Origin of Species
"Blood will out."I used to hear that expression all the time when I was growing up. You would hear about someone doing something particularly skull-duggerish, someone who was from "that bunch-a white trash living down at the river" but managed to hide their origins beneath a thin veneer of respectability. They would get an education, move up in the world, and then whizz-bang-pop they do something trashy, like leave their pregnant wife to shack up with some little cocktail waitress, and all the grown folks would sit around and smile knowingly.
"Yep," they'd say, "I knew that feller would come to no good. Blood will out, you know."
I was never a hundred precent sure what that meant, but as best I can tell, we are the way we are because of who and what we come from. Circumstances can change that but you never quite get away from your raising. Living far away from my raising, I know this to be a hundred percent true but don't tell my father or I'll never hear the end of it.
Anyway, I was driving home from work yesterday and I hit upon the grandaddy of all theories of origin. When you drive forty-five minutes to work, one way, every day, you hit upon all kinds of ideas. But this one was especially slam-bang. I figured out why Yankees act the way they do and why Southerners act the way they do, and its all so very simple. The reason? Music!
Yes, friends and neighbors, the music that is indiginous to the people who settled in both areas of the country has shaped the attitudes, actions, mores and culture of both North and South, but in radically different ways.
Think about it for a minute. Who settled in the South? Criminals from the British Isles were sent to Georgia when it was a penal colony back in George the III's day. Highlanders from the wilds of Scotland fled by the boatlaod to the hills and valleys of the Appalachains after the Battle of Culloden Moor crushed the dreams of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the House of Stuart. Irish flooded the entire east coast during the famine years, but made their way into the South via North and South Carolina and trickled down from there. The French put a stranglehold on Louisiana and Spain grabbed Florida while the gettin' was good, but we all know Florida really isn't Southern so that doesn't count. Anyway, you got a bunch of wild people in these ethnic groups. Every blessed one of them is known for drinking, fighting, cussing, partying, hell-raising and throwing logs at one another. And you can't drink, fight, cuss, party, hell-raise, and caber toss without music.
So these immigrants brought with them the native music of their mother land. The fiddle, the drum, the pipes, the mournful voices, the dulcimer, the mandolin, anything you could beat, bang, pick, blow, or strum they found a way to make music from it. However, once isolated from the source of its original sound the music mutated into a form all its own. From the rollicking Celtic ballads to Scottish flings and reels we got bluegrass and, later, country/western music. From the traditional Irish and Highland dances, we got clogging and square dancing. From celidh we got the good ole fashioned hootenanny. (Bear with me. I swear there's a point to all this.)
But who settled the North? Of course, depending on what part of the North you're in you get a little bit different set of immigrants, but here in the upper Midwest you primarily find those of German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Italian ancestry.
I'm firmly convinced the Italians contributed rudeness and the "whatsa matter with you?" attitude. But the Germans and the Scandinavians contributed their stoic reserve, their hard-headed stubbornness, their total lack of emotional warmth and personal interest, their sober, serious-mindedness and work ethic, not to mention a lot of suspicion and paranoia. Don't you all fuss at me, now. This is not some sort of half-formed racial profiling. You know I'm right, just think about it for a minute. When was the last time you heard someone say, "I want to drink all night, hear some loud music, find a pretty girl to laugh with and really tie one on. I think I'll go to Munich!" or "I went to visit Uncle Fritz last week. We stayed up until ten o'clock, drank some apple cider that was just starting to turn, forgot all about plowing that other field and skipped church the next morning. Boy, did we have a wild time!"
Compare that to doing a pub crawl in Dublin, or visiting your drunk Uncle Bill (short for William) and doin' the boot-scootin boogie down at the honky-tonk and waking up hungover after having too many shots of Jack Daniels, with a good-looking stranger next to you and asking yourself, "Where in the hell did I leave my car last night?"
What sort of music did the Germans and the Swedes and the Norwegians bring with them? Oom-pah bands, for one. Which left the North has polka music and schottisches and songs with tuba and accordian parts in them. Their songs are all about rolling out the barrel, or dance halls. They meet down at the bowling alley for the big Thursday night bowl-off and eat lots of sausage and chase it down with beer. They wear special shoes and shirts for this, and some even have their own personal bowling balls.
In the South, we all meet down at the river, fire up a couple of grills, toss on enough red meat to give everybody in your neighborhood a cardiac arrest, dress it up with carcinogen-laden charcoal-fire smoke, pile on the baked beans and your mama's potato salad, crank up Lynyrd Skynnard or Toby Keith, pass around a bottle of whatever's handy, throw a blanket down for the kids to sleep on and keep going till the foods gone and the bottle's dry. Nobody dresses up, shoes are optional, and you just might be the weird one if you keep all your clothes on!
Its all in where we came from, people. What is country music about? drinking and cheating and dying young, with a lot of national pride thrown in. What is Irish or Scottish music about? Drinking and cheating and dying young, with a lot of national pride thrown in. What kind of booze do the outerlands of the United Kingdom produce? Scotch, Irish Whiskey, and ales and lagers so dark and rich they make American beer look like piss water. What kind of booze does Germany produce? Beer. Maybe its good beer, but its still beer. Oh, and that nasty stuff that's supposed to be licorice flavored but tastes just like Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup.
We're happy in the South because we know how to have a good time. We know when to cut loose, when to quiet down, and when to tell the rest of the world to leave us the hell alone. We have good manners but we don't waste them on stuck-up Yankees who think they know more than we do because their high school had a bowling team and a golf team and all we had was football (like anything else matters.)
It's all in the music folks. If you don't believe me, ask Charlie Daniels, who is from Tennessee and just might be related to Jack, who said, "you can be proud here and be proud you a rebel, 'cause the South's gonna do it again."
posted by Zoe Richardson @ 9:56 AM
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