Yeah, the accent in southern Ohio (where I grew up) is different from that in northern Ohio, but both are quite different from Mississippi and Alabama and the like.
I’ve always thought of the South as those states that seceded. Either that or where the moss grows on the trees.
South of the Mason-Dixon, East of the Mississippi give or take a bowl of gumbo.
My father was fond of reciting the rule that if a man wears a boater after Labor Day and before Memorial Day, “young boys are to pull it off his head and kick out the top of it!”
:mad:
We are never considered to be in the South either.
I’m from Shreveport and spent my younger childhood there. After moving around a bit (CA, TN, MO) I went to undergrad at LSU down in Baton Rouge. Anyone who thinks Louisiana is not “The South” has never been to Louisiana.
Ironically, as a kid I thought of states such as Tennessee and Virginia as “The North” and probably infested with yankees. That was just a child’s perspective, though, as those places seemed so far away to the north.
I was better clued in when I moved to the Memphis area, though. Yep. Pretty damned southern. Most of my friends drove pick-ups, had guns for hunting and such (and no one cared if they brought them to school in the truck), and all we ever listened to was country music. My Boy Scout patrol was “The Confederate Patrol” and our patrol patch was the confederate flag.
All the continental United States. 
Sorry - didn’t mean to kill your thread. I thought it was funny.
Being from Texas, I’m fond of pointing out that we are NOT in the South, despite our geographical location or our political affiliations. Just as I’m fond of pointing out that Texas was the only state not to be successfully invaded by the Union during the Civil War (that said, as a note of historical trivia, Texas contributed relatively little to the overall war effort, keeping the bulk of its forces close to home due to the fact that their main problems, the Mexicans and unfriendly Native American tribes, continued to exist after Texas seceeded)
The South is everything due east of Texas and Oklahoma. Everything directly west of Texas is the Southwest, the West is everything straight north of Oklahoma and then west from there until you get to the coastal states. When you find beavers, you’re in the Northwest, when you find hippies and white guys trying desperately to learn Chinese, you’re in California.
Whatever is left, I guess, is the north and Midwest. When I feel like teasing my room mate from Indiana, I will alternately call him a Northerner or a Corn farmer (He maintains that he has never grown corn in his life, but does admit that the last four words of the National Anthem are “Gentlemen, Star Your Engines!” and that all roads lead to Indianapolis)
Being born and raised in San Antonio, the center of Texas, I never thought Texas as part of the “South”.
When I went to Atlanta for the summer Olympics a few years ago, I was told that the places and people would be very different than what I was used to. Reading a brochure in the hotel, it warned guests that the people you might meet in Atlanta could be very friendly - saying “Hello” to you on the street - a complete stranger- and looking you directly in the eye and smiling. Hell, I thought everybody did this. I assume that the warning was more for the “Northern” guests where this might ot be so common.
Now, I didn’t go all over the city, but I felt right at home in Atlanta. Friendly people, weather just about as hot and sticky as what I had back home. What I saw of the city was really nice. Met a few people that had a thicker Southern drawl than what I usually heard back in Texas, but nothing strange. I didn’t notice any huge differences between here and there, so I guess much of Texas can seem just as “Southern” as the rest.
now, that is extreme. My wife orders unsweet tea all the time. Though now that you mention it, she is from Penn…
Sweet tea is definitely a requirement.
Yes, I’ve met many other Texans who are similarly in denial. But you are Southern whether you like it or not.
The Solid South:
Virginia
N Carolina
S Carolina
Florida
Georgia
Alabama
Louisiana
The Iffy South:
West Virginia
Tennessee
Kentucky
Arkansas
Texas (many will say it’s Western, IMO it’s more southern)
Oklahoma
Missouri
LIES! ALL LIES!
The easy way to tell: In the south, gentlemen wear white suits and straw hats, and are called “Colonel.” In Texas, they wear denim and leather, and are called “Lawman” or “Ranger”
Also, the South features far fewer roundhouse-kick related fatalities than Texas does. 
I am not sure Virginia is as solid as being portrayed here. “Northern Virginia”, (with no clear boundary say roughly East of Manassas) is more culturally part of the Megatropolis stretching from the Northern Boston suburbs down the East coast. It is much more part of that “culture” than any porch swing & mint julep sipping, Straw-hat-wearing-on-a-lawnchair-in-the-shade deal.
I also struggle with West Virginia - I guess bottom-line if we are going to say that (as Hirundo82 does well) the Appalachian parts of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia are some kind of Southern cultural cadet branch (and that seems reasonable) then we need to throw huge chunk of West Virginia in there.
To me the answer to this is some combo of Spoke’s Linguistic map (which cuts across Maryland and includes some of Delaware and a chunk of WV) with Wendall Wagner’s wiki cite that kind of does a better job with the midwest in my view)
But see, there is no such South, except in the minds of Hollywood screenwriters. I sometimes think this is why Texans deny being Southern. They don’t realize how Southern they are because they have some Hollywood image of the South in their minds.
(King of the Hill seems like a very Southern show to me. It could be set in most any Southern suburb.)
I agree with the rest of your post, though. Based on my very limited experience in the area, northern Virginia doesn’t seem to have much “Southern” left in it. (I could be wrong.)
As I mentioned earlier, I grew up right on the Louisiana/Texas border. My mother is from Forth Worth, TX and then moved to Louisiana after college. She always explained to me that Fort Worth is where the West begins so that she got to pick at any time whether she wanted to be Western or Southern. Here is the hierarchy as far as I can tell (in order of priority):
A Texan is:
A Louisianan is:
A Person from Massachusetts is:
If you look carefully at the map in the Wikipedia entry for The Nine Nations of North America that I cite in my post, most of Maryland, the area of Virginia generally known as Northern Virginia (which means approximately the area within forty miles of D.C.), and the part of West Virginia sticking up between Ohio and Pennsylvania are part of the area he calls the Foundry. The rest of Virginia, the rest of West Virginia, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the several counties in Maryland too far south to be part of the D.C. suburbs (which are generally called southern Maryland) are part of the area he calls Dixie. (All of these are only border South though. None of them are deep south.)
Garreau doesn’t consider Texas to be in any single region. The eastern part of it is part of Dixie. The central part of it is in the Breadbasket. The western part of it is in Mexamerica.
Garreau lists Manhattan and D.C. and some of its suburbs as being anomalous. I don’t think this is very useful. They are only somewhat concentrated versions of the differences between big cities and smaller cities. Of course, all of this is only vague generalizations. Every place is different than every other place.
That’s where he goes off the rails, I think. As shown by the linguistic map, Texas is historically Southern (all of it). And I’ve been all over the state and it sure seems Southern to me. The cultural ties are long and deep.
In fact, you get the vibe all the way into New Mexico.
He also errs in leaving Oklahoma out of the South. It is very much a Southern place with (again) long and deep cultural ties.
To me Texas does seem a bit different, at least anything west of about Fort Worth. East Texas is far more “Southern” than they will ever admit to.
Perhaps the childhood brainwashing took too well, but I would still count Texas as its own thing, or at least as being a mix.
Actually, if you read the text in the link I posted to the Wikipedia entry on Garreau’s book, you’ll see that he does consider southeastern Oklahoma to be part of Dixie (as he calls the South). It’s hard to see this on the map in that entry which was clearly a little hastily drawn. Garreau doesn’t consider the linguistic divisions to be that important. Note that North Midland and South Midland cut across the Foundry and the Breadbasket. I think this just shows that there are many ways to split up North America into regions and these regions aren’t consistent. All these generalizations are vague, there are no true boundaries, and everything flows into everything else.