A region rich in folklore, but one so stereotyped that it is difficult to approach
objectively. Hoop-skirted belles vie with barefoot hillbillies and cotton-picking
sharecroppers in the popular imagination. These distortions ignore the substantial middleclass population, dubbed “the plain folk of the Old South” by historian Frank Owsley.
Yet they do reflect an important reality: the role of the land—both as terrain and as the
basis for an agrarian way of life—in shaping the culture.
How do we define the region geographically? Where does the South begin and end?
Although the Civil War and its aftermath certainly heightened the region’s separateness,
a historical approach based on membership in the Confederacy is not entirely
satisfactory, for Kentucky would be left out, as would border states such as Maryland and
Missouri that are, in part, culturally Southern. Central to the formation of a distinctly
Southern culture was the plantation system with its enslaved labor force; the large
African American presence has been a major shaper of the region’s character. Defined in
this way, it could be argued that the South extends as far west as east Texas, beyond
which the Southwest is more Western than Southern.
Within this relatively homogeneous region there exists topographically and ethnically
based diversity. The Upland South (the Appalachian and Ozark Mountains), which hardly
participated in the plantation system, is nevertheless Southern in its own way and shares
certain features with the Lowlands; the Cajun and Creole cultures of southern Louisiana,
with their French roots, are clearly different from the more typical northern part of the
state, yet still recognizably Southern. This dynamic tension between a unified Southern
identity and affiliation with smaller communities is crucial to understanding the region’s
folklore.
Not all of the traditions practiced in the South are exclusive to the region. So what is
Southern about Southern folklore? A group of folk-cultural traits helps distinguish the
South from the North and West, while at the same time acknowledging subregional
differences. As it is for people, much of a region’s folk-cultural “personality” can be
attributed to a combination of heredity (cultural rather than genetic, of course) and
environment. The regional “stew” developed its unique flavor as settlers of varying Old
World backgrounds exchanged traditions and responded to conditions in their New
World locale, such as climate and natural resources. This process is particularly evident
in the genres of material folk culture, wherein basic survival needs are channeled into
culturally preferred patterns.
Southern folk architecture emphasizes wood construction, with walls of horizontal
logs (a continental European trait introduced via the Mid-Atlantic) or a framework covered with weatherboards, and wood-shingle roofs. In the Deep South, external chimney
placement is typical, a carryover from southern England as well as a function of the warm
climate; the raised pier-and-sill foundation (which allows air to circulate under the floor)
is drier and less laborintensive than the underpinning of the North. Other features
reinforced by the climate are galleried porches (possibly an African influence via the
West Indies) and detached kitchens. Certain building types, such as the narrow, gablefronted shotgun house (introduced from Haiti), are also regional. The bare-swept yard as
a landscape tradition may have African origins.
No realm of folklife is more evocative of a region than its foodways. Greens, such as
turnip and collard, loom large as a Southern vegetable, boiled for hours with fatty pork
and the residual liquid (“potlikker”) also eaten like soup. Pork was the everyday meat
until the rise of the poultry industry, reaching its pinnacle of preparation in barbeque; hog
lard was the medium for deep-fat frying. Corn remains a staple grain, manifested in such
bread types as skillet-cooked pone, molded sticks and muffins, deep-fried hush puppies,
and pudding-like spoon bread. The distilling of corn into moonshine and bourbon can be
traced to Ireland (where other grains were used). Homemade cane syrup was the chief
sweetener for those unable to afford sugar. Plant foods introduced firom Africa via the
slave trade—the peanut (its folk name, “goober,” derived from the West African nguba)
and okra (its African name, gumbo, applied to the coastal stew in which it is often an
ingredient), among others—have made their culinary contributions. The peculiar habit of
clay-eating as a mineral supplement also may have been brought from Africa. Coffee was
the hot drink of choice (even in the late 1990s, tea is understood as iced), with buttermilk,
a by-product of churning, a favorite cool drink (as in Ireland).
The folk craft of pottery has a number of regional features. Green or brown woodashand lime-based alkaline glazes, used on stoneware of the Deep South since the early 19th
century, are found nowhere else in the country and probably derive from China via
printed descriptions. Rectangular cross-draft kilns and treadle wheels with ball-opener
levers are key elements in the regional production technology. Large jugs for storing cane
syrup, jugs with applied faces (first made by slave potters in South Carolina), and pottery
gravemarkers (alternatives to more expensive stone) are ceramic types concentrated in
the South.
There are also characteristic furniture types. Tall-legged case pieces—the huntboard (a
variety of sideboard or buffet) and the smaller cellarette (for storing wine bottles) and
sugar chest (for keeping solid sugar cones)—discouraged vermin and echo the pier-andsill foundation of buildings. The round lazy-Susan table with its smaller turntable
(another possible Chinese inspiration) could serve several courses at once with a
minimum of passing. The meal bin with two lidded compartments, commonly found in
Upland cabins, is an idea undoubtedly brought from Ireland. “Mule-ear” chairs, with their
backward-curving rear posts, lean comfortably against a porch wall, and the springy
“joggling board” on plantation porches was a pre-trampoline delight for children.
Regional characteristics of Southern folk textiles are less apparent. The predominant
filling material for quilts (before the recent availability of polyester) was cotton, an
obvious result of its availability as a crop. Hand-woven bedcoverlets typically are of the
overshot type in mixed cotton and wool, lighter than their all-wool Northern counterparts.
Such distinctive basketry traditions as the work in dyed river cane by Cherokee and
Choctaw Indians and in coiled grass by Blacks of the Atlantic Coast tend to be localized
or ethnically based, rather than panregional.
Such tangible traditions were not accepted as part of the American folklorist’s
research domain until the 1960s, whereas oral and musical traditions, which serve to
enhance a people’s quality of life and transmit community values, have been studied
since the late 19th century and are what will first leap to the minds of many readers when
thinking of Southern folklore.
