvis Presley. "We examine our lives down here," he says of the inspiration.
At Ardent Studio and Records, founder John Fry says Southern music, in spite of urbanization through hip-hop and rap, has remained a distinctive voice. "It's the unexpected. It has unexpected collisions or combinations of music you wouldn't expect. ... I think it's a land of unexpected and delightful combinations of influences that come together in a unique fashion."
Musician and radio producer Sid Selvidge, who has a master's in anthropology, says much of the South's musical innovation developed through isolation -- in the hills, in the Delta. "There's not so much of that now," he says, and there hasn't been an earth-shaking regional innovation since Stax Records in the '70s. "If we knew where the next innovations were coming from we'd already be on that wagon," says Selvidge, suggesting they may flow from the fusion of existing forms with Hispanic and Asian influences.
Through all of the changes, the South remains the South, says Jerry Schilling, a Memphian and former Elvis Memphis Mafia member who has lived in California for 30 years. "If you're a Southerner you never think of yourself as anything but. In fact, the more you live in other places, the more you realize you are a Southerner."
At the Women's Foundation, executive director Ruby Bright, born in Byhalia, Miss., agrees, "True Southerners are born and bred. Part of the tradition of living is part of the tradition of being a Southerner. I do not think the South is losing its identity." Bright, who lived briefly in Kansas City, Mo., says her migration reminded her, "I would never want to lose the ability to say hello to people on the street or to start off with a smile when I meet people."
Wilson at Ole Miss says it's hard to gauge change "when you're in the middle of it."
"If you're looking into the future and asking someone what they think of the South, they will probably be saying, 'Que pasa?'"
It's part of the dual-edged New South that Kate Campbell, a Nashvillian, sang of in a performance last week at the Center for Southern Folklore. "Change is inevitable, but I find it interesting we still find a sense of place. We all watch loads of TV, yet we still have accents. We have regional foods, and how we relate to religion is still Southern."
Center director Judy Peiser says the growing mix of outsiders is turning the South into a bigger melting pot. "We're becoming more cosmopolitan." Memphis has Thai restaurants, a Persian restaurant, Chinese restaurants using catfish with a Chinese twist, she notes. "People are not afraid to talk to other groups as much as they used to be."
Peiser says outsiders will be affected as much by the South as the South by them. "We won't lose the way we communicate with each other. It's too strong. Look at Asians who learn English here or Hispanics who learn English here. They come away with a Southern accent."