We welcome this year because it brings us hope and passion.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I will simply say that I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have lived in Missouri all my life. My family came to Missouri in 1809 from Virginia. Currently I live in southern Missouri in the boot heel. I am an educator at a school who has a mule for a mascot. In fact, most of my clothes have a mule (although not dead) embroidered on them. My dog is a feist named bubba.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in Tennessee, am raising my children in the quaint Southern town of Franklin, and embrace my Southerness like the badge of honor it is. My mother’s people were poor, working class folks without a pot or a window. My father’s people owned some land and attended church, which made them a bit ‘uppity,’ according to my mother’s folks. I was the first person on my mother’s side to attend college, much less graduate, so that makes me ‘uppity,’ too. But I learned my most important lessons from my mother’s mother, who graduated from eighth grade and had her first baby a couple of years later. She taught me it’s not what you have that counts, but how you use it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My Holiday Southern Legitimacy statement would have to include the usual trips to Wal-Mart for gifts and everything else for Christmas, outings to see “The Lights” in McAdenville, NC and arguments about how one set of grandparents got to see the grandchildren more than the “other” set. But, the arguments, the fatigue, the shopping, the madness all seem to disappear as you hear the church choir honorably sing “Silent Night”, while you peer out the stained-glass window, hoping, praying for the sight of one, unique snowflake.

Many things make me southern. When I was 12 I would ride my bike into town on Saturdays and sell bags of fresh roasted chinquapins. I know the different items used in baiting a catfish hole and a hog trap, and have practiced both on numerous occasions. I know that the bark of a persimmon tree can cure poison ivy and the nuts from a shaggy bark hickory taste the worst but make the best sling shot ammo.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the mountains of western North Carolina. I grew up thinking I had more aunts than you could “shake a stick at”. They had names like Aunt Owie (Iowa), Aunt Adar (Ada), Aunt Corie (Cora) and two Aunt Annies. Since both Aunt Annies had the same last name, I was taught the way to distinguish between the two was to attach their husbands’ first names, as Aunt Annie George or Aunt Annie Hayes. I was half grown before I learned they weren’t my true aunts al all. They were my grandmother’s friends and as a matter of respect, they deserved to be addressed in this manner. That was grandmother’s way, the southern way.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in Atlanta. It being fairly close to God’s country and full of opportunity I saw no reason to venture in to the unknown. When time came to pursue higher education I really had only one choice. College football being something of a religion in the South, you are required to make your choices at an early age. Mine was the quaint North Avenue Trade School sometimes know as the Georgia Institute of Technology. We Yellow Jackets lustily sing our fight song and as the lyrics go “drink our whiskey clear”. We bleed white and gold and despise all things Dawg. But, being fair minded folks we don’t care who beats Georgia and always strive to find employment opportunities for our less advantaged brothers after graduation.

Well, kiss my grits, I guess I am southern. Born and raised. Helped my momma kill the chickens, pluck the feathers, and fry up for Sunday dinner. I have “drug” a cotton sack and hoed the corn fields nearly killing a cousin with the hoe. I hardly ever wear shoes, maybe to a funeral or wedding, but always slip them off under the pew. Everybody in town is my cousin and two even married each other. Lordy we were all born at grandma’s house and we kept the milk in the well. Sally and Mable were my pet pigs and I rode one of them nearly every day when I was three. When Sally died, my momma buried her next to the creek. I walked 2 miles to school on a red dirt road, used an outdoor toilet, and ate turnip greens and cornbread. What was leftover after supper was put in the slop jar to feed the hogs. As a true southern lady, I hardly ever spit on the sidewalk. There really ain’t many in the world more southern than me.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I wasn’t born in the South, but I got there as fast as I could. I moved to Texas when I was nine years old, and lest somebody chides me by saying that Texas is more western than southern, let me point out that my adopted home is in East Texas. I live so close to both Texarkana and Shreveport that the folks in those towns can smell my biscuits and sausage gravy when I cook it very year. That’s right, every year, on my southern-born wife’s birthday, I wake up early and fix her some biscuits and gravy. I don’t feed her grits, because she can’t stand them. I, however, eat them as though I were born to do it. This southerner-by-choice also cooks black eyed peas and a mess of collard greens every New Year’s Day, but please don’t offer me chit’lin’s. I wouldn’t eat them even if it was required to prove my southern legitimacy. The best proof I can think of for my being southern at heart is that I actually know that the contraction y’all is used for a group of people—not a single person as they show in the movies. Furthermore, y’all should know that I have actually uttered that word and no longer say “you guys.”

