I was raised in WEST Texas, and back then it was considered the South. It’s just everyone was so gung-ho on being Texan that “the South” took a back seat. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I first encountered this notion of Texas as being in the Southwest. My theory is that came about in an attempt to attract tourists wanting to see the real Southwest, as in Santa Fe and the Grand Canyon.
Indiana ?!?!? Eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww !
My mom is from the Philippines and my dad is from Delaware.
I live in Atlanta now, after 40 years in NYC (Hollis!). I’m told I have an accent - Wendy Williams is who I’ve been compared to. 
I’m a southerner now.
I popped in to mention my favorite southern writers: Michael Malone (Dingley Falls, One Life To Live), Anne George (Southern Sisters Mysteries) and Rita Mae Brown (Six of One, Bingo, Southern Discomfort, Loose Lips), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Fanny Flagg (Fried Green Tomatoes, Daisy Faye and The Miracle Man, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl).
Reread what **Sailboat **said. It was a lighthearted joke, and a true one.
Do you not consider yourself Southern in particular, or Kentucky in general?
Good question. A little of both, actually. I consider myself more midwestern than southern: I was raised by a grandmother from Ohio, and I grew up a bit differently than my Mississippi born and raised husband. My husband says I’m southern because I live in Mississippi now and have been assimilated. Also, we moved back to Kentucky for a short period of time after we married, and found quite a few differences. Do you know how difficult it is to find sweet tea in Kentucky?
The people are different, too: down here, you can say hi to people and they’re at least going to say hi back. You may even strike up an interesting conversation. In Kentucky, if you say hi to a stranger, they look at you like you’re nucking futs.
As far as Chicago goes: it’s not a southern city, but most of my friends here have some kind of connection to Chicago. It seems they all have family up there. You have to remember how many people went north for freedom during the Civil War. They did take a good bit of the culture with them. The Blues (which I love, BTW) was just one small part of it. So, while Chicago itself is not southern, parts of it are.
And the City of New Orleans goes from New Orleans through the state of Mississippi on its way to Chicago.
Both. I’ve got the cert itself, personally!
Several Confederate ancestors, including some pensions for which we have the paperwork in old family albums. Some Union ancestors. Allegedly also some ancestors who were slaves in the southern states, and allegedly some American indian ancestors, but we have not confirmed either as of yet. The folks who were beyond infancy in 1864 were mostly the parents of my grandparents’ grandparents —that’s 32 people — plus their parents, another 64 people. That’s 96 ancestors. I regret to say that I do not actually know who all of those folks WERE, yet. (We’re working on it). Now, I ain’t saying you used to could say who your folks were from that time unless you had no more sense than to shake peanuts in your best Sunday clothes, but it was an easier thing done when the time we’re speaking of wasn’t so far gone.
My parents, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents, all are or were Southerners. Me, I live in New York. I’m the transplant!
The one I notice up here is northern folks making fun of the Southern “aw” sound as in “lawyer” or “saw”. Up here they use a sound for “aw” that’s most like where our “aw” ends up at, but ours starts off with an “ah” and diphthongs its way over to that closed-off sound we end up on. They don’t diphthong it a-tall, they just use that there closed-off sound all by itself. So to my ears if they was to pronounce “lawyer” my ears would hear “lorrier”; and when I say “lawyer” their ears come back with “low you’re”.
Meanwhile, not all of my own folks have all of the same ways of saying things. My Mom’s family is from the northern Georgia counties where there is more Appalachian flavor in the words, and if you asked her or had asked her Mama what that black stuff that goes into a car’s engine is called, you would be told that that stuff is AWL. Now if you was to pose that exact same question to my Dad’s family, all of which had come from more down in the seaboard all about from Virginia coast on into the edge of Florida, that same 30 weight stuff from out of the Pennzoil can would be called owwel. You got two syllables in there. Now we don’t come from out west ourselves but some of the girls and boys we have married into they’s from back out there, and you ask one of them about that there same lubricant and you got more syllables than your ears know what to do with. Something kin to owweeeeyul. Like a pig in pain.
