Papa Tiger and I went to a bluegrass festival today in rural Mississippi. As we drove to the Hickory Hill Bluegrass Park, turning from one small road onto another smaller road onto yet another, and finally onto a dirt track, past the trailers with rusted-out pickups on blocks, chickens running free, Confederate flags flying, and in one notable case a mechanical bull in the front yard, we were debating whether we would be served up as the Heathen Yankee Sacrifices at the Altar of the Backwoods.
The single most popular song all day was a (?) classic called, “Will My Soul Pass the South Land?” – the sad tale of a query to a minister from a Confederate soldier dying in a far Yankee prison, begging to know if he would fly past his beloved South on his way to heaven. At LEAST half the audience was singing along. It was a struggle not to heave my breakfast grits, to be honest.
I was SO tempted to stand up and yell, “People, the war is OVER! And YOU LOST!!!”
I’ve lived in the South for 20 years now and I JUST DON’T GET IT. What is it with all these people reliving the dubious glory of getting their butts kicked 150 years ago???
And do you think I would have found myself bent backwards over that altar with my heart being cut out if I really HAD stood up and said that?
Yes, yes you would have. Then they would have devoured it raw and smacked their lips afterward. The rest of you would have then been fed to a pet gator called Waylon and your missing persons file would’ve sat collecting dust in the sheriff’s back room for twenty years.
As a native Southerner, I can tell you there is a deep and loving connection to our land. Mississippi is beautiful and green and filled with secrets. Even if we do not agree with the political motivations behind our ancestors actions in the Civil War, we understand why they would fight and die for their home.
Besides that – why would you attend a bluesgrass festival in rural Mississippi if you don’t like the music and its content or enjoy being around rural Mississippians? Or would you really have preferred it if they had white-washed the bluesgrass so the Yankees in the audience wouldn’t have felt threatened? Maybe such immortal Southern ballads as:
“You were right, we were wrong, we deserved to be Reconstructed”
“Atlanta’s burning and I feel fine”
“Sorry 'bout the bullet in Lincoln’s head, honestly”
“My ancestors were illiterate dirt-poor farmers who fought and died in a bloody conflict because rich white people owned slaves and other rich white people didn’t like it”
I was born in the South. Raised in the South. And, damn, I never could figure it out, either. My guess is that the damage done to the South by the war, as well as the pain resulting from Reconstruction, resulted in a lot of bad feelings, which have been passed on from generation to generation.
But don’t Serbs every year commemerate their expulsion from Kosovo by the Ottomans? That’s what, 600 years ago?
And you want to talk long-term, Passover commemerates 40 years of travail in the desert preceeded by years of slavery. Maybe we’ll stop calling you Damnyankees in two or three thousand years.
As for the comments, have you ever been to a pig-picking? It was originally practiced with carpetbaggers, I’ve heard told. Tread lightly.
Jeez, I thought this was MPSIMS, not the Pit. I don’t disagree that rural Mississippi can be beautiful, and the music was very pleasant. But that still doesn’t mean I can’t wonder why people can’t just LET IT GO!
And personally, my favorite bluegrass is strictly instrumental, heavy on the banjo picking, which isn’t exactly political. Or as religious as this particular festival was. The gospel-to-secular ratio today was way higher than this heathen was comfortable with; unlike other festivals we’ve been to where it was 10:1 secular:gospel, this was the other way around. As long as I tried my best to ignore a lot of the lyrics – there’s horrible, sappy gospel just like there’s horrible, sappy music of every other variety, too, which we heard way too much of today – I could enjoy it. But that doesn’t mean I understand that mindset!!
Ingredients: 1 pig. Barbecue sauce. No, not that retched tomato-based stuff they use in Texas. Real barbecue sauce, vinegar based.
Take pig, scoop out innards to feed to the dawgs. Marinate. The pig, not the dogs. I don’t know how long, sorry.
Find or make a pit. Put a spit through the pig. Slow-roast the pig over the pit for hours upon hours, marinating as needed.
Then, give people knives, and let them have at it. Oh, what the heck, give them forks and plates, too.
Side dishes are needed, too, but vary by region. Cole slaw (No mayonaise! Vinegar!), potato salad (Okay, you can use mayonaise for this one), red beans and rice, maybe some crawdads. Go crazy.