Folk music and song have always been major vehicles of aesthetic expression in the
South. Several of America’s most important musical gifts to the world—Negro spirituals,
blues, jazz, and bluegrass—arose as Southern folk idioms, the African American
presence dominating the first three and influencing the fourth (which Bill Monroe and
others developed mainly out of the White old-time string-band tradition, beginning in the
1940s). Commercial broadcasting and recording of American folk music was
concentrated in the South, with record companies issuing blues and old-time
performances in the 1920s and paving the way for the popular sounds of rhythm and
blues and country and western. More old British ballads have been found in the South
than in any other region, and the South also leads in the number of ballads created in the
United States.
The most significant folk-musical instrument the South has produced is the banjo,
originally a slave instrument with West African forerunners that became a mainstay of
mountain music. The Appalachian dulcimer appears to have evolved from the scheitholt,
a type of German zither transplanted in Pennsylvania. Southern fiddling features a drone
or chorded sound reminiscent of bagpipes of the British Isles, from whence the
instrument was brought. The French accordion is central to the pulsating sound of Cajun
dance music and its Black counterpart, zydeco. The South contributed to the development
of the American square dance, while producing such distinctive forms as buck, or
flatfoot, and clog dancing (both having roots in the British Isles).
What could be called an oratorical aesthetic—emphasis on skill with the spoken
word—permeates Southern life and is manifested in legal and political oratory. In
folklore this love of entertaining talk is channeled into traditional preaching and
storytelling. Several distinctive groups of folktales hark back to the Old World, such as
the mountain Jack tales (popularized by Richard Chase) and African American animal
tales (popularized by Joel Chandler Harris), while others, like the “Old Master and John”
tales told by Blacks, grew out of Southern experience. Riddling was popular in the
Uplands, and Southern speech is often creatively punctuated with colorful proverbial
usages.
Southernisms also can be found in the realms of folk belief and custom. Witchcraft
once was prevalent in the mountains and among African Americans, who often called it
“hoodoo” and gained from it some sense of control as an oppressed minority. Voodoo, a
folk religion emphasizing spirit possession, was imported from Haiti to New Orleans;
more recently it was introduced to Miami, as was its similarly African-derived but
Catholic-influenced Cuban counterpart, santeria. A southern folk sect that also involves
spirit possession—in this case, by the Holy Ghost—and that is part of the White
Pentecostal movement—is serpent handling.
A Southern custom illustrating the centrality of the family is Decoration Day, when
members of a community come together in the summer to clean up their local cemetery
and decorate their ancestors’ graves with flowers. “Turnouts,” in which children barred
their teacher from the schoolhouse until they were granted a holiday, was a curious
frontier custom brought from Britain; the frontier “sport” of “gander-pulling,” in which
horseback riders vied to yank off the greased head of a live male goose, was no more
cruel than modern-day cock and dog fighting. Early Southern Christmas customs
supplanted by the modern American observance include shooting off firecrackers, the
ritual shouting of “Christmas gift” first thing on Christmas morning, and costumed
teenagers known as “fantastic riders” or “surnaters” who sometimes played pranks as
they made the rounds of their community (a survival of British “mumming” or “guising,”
and similar to Mardi Gras as celebrated in rural Louisiana; in both cases, the luckbringing visits were institutionalized as parades in urban areas).
While this catalog certainly is not complete, it at least suggests the regional character
of Southern folklore as an overlay to the historical, sociological, and linguistic
approaches emphasized elsewhere in defining the region. Another distinguishing feature
as important as any of the foregoing is that the South is a region of retentions, where
traditions once shared with other parts of the country have been maintained after
disappearing elsewhere. This can be attributed to the isolation of the dispersed farming
population from centers of change, poverty following the Civil War, and a conservative
tendency to cling to the old ways.
An example from the realm of traditional clothing is the sunbonnet, which passed out
of fashion in less sunny climes (except for “plain” sects such as the Amish) but remained
a common part of women’s apparel in the rural South (especially the Uplands) until
recently. In the food domain, grits (coarsely ground corn stirred into boiling water and
eaten like mashed potatoes with butter or gravy) are still routinely served—even in fastfood chains—as part of the Southern breakfast, while their Northern equivalents—hasty
pudding and mush (eaten as hot cereal with milk and sweetening)—are all but extinct.
The White spiritual, an early type of religious folksong once quite widespread, survives
as a continuous tradition only in the South. The South also is the only region where EuroAmerican folk pottery is still made, with the Meaders, Brown, Hewell, and other families
working with elements of a preindustrial technology. A handcraft revival, begun about
the turn of the 20th century and focused in Appalachia, stimulated crafts by providing
classroom instruction and creating outside markets.
Rural-based Southern folk traditions remain vital; more than a third of the 143
outstanding American folklore practitioners awarded National Heritage Fellowships by
the National Endowment for the Arts through 1991 are Southerners. But the South is
rapidly becoming more like the rest of the country as urbanization, mass culture, and
shifts in the economic base have their impact. Some of the characteristics that give the
region its distinctiveness are destined to yield to modernization; but at the same time,
incomers from other regions and countries (as exemplified by south Florida) are
transplanting “new” traditions in a process akin to that of the early settlement period. The
regional folk-cultural “stew” is still cooking.
John A.Burrison
References
Burrison, John A., ed. 1989. Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South. Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
Egerton, John. 1987. Southern Food. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Kane, Harnett T. 1958. The Southern Christmas Book. New York: David McKay.
Tullos, Allen, ed. 1977. Long Journey Home: Folklife in the South. Chapel Hill, NC: Southern
Exposure.
Wilson, Charles R., and William Ferris, eds. 1989. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.