Interesting. I would never think of Kentucky as anything but Southern. If anything, I’d consider it more Southern than Tennessee, but that’s just based on perception and stereotypes, having never really been to Kentucky, only through it.
Hi, I’m Juliana’s husband. 
The SE is the Old Confederacy, for me. Well, Maryland did have slavery, but didn’t secede and Florida has become a Yankee Penal colony and Texas has wandered off on it’s own, so…
Yeah. My Mom can intimidate Marine Drill Sargents.
Favorite Southern Writer? Oh… I dunno. Faulkner is readable.
Yes. To both. Some of them are the same person, even. I had one relative who’d join up whichever side won the most recent battle he’d been in. I have no clue how he managed Pensions after the war…
On my Mom’s side, they helped found Georgia way before the US of A got started. On Dad’s? They came over right after the Mayflower, but sadly were Yankees. Dad did end up in the South right before WWII, so we’re set there.
My musical tastes run from Blues to Heavy Metal.
The “Shoes and Indoor Plumbing” question I got when I visited NYC back in 1987 or so.
I don’t consider myself Southern at all, but 1/2 my family comes from “there”. On my mother’s side were small farmers who did own 2-3 slaves (we have the documents) in both VA, then KY (where they moved). I have/had family in VA, southern Ohio, KY, FL (mid state and Gulf coast), as well as Yankee New Englanders (MA, NH, VT and NY state).
Since I’ve lived in IL since I was 4, I consider myself (nominally) a Midwesterner, but I actually have little in common with most Midwesterners (I’m not Catholic or Lutheran, or of Polish, Scandinavian, or German ancestry). My father’s family has been here since before the Revolutionary War. My mother’s shortly after (they were Scots-Irish who settled in the Appalachian region of VA).
So, I’m a bit of everything, really, except Western (or Texan).
This probably didn’t answer your question.
I prefer folk to either blues or jazz. I also love old Southern hymns. My family (both the New Englanders and the Southern contingents) have bits of madness, eccentricity and just plain boring in them. All families do–it’s only Southerners who think they have some special claim to this aspect of blood kin.
I don’t have a favorite Southern author (or can’t think of one–maybe Harper Lee). I love pecan pie and make a mean one. I loathe sweet tea and don’t see how that makes anyone “Southern”, but IMO light and fluffy biscuits define a Southerner. YMMV.
:rolleyes: Oh, lord. Look, Southerners are famously eccentric. I’ve lived all over this country from sea to shining sea, and I’ve never known any place or any people as eccentric as Southerners. I don’t understand why I can’t even post a happy chatty topic without people being dismissive, insulting, or superior.
And the question was whether you prefer blues or jazz because those are two uniquely American musical forms that were both born in the South. I was wanting to see if Southerners from any particular state or area felt an especial affinity to one or the other.
You can’t claim to have the goofiest serial killers
A tom-tom made from human skin stretched over a coffee can? Only in Wisconsin!
See, now, that’s what those long cold winters will do.:eek:
Over the past couple of year’s I’ve been sporadically working on my family tree, and to my surprise the only confirmed Civil War veteran amongst my ancestors was in fact on the Union side. Several branches of my family have been in the South since before the American Revolution, with the main exception being one grandmother. She was from Southern California, and although one branch of her family had headed West from Virginia and Kentucky she was 3/4 completely non-Southern. One of these non-Southern ancestors was a German immigrant who’d settled in Cincinnati and served in the 9th Ohio Infantry.
Considering what a large percentage of Southern men served in the Confederacy I’d fully expected to find a Confederate veteran somewhere in my family tree, but so far none have turned up. My great-great-great-etc. grandfathers mostly seem to have been the wrong age. Those who were alive during the Civil War were often either quite young boys or older men. I expect that some of these young boys had older brothers who served in the war, but these would have been my many times great-uncles rather than my direct ancestors.
*I can only think of one time when my accent has confused anyone, and it didn’t involve an “ah” sound. A friend once thought I’d said “pin” instead of “pen”. I pronounce both words either identically or extremely similarly, and the context was unclear (I was talking about a metallic gold marker, not a gold metal broach). The two words have always sounded pretty much the same to me even when non-Southerners say them.