Okay, Mama Tiger, I apologize too. Perhaps I snapped a little hard.
I just get a little defensive when people talk about the South in a “my look at these backwards natives, aren’t their tribal rituals quaint?” sort of way. Part of the reason we can’t “LET IT GO!” is because the Civil War was a huge, defining part of our world’s existence. It changed everything, destroyed everything, rewrote the rules and rebuilt our society from the ground up. We lost our homes, our sons and husbands and fathers, our separate state, everything. It’s no wonder a lot of our history and sense of self centers around it and its aftermath. Asking us to “LET IT GO!” would be like asking Americans in general to let the Revolution go. After all, it was hundreds of years ago, the Brits are our friends now, what does it matter? Why do we bother with 4th of July anyway, huh? We bother because it does matter, it’s still an integral part of who we are.
I know at least in my community, there’s no nostalgia for the pre-Civil War days, mostly because no one lived that glamorous Scarlet O’Hara existence. The whites were barefoot, uneducated, and dirt-poor and the blacks were even worse off. After the Civil War life just got harder for everyone. We took refuge in our music, our churchs, our history. We didn’t have much else. These things gave our lives structure. I’ve been to several rural festivals (though I prefer jazz over bluesgrass) and it’s a way to celebrate who we are and let our performers have their moment.
Anyway, that’s how I see it. Once again, my apologies if I was a little out of line in my earlier reply.
Oh, they had some GREAT dry barbecued ribs today. Don’t know if they roasted the pig whole or not, though. But they did use mayonnaise on the cole slaw…
No apologies needed, Nichol. I have to add, though, that we lived for a couple of years in Maryland, where everything was overrun by the Civil War as well. Major battlefields everywhere you turn, including lots north of the Mason-Dixon line, so clearly the damage of the Civil War wasn’t done just to the South. But the folks up North don’t use it as the defining point of their existence in the same way Southerners do. Even the names for the war are different in different areas – depending on where in the South I’ve lived, it’s either the “War Between the States,” the “Late Unpleasantness,” or (my personal favorite), the “War of Northern Aggression.” But almost NEVER the Civil War, like it’s called pretty universally up North.
I’ve lived a lot of different places in my life, and so yes, sometimes it DOES seem like “quaint tribal customs.” But I don’t make fun of peoples’ customs to their face, I honestly try to participate and enjoy and see why they do what they do. It’s made for a lot of unexpected fun over the years, as well as lots of learning. But some things you just can’t understand, I guess, and this is one of them!
And lest you think I’m a nasty Yankee, my dad’s family has been in Fort Worth since the early settlement days, when my great-grandfather rode the Chisholm Trail and his brother rode the Pony Express. The whole family has always been rabidly Southern in their perspective. Yet even with constant exposure to their point of view from the time I was a young child, I just have NEVER GOTTEN IT. So apparently I never will!
Reconstruction was the culprit, even more than the War, for the nostalgia. Carpetbaggers and scoundrels and theives, able to turn poor dirt farmers off their land just because they had been in the Confederate Army, and punishment for daring to disagree with decisions made by people with no knowledge of the region that they were brought in to run. And before anybody gets tweaked, the issue slavery was secondary to the issue of state’s rights…something that the Republican Party of today hold very dear.
I have an ancestor who was thrown off his land by the governor-General of the area during Reconstruction because of his family’s participation in the war. He couldn’t get it across to them that he, nor any of his 6 daughters had fought in the war at all, and his wife had died when shot by a deserter from the Union Army who wanted her wedding ring and the chicken she’d just killed for supper. He had to bring his children, ages 14 and under, to Texas with the rest of his brothers and sisters who had moved to try to avoid the conflict.
Stuff like that will stay with a family for generations. He actually lost his land to a relative of the head guy, who envied the land and the access to water (riverbottoms are very fertile) and who “bought it” for pennies on the dollar. And don’t think that the older relatives of that part of my family didn’t do a quick genealogical search when I got engaged to a man with the same last name as that of the people that took their land…
Yikes, thatDD! Sounds like your family done got royally screwed! Yes, I can see why that would present a problem. However, it IS 150 years later; somewhere along the line, can’t ANYBODY let it go? (And yes, I know the answer is, “No, of course not,” but I can still ask the question, albeit plaintively!)