Even today when my energy is low because of a cold I see my Aunt Nina coming at me with the bottle of Vicks Vapo-Rub. How I hated that sticky ointment and the statement I knew would come out of her mouth, “If you would quit going outside with your hair wet, you wouldn’t be sick now! Though I now live in Oregon I have infused into the people who work for me the knowledge of,”Lit up like Levi’s.” This was a department store in downtown Louisville, Kentucky that at the turn of the century had a LOT of lights. People used the expression, “Lit up like Levi’s, whenever they saw what to them was a preposterous amount of lighting. Every time someone left on a trip the words hearken to me from long ago, “Don’t watch them out of sight, its bad luck.” WE still have our superstitions. If you drop a fork, a woman is coming. If you drop a knife a man is coming. If a bird gets in the house and sings on you’re bed, God help you.

Even though I was born in Northern Indiana frequent visits from a seemingly endless amount of cousins kept my accent skewed towards the South. I remember my first year of school when I had to explain to Mr. Rust, the principal of West Township High School that someone had stolen my towel. “Mr. Rust my taaal is missing.”

“You’re what?”

“My taaal.”

“What is that?”

“The thing you dry your self on after gym class.”

“Son that’s a Ta-wool. “ I don’t think even he had it quite right but communication improved gradually.

Every summer we returned to Louisville (Loo-eh-vuul) to visit our relatives. My mom would take us to Cherokee Park and show me the great rock in the river that supposedly had three bodies under it from when it fell. She showed me the big hill they used to wait by, when they were roller-skating. Now they were not at the top, but waited at the bottom for a car to slow for the turn onto the hill, and grab its back bumper to ride to the top. Many skinned knees and hilarious stories came from those times.

My cousin’s house in Corydon, Indiana, which was just across the bridge from Louisville, was up in the hills, past the church with the blue Iris’s. I would have so much fun there. They did not have running water but they had a cistern. They grew tobacco and had cows. The cows were a never ending source of pleasure as they often “got out.” “Russell, Cherry is out agin’.”

Motivation was not a top priority in my family. Their extended fence was a single line of barb wire around several acres. Russell would yell, “Get ‘im dogs,” and charging out from under the porch (I swear to God this is true) came a bunch of dust and dirt covered dogs, barking ferociously, heading straight for poor Cherry. She knew the game and hopped the wire and the dogs returned bearing their heads high with Southern dignity.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up and live in Greenville SC. Our hot water heater busted in my wife’s and I’s apartment so as for now we are living in my mother’s house which is where I spent all of my childhood. About the only thing I notice that is different is the size of the magnolia and the pecan tree which were as tall as I was when my dad planted them nearly 40 years ago. I work at the local Y and my wife works at a group home in the country. I have been writing poetry for 27 years.

First, let’s deal with the issue of geography. I am from Missouri…yes, Missouri. But where I am from is decidedly Southern. Even the name of my home county, Mississippi County – which straddles the bootheel and hugs the river, pays tribute to the South. My home is further south than 90% of Kentucky and I can be in West Memphis in about ninety minutes. I live closer to Ole Miss than Mizzou. We shop in Memphis, not St. Louis, and if you try to tell anyone from around here that we are not part of the South, you may have a fight on your hands.

I have castrated hogs with a pocket knife and washed the wounds with turpentine…and enjoyed it. I have pitched watermelons and chopped cotton. My family raises cotton and I can remember playing in the cotton trailers and nearly crying when we sold the gin (not the drink, we kept that). I’ve run trot lines, hogged catfish, gigged bullfrogs and attended an annual “squirrel fry “. I have ridden a tractor all day long while chewing “Days O’ Work” tobacco and spitting in an oil can with the top cut out. I’ve known my wife my whole life. We grew up two miles from each other, dated since my freshman year of high school, and her daddy is the pig farmer who taught me to castrate hogs.

Presently, I am a family physician in southeast Missouri. I make house calls. I call little old ladies Ma’am. And two months ago, a lady brought me a sack of turnip greens. And I ate them. My wife cooked them with hog jowl, beans and cornbread. I washed it down with sweet tea. And finally, I can sing Dixie…the whole song, not just the “living in the land of cotton” part.

Even though I moved away from Georgia ten years ago, I still check pickups for a gun rack before I honk.