My one major Southern shibboleth is “naked”. I have always pronounced it “nekkid”, which attracted no special attention whatsoever until my family moved to the Midwest when I was a teenager. Suddenly it seemed very funny to people indeed. I escaped more lightly than my sister, who had a somewhat more obvious accent and was thoroughly mocked for it by her middle school classmates.
As long as I don’t say “naked” people do not often identify my accent as being Southern, although when I was living in the Midwest people could tell I wasn’t a local. I remember a couple of other kids asking if my parents were from England. I guess they couldn’t place my accent within the US but could tell that I wasn’t a foreigner or non-native speaker myself.
My mother would never be mistaken for an Englishwoman by anyone who’d actually met her thanks to her very strong East Texas “country” accent. I don’t think anyone in the Midwest (where she still lives) has ever correctly pegged it as East Texan, though. People outside the South don’t seem to be very good at placing accents within the South. Most people guess she’s from further east, like Tennessee or Georgia, although for some reason quite a few people have asked her if she’s Australian. 
When I was a little girl I do remember relatives and neighbors sometimes commenting that I was “lucky” because my accent was not obviously Southern. I distinctly remember adults saying that others wouldn’t be able to tell where I was from when I talked. I think this was because my dad was in the military and we moved around quite a bit when I was little. But I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line until I was about 13, so the accent I wound up with is vaguely Southern but apparently not that obvious and not from a particular region of the South.
I’m one who believes that the true South is any state that was in the Confederacy.
My family is pretty normal, but we do have a couple of characters.
Favorite Southern writer is definitely James Lee Burke.
My family tree traces back to a fellow on the Mayflower. We kinda came down the East Coast, then around into Texas. The most Confederate ancestor that I have would be my great-granddaddy, Brig. General Claudius Wister Sears, CSA. He got a leg shot off at Vicksburg. Another branch of the family includes William Fairfax Gray, who was the diarist of the Texas Revolution.
Blues and jazz: yes, among other genres.
Wierdest question anyone has ever asked me is if I had an oil well in my back yard with the cattle.
I’ll agree with that.
I came to like Blues and Jazz as I grew older.
I know of no ancestors who served in the Late Unpleasantness. Most are from the South, my paternal Grandmother was from Illinois.
I can’t name a favorite author, there are so many. Burke, Faulkner, James Dickey, Flannery O’Conner…
My Cousin by Marriage from NY asked me the strangest question. At a bar in LIttle Rock she was confused that everyone wore shoes and I worked on computers. "Is this the South? she asked.
“Well,” I replied, “we lost the war.”
She nodded sagely.
Should note this: Chicago is a great melting pot of many cultures, but, it was a substancial place of Southern Black culture , and should be admired as that. Chicago was the place a someone from the South could go and get ahead. Many riverstops on the way north had some settling, but Chicago was by far the best place to go. The city allowed a great diaspora fom the South, and there is to this day a Southern Black culture there.
Anectdotal witness: in taking the City of New Orleans train 1989, the holiday going home train, going from Chicago to New Orleans, it was full to the brim. Stopping in Jackson, Miss, pretty much the whole train got off there, people from Chicago going home to Mississippi. I was struck and moved by that then, that so many people took the train home, that Mississippi still was the place they came home to.
Twas a rather empty train then, heading to NOLA.
Was this also true of Detroit?
I am afraid that we will have to cede that distinction to y’all.
As Lewis Grizzard once explained, ‘nekkid’ and ‘naked’ are two different terms. 
‘Naked’ simply means having no clothes on. We all came into this world naked.
‘Nekkid’ means you’re naked and you’re up to something. Tammy and Bobby stripped off their clothes and ran through the forest nekkid.
My country grandmother and at least one sister of hers went from Arkansas to Detroit for a few years in the 1920s to work on the auto-prodiction line. Well, maybe not the line itself, not sure if they let women do that back then, but something to do with the industry.