One of my “cancer buddies” that has the same rare cancer I do is a major bluegrass person, and every now and then I get a bluegrass e-mail with my cancer ones.
Me, i’m a Texas music kinda person, so most of my blueglass has been filtered through Asleep at the Wheel. (I LOVE Ray Benson’s voice.)
Ol’ Ray has been known to tell a crowd “Save yer Confederate money, the South’s gonna rise again!”
I have to admit that Texas music grates on my nerves. Probably because my father, who of course grew up listening to it, was a true-blue musical snob, ONLY liked classical – well, except for Big Band – and thought country was the excrescence of musical existence.
Bluegrass, however, is probably the “purest” American music form – closest to the original Celtic musical strain that came over with the folks who settled in Appalachia. At least so I’ve always believed; I could easily be wrong. There’s a simplicity to it, in spite of it being very complex instrumentally, that I really enjoy.
If the South rises again, it’s gonna be with Republicans at the helm, however. My grandpappy is probably rolling over his grave. While by today’s political standards he’d be a conservative Republican, he was a true Texas Democrat all his life. When I became old enough to vote, he wrote me a letter which I still have saved away in which he told me, “Vote for whoever you like, as long as you vote straight Democratic!”
So much Texas music is not country, though, especially the last 25 years.
The blues and cajun/zydeco influence combined with the German/Czech polkas and Mexican styles (especially the Norteno style) have made New Texas music a weird hybrid all it’s own. Superimpose that on a rock and roll OR country background…
Add in the folkie/singer/songwriter groove, and it’s just a whole different kind of thing.
I consulted in the south several years ago and I was amazed that they still hold onto the war like they do. For instance, I was buying my lunch and the lunch lady was giving crap about being a Yank, but then said “But y’all won the war didn’t you?” I was amazed, 'cause no one up north even thinks about it. I was like: “um, uh… well, um, I wasn’t really there ma’am. I don’t even know anyone who was there…”
Mama Tiger, I suspect that you can find almost as many answers for your question as there are Southerners.
Possible answers:
A lot of bigoted people in the South seem to derive some sort of pleasure in thinking about what might have been if the South had won the war. They are “ignert.”
In my opinion, the South has never completely recovered economically from the destruction and Reconstruction. Generally speaking, where are the poorest states in the country?
You don’t hear people talk much about their “Northern Heritage.” Maybe we are more unified in an interest in our common history in general than Northerners.
The largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere is filled with Confederate dead. And not that many people have heard about it the way they have Andersonville. (The winners get to write the history.)
Someone mentioned this reason previously, but I think it is an important factor. The “main” war in the North was the Revolutionary War. And the North does seem to observe that war quite a bit. The “main” war for most of the South was the Civil War, so it is natural that we are more interested in that.
BTW, I don’t think the song “Will My Soul Pass the South Land” would be considered a classic. I’ve never heard of it and apparently Google hasn’t either. But then I don’t listen to country music. My preferences are jazz and classical.
In my opinion, the purest form of American music is probably jazz. It’s a fusion of music from several cultures, but the sounds came together here for the first time. Someone else might argue that Gospel music is.
The term “that late unpleasantness” is considered a joke in the South, although maybe it wasn’t meant to be funny originally. The same is true of “the War of Northern Aggression.” I have always called it the Civil War. And I always hear about Civil War reenactments – never the War Between the States reenactments.
I’m glad that you don’t make fun of us to our faces. :rolleyes:
What leaves me scratching my head is wondering why y’all stayed around once you saw those Confederate flags. That is considered a sign that Johnny Reb’s ghost is around – especially if there is more than one flag. I would have backed that car up faster that you can say, “New Jersey is the pizza state.”
For a good look at re-enactors, “Confederates in the Attic” is a great read. And for a non-romanticized history of the CSA “Look Away!” is a fine read, as well.
Anyhoo, I imagine it also has something to do with most of the South being filled with battlefields. If you live in Tennessee, say, you’re probably going to live within spitting distance of one. So you’re bound to be more aware of the Civil War than someone who lives in, oh, Vermont.