I live in Phoenix Arizona. I hang out at North Phoenix Baptist Church and like most Southern people, I eat a lot. Southern people speak their minds and say things whether they are popular or not.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Born in Farmville, Virginia, and raised in Richmond and the mountains of southwestern Virginia, I’m a lifelong southerner. As a child, I frequently visited the tobacco farm, where my mother was raised. My siblings, cousins, and I would head to the barn to fetch the mules for a saunter along the dirt paths that straddled the tobacco curing sheds. I cared little if the mules sweated buckets and soiled my blue jeans. My rural background spent wallowing in mud piles and chasing chickens around the henhouse prepared me to accept the earthy side of country living, including the swarming flies that swirled around my neck during visits to the outhouse. Often my writing pays homage to my humble roots and to Virginia’s terrain. Most recently, I’ve written a book about the natural beauty and the environmental challenges facing the Chesapeake Bay region of eastern Virginia, where my husband and I currently live on a cove.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I spent most of my life in a poor community called Doodle Hill. One grandma lived behind me and one in front. Breakfast was always ready before putting in tobacco or going to dig foundations with granddaddy. Feeding hogs was half of my early childhood. At fifty, it is a little weird having to proclaim my legitimacy as a southerner. Yes, we have it all here, the good and the horrific, the beautiful and the tragic. Where else could Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond be promoted up the political gang plank for their opinions on segregation. Where else could black and white kids play doodle bug under a grandmother’s house while their parents graded tobacco together. If nothing else says southern, the title of my chapbooks “no good will”, “No Welfare, No Pension Plan”, and “Pot Liquor Promises” should sound it out. Yes, I know who was the first person to introduce the steel guitar to the Grand Ole Opry and who introduced the drums to country music and who really wrote “Hello Walls.” Well if this doesn’t legitimize my southerness, I am due to get a tattoo proclaiming my love for mother, Jesus and whiskey. Hallelujah. Set the dogs free.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in South Carolina, love collard greens, okra, grits, and barbecue sandwiches (with cole slaw on top, of course), and still have my southern accent. My great grandfather fought in the Civil War. He owned a mule. I have a photo of that mule. That mule is now dead.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and raised in Kentucky, love grits with butter and pepper, don’t understand people who screw up grits with milk and sugar, for gods sakes people, grits and cream of wheat are two different things, as different and horses and mules.

I live below the Mason Dixon line, only time I get in trouble is when I go north and marry some Yankee woman, always have to buy them a house, pack them up and then send them back north with all my money; I just can’t speak or understand their language, you know what I mean.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
We take the pursuit of happiness seriously here in Louisiana, as you have probably heard before. What’s more, you all would be speaking the Queen’s English if we hadn’t saved Andrew Jackson’s tail from the red coats.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I like living in the South because it’s not as far north as the North. In North Carolina, that means instead of suffering the mud-brown, dreary snow-slushy springs of Pennsylvania, we generally get sunshine and warmer temperatures in March and April. Up North, September is only summer on the calendar. Here, we get to experience the warm and temperate weather you would expect from summer. I swore when I moved here from Key West almost 13 years ago that I would never live further north again, and I intend to keep that promise.

I’m a native of a small town called, Hiawassee, Georgia. We have a language of our own, and lately I’ve been paying more attention to it. Just the other day I heard this saying, “If you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” Another one I hear quite often is, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” These are short but filled with some truth.

If I need a Southern legitimacy statement again, then let me say that I drink my tea sweet, that I make my biscuits from scratch, and that I do like a little bourbon during the holiday season.

I’m so durned Southern — writing Southern fiction from my mountaintop lair in east Tennessee. Just me and the goats.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

How can you tell I’m Southern? There ain’t nowhere else where a poet would try to get away with starting a sentence with “There ain’t nowhere else.” And, besides that, I can recite Jerry Clower from memory and actually know people from Yazoo City, MS, but none of them are Ledbetters. Now, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably ought not to be reading this. I believe dirt clod fights are reasonable ways to settle disputes among teenagers (at least in the past).

I believe in cooking fish stews under shade trees in August
And I believe in drinking beer while you do.

But, most of all, I believe in Grandma’s 17 thin layered chocolate cake.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My parents still live in Alabama and each time I get the opportunity, I visit. Being geographically separated from the south (stuck out west) is tough, but the memories of home serve me well. I also keep in touch with my southern roots each time I heat up the cast iron skillet to either fry taters or make some cornbread like mama taught me. When I call home, I sometimes ask mama to hold the phone in front of her so I can hear Alabama talk to me. She probably thinks it’s silly, but she obliges and I hear the sweet southern whisper, “hurry back,” and I’m homesick again.

Mule essays provide a wonderful link to real life.  Southern stories are less fiction and more truth than any tales around. Enjoy this month’s collection while sipping some hot cider… or buttermilk egg nog. Yup, there is such an animal – but ya’ll have to do your own googling. I’ve got more stories to load [...]

