A young man, an assistant to a pastor in a large city north of the Mason-Dixon line, emailed me this week, asking for a reading list of good books on southern culture. He said he believes God is leading him to pastor one day in the South, and wanted to spend some time thinking about the cultural influences on the region.
This list is far from exhaustive, but here’s what came to mind.
The best general non-fiction resource on southern culture these days is The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Like any encyclopedia, the entries are not of equal quality, but, all in all, the series is both informative and entertaining. Volume one deals with religion, volume two with geography, volume three with history, and volume four with “myth, manners, and memory.” I think the order is significant.
Some other non-fiction works, mostly in print, on historical influences on southern culture would include:
Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (University of Georgia Press, 1998).
Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Harvard University Press, 2003).
Charles Reagan Wilson, Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (University of Georgia Press, 1995).
Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Louisiana State University Press, 1949).
James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
David Fillingim, Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology (Mercer University Press, 2003).
Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South (Basic Books, 2001).
John Shelton Reed, My Tears Spoiled My Aim and Other Reflections on Southern Culture (University of Missouri Press, 1993).
Genovese is brilliant, and anything he writes is worth reading. Chappell’s book is, I think, the best book on the civil rights movement ever written. He takes seriously the influence of conservative evangelical religion on both black and white southerners during the 1950s and 1960s struggles for dignity and justice for African-Americans.
Still, to understand the South, non-fiction is not really the place to start. Southerners are storytellers and myth-makers, and the ethos of the South can be better felt than analyzed. Anything by William Faulkner, especially Absolom! Absolom!, is a good place to end up. But Faulkner can be frustrating. Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy and Willie Morris are better to ease one’s way in to southern fiction. For O’Connor, I’d start with A Good Man Is Hard to Find. With Percy, I am partial to The Moviegoer because it is set partially where I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the rest in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, where I went to seminary.
Southerners and Kentuckians are often conflicted as to whether Kentucky really counts as southern. But I’ll count Wendell Berry. You’re either a Berryphile or you’re not. I am. Berry’s fiction is filled with longing for an agrarian past and an agrarian future, for the continuity of the generations. The best place to start with Berry is Jayber Crow, which I think is his best novel yet.
Anyone who grew up in a low-church southern congregation, like I did, is familiar with the peculiarly southern way of personal testimony. Think Hank Williams, “I Saw the Light.” Personal memoirs often carry the same kind of feel, and can give a glimpse of the past and present South in ways few other genres can. I would suggest: Willie Morris, North Toward Home, Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly, and Clayton Sullivan, Called to Preach, Condemned to Survive: The Education of Clayton Sullivan.
Charles Marsh’s book, referenced above, also fits here. Marsh’s father was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Laurel, Mississippi. The memoir is written by a first-hand observer to the way the segregation debates impacted one southern church and the culture around it. Marsh doesn’t share his father’s faith, but he paints a reverent picture of him nonetheless as a man of integrity and honor.
The South has produced a great literary tradition, to be sure, but one won’t really understand southern culture without understanding the essentially oral nature of southern identity, with the crucial place of story-telling. My entire childhood is built around stories. My grandmother telling about her childhood while shelling butterbeans in the living room, my uncle telling Edgar Allan Poe tales while we children pulled the covers up over our eyes, my pastor recounting the biblical narrative with imagination and force. I would recommend that you listen to some southern orators and storytellers, running the gamut from W. A. Criswell to Lewis Grizzard, from Martin Luther King (both Jr. and Sr.) to Jerry Clower, from Vance Havner to Grady Nutt, from Dale Bumpers to Hank Williams (again both Jr. and Sr.).
I thought this young pastor-to-be’s question was a good one. He is starting to think through the cultural influences on the people to whom he’ll minister. Of course, many of these will vary from place to place, town to town, wherever the Lord leads him. And, unfortunately, there’s a kind of flattening out of southern culture, replaced by Bed, Bath, and Beyond stores off the Interstate and MTV on the television screens. I am interested to know what books you would recommend to a pastor seeking to minister in your particular region of the country? What would help him know why the people in your area think and feel the way they do in the Midwest or the Pacific Northwest or New England or wherever? Please email me with your suggestions about reading up on your region.
