Culture of the Southern United States
In the South they are fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent; zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others; generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.
This usage can be found in a passage from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth, "I should explain ... what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.
[17] Despite Jim Crow era outflow to the North and Midwest (see Great Migration), the majority of the black population has remained concentrated in the southern states from Virginia to Texas.
Also called Geechee in Georgia, the language and a strongly African culture developed because of the people's relative isolation in large communities, and continued importation of slaves from the same parts of Africa.
Other, less known African American dialect groups are the rural blacks of the Mississippi Basin, and Africatown near Mobile, Alabama, where the last known ship to arrive in the Americas with slaves was abandoned in 1860.
The US South also contains many indigenous languages from the Native American Muskogean, Caddoan, Siouan–Catawban, Iroquoian, Algonquian, Yuchi, Chitimacha, Natchez, Tunica, Adai, Timucua, and Atakapa families.
[citation needed] In addition to an influx of Northerners, the job markets in North Carolina's three largest metropolitan regions—Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, and the Greensboro–Winston-Salem–High Point Piedmont Triad—have also attracted large and growing Latino and Asian American immigration and migration.
A report released by the Brookings Institution in May 2006 entitled Diversity Spreads Out, noted that the Charlotte metro area ranked second nationally with a 49.8% growth rate in its Hispanic population between 2000 and 2004.
[citation needed] The larger cities of Texas, such as Austin, Dallas, and Houston—with their burgeoning knowledge-based economies—have attracted migrants from other regions of the United States, particularly the Midwest and West Coast.
However, areas such as Northern Virginia, Richmond, and the Hampton Roads region have attracted many internal migrants coming for job opportunities with the federal government, military, and related businesses during and since World War II.
Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, Virginia went through the dark period of Jim Crow laws and faced the era of Massive Resistance to school desegregation.
They were known early on for having large Free Black, Quaker, and Jewish populations, much industry, and significant immigration from Eastern Europe up until the Civil War, in which Richmond was made the Confederate capital despite voting against secession.
[73] These remain the only two large cities in the country in which old fashioned Chesapeake Bay style culture is found with the distinctive Tidewater accent and many historic plantations still prevalent throughout the region.
Before the Civil War, six of the counties included in this area had populations in which more than 25% were enslaved African Americans, the highest concentrations in the state outside the cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta.
More than 6.5 million African Americans left the segregated South for the industrial cities of the Midwest and West Coast during the Great Migration, beginning in World War I and extending to 1970.
In much of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and other parts of the South, the term "soft drink" or "soda" is discarded in favor of "Coke" (see Genericized trademark).
Due to widespread restrictions on alcohol production, illegally distilled liquor or moonshine has long been associated (often rather stereotypically) with working-class and poor people in much of the region, especially in southern Appalachia.
[101] Other well-known Southern writers include Erskine Caldwell, Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Sidney Lanier, Cleanth Brooks, Pat Conroy, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, William Styron, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, James Dickey, Willie Morris, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Walker Percy, Charles Portis, Barry Hannah, Alice Walker, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Rice, Shelby Foote, John Grisham, Charlaine Harris, James Agee, Hunter S. Thompson, Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Harry Crews, and the authors known as the Southern Agrarians.
A stylish variant of country music (predominantly produced in Nashville) has been a consistent, widespread fixture of American pop since the 1950s, while insurgent forms (i.e. bluegrass) have traditionally appealed to more discerning sub-cultural and rural audiences.
Early rock n' roll musicians from the South include Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding, and Carl Perkins, among many others.
Hank Williams, Charlie Feathers, and Johnny Cash, while generally regarded as "country" singers, also had a significant role in the development of rock music, giving rise to the "crossover" genre of rockabilly.
Many who got their start in the regional show business in the South eventually banked on mainstream national and international success as well: Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton are two such examples of artists that have transcended genres.
[citation needed] Many of the roots of alternative rock are often considered to come from the South as well, with bands such as R.E.M., the B-52s, and Indigo Girls forever associated with the musically fertile college town of Athens, Georgia.
[109] The National Basketball Association (NBA) is well-represented in the South as well, with franchises in Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando, Miami, Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Oklahoma City.
[citation needed] Normally associated with cold climates, five National Hockey League (NHL) franchises are based in the south: the Dallas Stars, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers, Nashville Predators, and Carolina Hurricanes (six if the Washington Capitals are counted as Southern).
Traces remain in the media, usually in humorous form, as in the 1960s TV series, The Beverly Hillbillies, a situation comedy, which depicts the cultural dissonance of a poor backwoods family that moves to upscale California after striking oil on their land.
A favorite theme especially regarding Appalachia and the Ozarks, portrayed "hicks" isolated from modern culture as shiftless male hunters, violently feuding clans like the Hatfields and McCoys, degraded women smoking corncob pipes, religious snake handlers, and compulsive banjo players.
The large numbers of Southern men, and these were of the better class (officers in the Confederate army and planters, worth $20,000 or more, and barred from general amnesty) who presented themselves for the pardon of President Johnson, while they sat awaiting his pleasure in the ante-room at the White House, covered its floor with pools and rivulets of their spittle.
Women could be seen at the doors of their cabins in their bare feet, in their dirty one-piece cotton garments, their chairs tipped back, smoking pipes made of corn cobs into which were fitted reed stems or goose quills.
[124] Cultural historian Anthony Harkins argues that Dogpatch's hillbilly setting "remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society.