Virginia Lee is back in Memphis after spending thirteen years in Mississippi and nearly two in North Carolina. She’s about as Southern as a body can get, having been born in North Carolina in the mid-60s to a Memphian mama with roots in middle Tennessee and Louisiana and an Arkansan daddy with roots in Alabama and also Tennessee. Lee even has a degree in things Southern from the University of Mississippi. Like the South, Lee is a survivor who defies her detractors with humor and a determination to stay true to herself, her mama, and the region. She’s a rebel, Lee is, and you’d best not forget it. She certainly won’t.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Winter is now fast upon us here in Southern Illinois…I say ‘Southern’ there…don’t make me go into my Yankee hatin’ spiel again. The snow’s gonna be comin’. That’s just somethin’ we put up with. For me, gimme a sunny Christmas on a Southern beach. When I was livin’ in Georgia, I got the worse sunburn I ever got on Christmas Day. That ain’t crazy, that’s just the way it is.

I remember those freak snow storms we had down in Georgia. Ice all over the roads. Cars slidin’ into ditches. And Yankee dogs from the Army base laughin’ it up sayin’ Southern people don’t know how to drive in winter weather. ‘Course they ain’t never seen one of our ‘shine runners in action. That’s real drivin’. Anyway, I’m pretty easy goin’ and I’m glad they were amused. Simple folk laugh at a lot of stuff. I say simple folk ’cause, as a rule, only fools would live where the white stuff comes down all winter. Okay, okay, ya got me. Exceptions to the rule: Eskimos, Aleuts, Alutiiqs, Athabascans, Tlingits, Haidas, Eyaks, Tsimshians, Laplanders…boy I’m sorry I brought this up…Ainus, Buryats, Nenets, Enets, Nganasans, etc., etc., etc.

I earned my Southern Credentials in 1963, the first time I said “Yes, Ma’am” to my Ohio mother. She sent me to my room, said we didn’t move to the south so I could learn to be a smart ass. That’s a true story.

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but have lived in the South long enough (Atlanta for over thirty years, Baton Rouge and Austin before that) to enjoy collards and black-eyed peas, and to have developed peculiar linguistic tendencies. If I don’t watch myself, I utter phrases like, “how y’all guys doing?”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My sisters and I suffered from southern girl envy when we were kids. Seems like magazine covers of the fifties liked to feature carefree, southern-looking girls who wore pillbox hats, dainty gloves and crinolines under their full skirts. One time my oldest sister, Beta, (short for Melvita, so see there, we did know how to name our children anyway) decided to starch her tulle net crinoline for a bowling date, only Mama was out of starch so Beta made up some sugar water to dip it in. The thing stood up by itself on the kitchen table until just before her date got there. When Beta pulled it on under her homemade bib skirt, we all thought she’d discovered one of the secrets known only to a chosen few.

Well darn it, it all would have worked out fine except when she took those three steps down the bowling lane and swung her arm back for the stroke, her thumb stuck in the ball’s thumb orofice. She was able to shake it off at the last minute, but somehow or other the crinoline got tangled up in the operation and was drug down to her ankles by the momentum of the ball. (We sturdy North Idaho girls were not much given to lady-like exhibitions of strength. Beta gave up bowling and starched underskirts over the years, but she still whacks a mean golf ball in her creased capris and she’s nearly seventy.)

I can’t remember if that particular date wound up being her husband, but I do remember that on her way home, disgraced and a little sweaty from the ordeal, Beta’s legs stuck to the sugared crinoline, making a dignified exit nigh unto impossible. Might have been where she learned to be such a good sport.

Shoot, I started out intending to tell y’all a Christmas story, which is testament to my attention span nowadays. It might have been a December bowling date though, come to think of it.

I was born in Tuscaloosa, raised in the Bluegrass, and educated north of the Mason-Dixon line where I introduced the Yankees to Maker’s Mark. I believe in grits, grit, and God, keeping a loaded gun under the bed and a handmade afghan on top of it. Don’t tell me Kentucky’s not South. I’ve got a mimosa tree in my backyard, tomato aspic in my refrigerator, and a Skoal ring on the back pocket of my high school jeans.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Now about my Pedigree:

I was born and raised in Mississippi. I left Mississippi to broaden my horizons. My daddy cried and my mama made Daddy drive all the way to South Carolina, where the United States Army had me hidden away in the brig, to try to talk my NCO into letting me come home.

Mama missed the $50 dollars a month I brought home from de-barking pine trees at Mr. Brewer’s Lumber Mill outside of Natchez. I hit my West Point-educated Lieutenant in the mouth when he playfully tugged on my big toe and told me to get my redneck ass out of bed. I then proceeded to admonish him as I pulled his damn pants down to see if his panties had lace on ‘em. They did.

