On Being Southern…

“All I can say is that there’s a sweetness here, a Southern sweetness, that makes sweet music. . . . If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South, who had never heard of soul music, what it was, I’d just have to tell him that it’s music from the heart, from the pulse, from the innermost feeling. That’s my soul, that’s how I sing. And that’s the South.”
– Al Green

“Do not ever give a Queen a home appliance as a gift. Period. The end. Now, an exception can be made in the event she just happens to mention in passing that she wishes she had, say, a full Viking kitchen, and then she goes out of town for a few days; and when she comes back, her entire kitchen is renovated with fabulous Viking appliances. She will be touched. On the other hand, if it is her birthday and you, all on your own, select, purchase, and present her with a Crock Pot, well, you are over.”
- Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queen’s Book of Love

True grits, more grits, fish, grits, and collards.
Life is good where grits are swallered.
- Roy Blount, Jr.

(editoral comment… that’s the truth!)

Spanish Moss flutters in the wind like angel hair,
Look, don’t touch! Redbugs, you know – chiggers we call them.
But still, who can resist?
Lay and bask in it’s shade and feel it’s breeze…
Close your eyes and let those angels take you yonder away,
Paris, Rome, anywhere is fine,
Just as long as they bring you back
To where the Spanish Moss flutters in the wind like angel hair.
– Curtis Rice (who definitely ain’t a poet)

The summer picnic gave the ladies a chance to show off their baking hands. On the barbeque pit, chickens and spareribs sputtered in their own fat and a sauce whose recipe was guarded in the family like a scandalous affair.
—Maya Angelou

Anyone with a lick of sense knows that you can’t make good barbeque and comply with the health code.
—John Edgerton

Because I was born in the South, I’m a Southerner. If I had been born in the North, the West or the Central Plains, I would be just a human being.
—Clyde Edgerton

Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy… If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
—Florence King

“What has always been clear, for Southerner and non-Southerner alike, is that Dixie is the most fascinating part of the country. There may be a book out there called ‘The Great Midwest’ or ‘A Turn in the Midwest’ or ‘The Mind of the Midwest’ or ‘The Midwestern Mystique’, but if there is I’m certainly not aware of it.”
–Fred Hobson

“Down South everybody cherishes dreams. In dreams this world and the next mix like sugar and grits.”
—-Grandmother Ernestine, to novelist Jewell Parker Rhodes