Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Gone to Texas! To make copies of columns I wrote at a paper there between 1991 and 1999. Just to have. Who knows? Might be able to do something else with some of them.

Here's one, from '99, to tide y'all over, since it could be Tuesday before I'm back here! :-)

xxxxx

Hed: Song of the South grows faint this far west

A study shows that 82 percent of Texans polled said they live in the South. What of the other 18 percent? I reckon they said they live in the West, and that’s just fine and dandy, too, but the study didn’t say.

It was done by the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina – which is still a Southern state, although I hear the chamber of commerce in Charlotte gets kind of uppity once in a while, so there might be some confusion on the point.

Only 69 percent of Oklahomans polled said they live in the South, which doesn’t surprise me a bit. For one thing, people get confused about what constitutes the South, and Oklahoma, of course, wasn’t even a state until 1907, some 42 years after the War Between the States.

But don’t let the apparent geography of the Confederacy confuse you. In the part of the Sooner State where I come from, which is just spittin’ distance from Arkansas, there is little question about it. Heck, that part of Oklahoma is even called “Little Dixie” by the natives, and if you haven’t been there, it’s cut from the same cloth as East Texas, culture-wise.

East Texas, of course, is the most Southern part of Texas. Out here this far west, (Wichita Falls) it’s not surprising that people get a little confused. For one thing, when it came to white people and black people, there wasn’t anybody but the hardiest of souls out here on the frontier in 1861-1865, the years of the Late Unpleasantness. The rest were natives of the Plains variety. And Amon Carter forevermore confused things with that whole business about “Fort Worth – where the West begins,” or whatever it was he said exactly.

Strictly speaking, Wichita Falls is in East Texas. Draw a north-south line smack-dab down the geographical center of the state and take a looksee: In these parts, the line passes somewhere between Harrold and Oklaunion over in Wilbarger County. But Southerners aren’t known particularly for speaking strictly. Culturally, Wichita Falls, what with the big ranches so close by and the fact that it’s right at the edge of the Great Plains and all, is closer to West Texas than East Texas.

Over in Indian Territory, there wasn’t just a whole heck of a lot of non-native-type people either during the war, at least not the kind you’d invite to supper. It was mostly outlaws a la Rooster Cogburn tryin’ to outrun the long arm of the law extendin’ from Fort Smith, the closest clear-cut federal jurisdiction – and even it changed hands between the South and the North a few times over the course of the Civil War.

And the rest was mostly Cherokees and Choctaws, uprooted from the Southeast, which was and is the South, and they brought their Southern Indian ways with ‘em. And, in fact, while they didn’t agree on it, the Cherokees, by and large, sided with the Confederacy. Confederate Gen. Stand Watie, a Cherokee, was the last Southern general to concede defeat, the history books say.

So all you Texans who insist that all of us from north of the Red are just a bunch of Yankees remember that. As for the rest of Oklahoma, I’m here to tell you that most of the folks I know from the northeast part of the state will side with the South if asked where they’re from, mostly, I think, because of the influence of the Ozarks of Arkansas. And I’m pretty sure that my friends just across the river in southwest Oklahoma think of themselves as Southerners, maybe because of the influence of the Lone Star State so close by.

Oklahoma City is kind of an island to itself. You’d probably get a mix of “West” and “Midwest” and “Southwest” and “South” if you asked them where they hailed from. But those Yankees from up around Enid and anywhere else north of I-40 and west of I-35 are on their own. I dated a girl from close to Woodward in college and she declared she was from the Midwest. She and the rest of them account for those 31 percent of Okies who claimed not to be Southerners when asked.

So, where do you fall? Here’s a test of your Southernness, swiped from the Internet. You either known them or you don’t. It’ll be temptin’ to cheat, but don’t do it just because I have no idea how to get this here computer to print all the answers upside down.

You get three points for each correct answer. You get one point to start with just so you don’t feel left out if you don’t know any of them.

1) How many Vienna Sausages are in a can?
2) What was the number and color of Richard Petty’s cars?
3) Bill Dance is good at what?
4) What university does Bill Dance root for?
5) Where did Herschel Walker play (college) football?
6) After boiling peanuts for an hour you have what?
7) In cubic inches, how big is the smallest 1966 GM small-block V8?
8) A Cajun is likely to speak what furrin’ language?
9) What is a chigger?
10) What is scrapple?
11) Where is “The Redneck Riviera”?
12) What’s that fuzzy stuff hanging off the oak trees?
13) What follows logically? Johnson, Mercury, ________.
14) What’s the common name for a bowfin?
15) If you mated a heifer and a steer, what would you get?
16) Who sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart”?
17) What are grits made out of?
18) Who was nicknamed “The Bear?”
19) Why is the Blue Ridge blue?
20) What did The Baldwin Sisters make?
21) Who was Andy Taylor’s love interest?
22) What radio station carries “The Grand Ol’ Opry”?
23) Where would you find Vidalia County?
24) What sport requires 3 legs and a rope?
25) What instrument did Bill Monroe play? (typically)
26) How many strings on a banjo? (two possible answers)
27) When you argue with a fool, what is he doing?
28) What is a scuppernong?
29) Do you want the goats to get into the kudzu?
30) Why do you want to eat “high on the hog?”
31) What color is a John Deere?
32) What do you call the offspring of a mule?
33) What will you harvest when you plant “shade?”

Isn’t that a hoot! For the record, I scored a solid 70 – which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me.

Here are the answers:

1) 7
2) 43, red and blue
3) Fishin’
4) University of Tennessee
5) University of Georgia
6) Hard peanuts
7) 283
8) French
9) A red bug (small parasite)
10) A sausage-like loaf made out of pig parts
11) Panama City, Fla.
12) Spanish moss
13) Evinrude
14) Mudfish
15) Nothing. A steer has been castrated.
16) Hank Williams
17) Corn
18) Paul Bryant
19) Because of the pollen
20) “The Recipe.”
21) Helen
22) WSM
23) Georgia
24) Calf roping
25) Mandolin
26) 5
27) The same thing
28) A wild grape
29) Yes
30) Because that’s where the better cuts of meat are. Rich folks live high on the hog.
31) Green
32) Another trick animal husbandry question. Mules are generally sterile.
33) Tobacco

So, are you one of y’all or one of you guys?

END