Music and Family

Music plays an important part in Southern culture and literature. This might seem like a fairly insignificant or unnecessary observation as (a.) music plays an important role in most cultures and (b.) there wouldn’t be much reason to write a post about the importance of music in Southern poetry if that wasn’t the case. I discussed in the first entry (“Southern Identity Projected Through Music (and Insects)”) how music is used to project the importance of other themes in poetry and now I’d like to investigate the specific role of music within this poetry.

The first poem that came to mind for this particular discussion is "XVIII" of Cradle Song. This is one poem where the importance of music really jumped out at me and I think it’s a fantastic example to look at for the role of music in Southern poetry. To begin with, this particular poem (or part of a poem, technically) feels about as Southern as you can get with its talk of, “Sausage biscuits and sweet iced tea,” and its imagery of “Red clay fields.” Stacey Lynn Brown even goes so far as to include her grandmother’s accent as she proclaims, “Herrrrrrr-burt! They’re heah!” This poem definitely has the qualifications to be considered Southern.

So what role does music play in “XVIII?” Well first, it’s important to consider the poem’s overall themes. This is a poem about family. Brown makes a point of demonstrating the differences in her family. She makes it clear that her mother doesn’t feel a sense of belonging in that family under most circumstances. Music, in this case gospel singing, is the commonality that brings the family together. When they’re singing, each member of the family quartet brings an element that meshes with the others to create harmony. It is through music that Brown’s mother finds her place in her own family.

To me, “XVIII” is more than just a look at how music brings Brown’s family together. I took it as being representative of the South as a whole. In many ways, the South has the feeling of a large dysfunctional family. This goes along with the collective identity I talked about in my last post. While individuals, be they states, groups, or people, may not always agree with or approve of each other, they have their place within the South. Many Southerners would not hesitate to criticize one another, but would see any criticism of the South as a society as an affront to the greater entity they belong to. So in this poem, music is used to project this sense of family.

R.T. Smith’s “Flat-Footing, Summer Evening, Rockbridge County, VA” subtly supports this notion by showcasing music’s life-giving effects on the family’s oldest members. I thought it was rather significant that Smith chose to use the phrase, “A grandfather flat-foots and smiles,” instead of just referring to the man as one of the “old-timers” mentioned earlier in the poem. There is a strong sense of the importance of small-town community relations in this poem. It is hardly unthinkable that this community could be viewed in a family sense in this rural setting. This man is a “grandfather” and not just an “elder” because the community has a strong sense of familiarity and connection to him. This sense of family within the community is a trademark of Southern culture as it thrives in small, rural towns but is all but impossible to cultivate in big cities.

Music serves to point out the strong sense of family that exists in the South. Beyond poetry, however, music is certainly a part of the culture that brings the South together. As mentioned in my last post, Southern music has its own distinct flavors that differentiate it from music anywhere else in the world. Gospel, bluegrass, country, Dixieland jazz, and even Southern rock are distinctly Southern creations and serve to create that greater sense of identity. It is the same sense of “who we are” that defines what it means to be Southern as well as what it means to be a part of a family.