[kalee]

Dixie ping

[kalee]

Hampden Sydney ping

[lightman]

Brings back memories of the three weeks this Yankee spent at Lend-A-Hand in Knox County, KY in the early 1980’s.

[silentreignofheroes]

Great to be a Southron,,Roll Tide...!!

[gusopol3]

consequences of one party rule for a century, like today’s inner cities?

[okie01]

But singers like Gentry, like David Allen Coe aren’t making it up. They just report. It was like that.

Yes, it was.

Fifty, sixty years later, some of it is gone forever. Some good, some bad.

And, the South, it's still a great place. Maybe a little better than it was.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

Increasingly it is sung by people who were never there. Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry, to my eye anyway, pretend to be what they aren’t any more.

This is the essence of the fall of country music. It used to be the truth sung by those who lived it. It is now a counterfeit art form and has the appeal of a three-dollar bill.

[WKB]

Mississippi Ping

[Hardastarboard]

ignorant beyond today’s imagination

I don't know - I can imagine some pretty severe ignorance. I've seen "Jay Walking" on Jay Leno.

[WKB]

After being married to Bobbie Gentry
Jim Stafford said he knew why Billy Joe
jumped off that bridge.

[humblegunner]

remote hollers near Bluefield where inbreeding turned the people strange

Highlands Texas ping.

[BlackjackPershing]

Fine piece of writing. Bigtime ping from Pikeville, Pike County, KY...the largest single-county coal producer in the USA.

[Mr Rogers]

My memories of the south are from Selma, Alabama from 66-67. I was a military brat at Craig AFB, and no one connected with the federal government was very popular. After we were refused service at the Selma Del, we stayed on the base, ordered clothes from JC Penny and traveled to Florida for vacations.

I remember tar paper shacks, and driving down dirt roads where folks came out of what I assumed were barns or stables to stare at us. There was breath-taking poverty, but there was also good...walking with friends to the pool during the summer (the 2 TV stations we sometimes got didn’t show much) or running thru the woods to the Boy Scout camp to ‘borrow’ their canoe and paddle around the lake.

Conservatism is about conserving the good while having the discernment to know and reject the bad.

The ‘war on poverty’ helped get rid of tar paper shacks, but we’ve also lost families and a work ethic. We have computers and TV and can see what is happening from afar, but don’t know our neighbors’ names.

I have mixed feelings about the old south...

[EternalVigilance]

Heck, the whole country’s different. It ain’t just the South.

[catpuppy]

Ode to Billy Joe, Bobby Gentry’s song of bleak rural poverty

That's news to me. The song refers to hard work (choppin' cotton, balin' hay and plowing) and lots of food (black-eyed peas, biscuits, apple pie--"I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite") but never to "bleak rural poverty."

[stainlessbanner]

Dixie Ping

Thanks Kalee!

[Onelifetogive]

The South is today, for so many people, a symbol of lynch law, slavery, benightedness, and masked riders in the night.

We spread that rumor to keep the Damnyankees out...

[HIDEK6]

My father, with the simple-minded patriotism of the South of the time, had gone back into the military to be an artillery spotter for the Marines in Korea.

I can;t believe everybody missed this little gem.

[ALOHA RONNIE]

.

NEVER FORGET

.

The same WALTER CRONKITE who was on the side of Communism taking over a then Free South Vietnam during the Vietnam War...

...went on to publically state at a year 2000 London World Conference that it was time for America’s 11 Southern States to secede from our Union.

The very same WALTER CRONKITE that is pushing now for HILLARY to regain control of our precious Oval Office...

...in a new time of war in a new century with our own Freedom directly at stake right here at home.

NUTS.

.

NEVER FORGET

[struggle]

Ironically, Tupelo has one of the best school systems in Mississippi.