Two weeks later our Yankee President declared war and my NCO finally did let me out of the brig. But he didn’t send me home to Natchez, after all. No, sir.

I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a hole; a foxhole.

Now about my chosen field:

When I returned to the United States of America, I moved to Louisiana. I joined the Baton Rouge Police Department. After thirty years, I retired.

For the last twenty years I have spent my time fiddling around with my tractor and diggin holes of my own, in the pasture with it. I dug a hole 400 feet long, 75 feet wide and 12 feet deep with my Massey Ferguson and a box. It filled up with rain water on its own and then I hired a man from Arkansas to fill it up with fish. I fish some but nowadays I catch and release. My wife thinks it’s smart, because of my age and all, just in case when I do kick the bucket and find out God is in actuality a striped bass that He won’t have anything to hold against me, much.

Now about my eating habits:

I revert to eating what I was brought up on and grits was the thing. Mama could make kudzu and poke salad taste like mustards. My sisters let me help pull taffy and drop the peanuts in it while it was still warm. Iced tea was the drink but we didn’t have ice, mind you. I still get a hankering for cold sweet potatoes and still spell a singular said spud with an “e” on the end of it.

Now about my music habits:

Tina not Ike. Waylon not Willie. Julie not Lisa. Anybody who is or once was signed with Sun Records.

I’m so Southern that I use to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano at the black churches in Ferriday when he was a boy. White Churches wouldn’t let him in the door. Nothings changed much and that’s the way I like it.

If that ain’t enough, James Lathern is my first name.

I feel southern, I sound southern (when I open my mouth), and some would even claim I look southern. My birth certificate shows that I was born in a part of Texas that is culturally indistinguishable from an area often referred to as the “Deep South.” When I travel back to the place where I got my start, I still hear people say things like “y’all” and “fixin’ to” as in “Y’all fixin’ to go to Walmart?” I have many fond memories of my high school days when I drove hotrod pickup trucks, chewed tobacco (Red Man or Brown’s Mule), and listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd with the volume dial turned far to the right. Today, years later, I no longer do some of those things, nor do I even live in the United States, yet deep down in my molecular structure, I’m a small-town, southern boy.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have lived most of my life in LA (lower Arkansas) and have enough sense to know Dr Pepper doesn’t have a period behind Dr and RC Cola is the preferred drinks of the southern aristocracy. Further proof indicated by former co-ownership in a newspaper with Picayune in the title (yes, in Arkansas). I graduated from high school as a Curley Wolf, and now I am a freshman at the University of Arkansas in Monticello, whose mascot is the Boll Weevils. My wife graduated from a university whose mascot was the Mule Riders. Our son, RC, is a temporary Yankee (living in north Arkansas), and is attending school where the mascot is the Wonder Boys.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in NC. I like to go to church events, and love the fresh air. The best part of the outdoors is when the leaves are changing and start falling to the ground. Then it starts getting cold and I get to stay inside with the family. During that time, we cook the meals together. My favorite meal being cornbread, gravy, beans and fried potatoes, I end up fixing that a lot.

Working on the post-holiday updates of the Mule… the database updates we mean.

It’s true, we need to fill this space with something so the best dynamic would be a visual addition. That’s “K” for KMart, back when we got a new store but that store is gone now and it’s a Fitness Center, Tractor Supply Store and a Badcocks, to name a few. Betcha’ never saw a [...]

make the most of every single day…

Dear Santa… I have no complaints. I am what I am and I ain’t what I ain’t.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in south central Virginia and attended college North Carolina. I currently live in New England. I like up here a lot but I do still yearn for the south — its people, places and uniquely southern events. I miss how strangers will tip their hats in greeting, and I miss how thunderstorms roll through in summer with such fury and then leave behind a sky scrubbed clean. I have talked of returning to the South, to Virginia, most likely. A small house with a back porch, on a hill. I can sit in my rocker and stare out at the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. It’s a dream.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Since I was born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, much of my childhood was spent running around half-naked and barefoot, slamming screen doors and catching lightning bugs, dipping corndogs in mustard and ketchup, gnawing on fried chicken legs and eating salted watermelon in the back yard—and a big night on the town for my family was watching colored lights shine on the giant water fountains at the R.J. Reynolds headquarters. Speaking of colored lights, there were plenty of them wrapped around our Christmas tree when I was growing up—none of those high-toned tiny white lights for us—the tackier, the better. And every Thanksgiving/Christmas meant plenty of “bless your hearts,” “pass the ham,” and great dollops of time with assorted grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and the occasional stray. I have to say that I had a wonderful childhood, and although I’ve traveled all over the world since then, as “Dorothy” said so well, “There’s no place like home!”