If you love Muddy, who I try to listen to every day, then join all good bluesmen and have a drink for Little Walter tonight...greatest blues harp of all time...
he died February 15th, 1968...
Posted on 02/14/2002 9:01:00 AM PST by sheltonmac
Thirty years ago I visited my first cousin in Virginia. While hanging out with his friend, the discussion turned to popular movies of the day. When I offered my two-cents on the authenticity and social relevance of the movie Billy Jack, one of the boys asked, in all seriousness; "Do you guys have movie theaters down there?" To which I replied, "Yep. We wear shoes too."
Just three years ago, my wife and I were attending a food and wine seminar in Aspen, Colorado. We were seated with two couples from Las Vegas. One of the Glitter Gulch gals was amused and downright rude when I described our restaurant as a fine-dining restaurant. "Mississippi doesn't have fine-dining restaurants!" she demanded and nudged her companion. I fought back the strong desire to mention that she lived in the land that invented the 99-cent breakfast buffet.
I wanted badly to defend my state and my restaurant with a 15-minute soliloquy and public relations rant that would surely change her mind. It was at that precise moment that I was hit with a blinding jolt of enlightenment, and in a moment of complete and absolute clarity it dawned on me -- my South is the best-kept secret in the country. Why would I try to win this woman over? She might move down here.
I am always amused by Hollywood's interpretation of the South. We are still, on occasion, depicted as a collective group of sweaty, stupid, backwards-minded and racist rednecks. The South of movies and TV, the Hollywood South, is not my South.
This is my South:
- My South is full of honest, hard-working people.
- My South is colorblind. In my South, we don't put a premium on pigment. No one cares whether you are black, white, red, or green with orange polka dots.
- My South is the birthplace of blues and jazz, and rock n' roll. It has banjo pickers and fiddle players, but it also has B.B. King, Muddy Waters, the Allman Brothers, Emmylou Harris, and Elvis.
- My South is hot.
- My South smells of newly mowed grass.
- My South was the South of The Partridge Family, Hawaii 5-0, and kick the can.
- My South was creek swimming, cane-pole fishing, and bird hunting.
- In my South, football is king, and the Southeastern Conference is the kingdom.
- My South is home to the most beautiful women on the planet.
- In my South, soul food and country cooking are the same thing.
- My South is full of fig preserves, cornbread, butter beans, fried chicken, grits and catfish.
- In my South we eat foie gras, caviar, and truffles.
- In my South, our transistor radios introduced us to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones at the same time they were introduced to the rest of the country.
- In my South, grandmothers cook a big lunch every Sunday.
- In my South, family matters, deeply.
- My South is boiled shrimp, blackberry cobbler, peach ice cream, banana pudding, and oatmeal cream pies.
- In my South people put peanuts in bottles of Coca Cola and hot sauce on almost everything.
- In my South the tea is iced and almost as sweet as the women.
- My South has air-conditioning.
- My South is camellias, azaleas, wisteria, and hydrangeas.
- In my South, the only person that has to sit on the back of the bus is the last person that got on the bus.
- In my South, people still say "yes, ma'am," "no ma'am," "please," and "thank you."
- In my South, we all wear shoes....most of the time.
My South is the best-kept secret in the country. Please continue to keep the secret....it keeps the idiots away.
I have a stockpile of "3" stickers and I'll have one on my Harley as long as I ride!
I forgot about the Louisiana Blacks though. They rival Texas. I used to like their BBQ Balony.
There's a place - it's in Tarrant County or thereabouts near Azle, just a little place on the highway - that has such good BBQ. My mouth waters every time I think of it.
It is not Southern to question a good man's where-come-from-abouts. 'Specially when even the WEATHER CHANNEL places us in the Southwest. Georgian infidels!!!
It's not what you say, but how you say it.
Braggart.
If you love Muddy, who I try to listen to every day, then join all good bluesmen and have a drink for Little Walter tonight...greatest blues harp of all time...
he died February 15th, 1968...
What do you want here, anyway? You're not a conservative and you post nothing that doesn't amount to a rabid attack on someone. Go back to DU where you belong. Communists aren't welcome contributors on FR.
Bless your heart, you can't handle a little friendly constructive criticism, can you?
My South is where you can still buy a palace for $100,000.
My South is where gas is still 90c per gallon.
My South is church on Sunday (and a few times in between).
Goldie's is still there (yum!), but Top o'the River is gone. Sadly, Miss Ruby Mitchell has passed on. (For those who don't know, Miss Ruby's smoked sausage with red beans and rice was indescribably wonderful. You could cut the sausage with a plastic fork, it was so tender.)
Sure I can. Give it a try.
You are the Dixiecrat. A change of party was always secondary to your crowd's central malevolent spin, and that hasn't changed.
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