What are some songs or books that you think all Southerners should know? Cultural literacy is the ordinary process by which a population acquires a language of thought through the forms already belonging to it. Those forms are the songs, stories, images, and phrases that circulate in the ordinary life of a place. Everybody knows the Mona Lisa. Everybody knows Romeo and Juliet. Everybody knows the Moonlight Sonata. Once they are internalized, they become the instrument by which later material is recognized, measured, and understood. Hollywood film director James Cameron is reported to have sold the idea of the movie Titanic to 20th Century Fox studio executives by showing them a painting of the legendary sinking sea liner and saying, “Romeo and Juliet on that.” Without the cultural literacy behind Romeo and Juliet, the film would not work.
For Americans, the process begins most securely with the forms that have circulated in the South. Southern ballads, fiddle tunes, work songs, and shape-note hymns still retain the interval patterns, modal turns, and narrative economies that appear, often altered, in the wider national repertory. A person who can already hear and perform those Southern forms possesses a stable standard. Against that standard, the national songs and texts become audible as preservations or departures rather than as isolated items. The Western inheritance enters last, measured in turn against both. This order is not a claim that the South is the sole source of American culture. It is the observation that a coherent regional tradition, still recoverable in living or recently collected form, can supply the first language of thought through which the larger tradition becomes thinkable.
The same regional ground that supplied the nation’s first musical language also supplies its first political language. Several of the men who wrote the founding documents and held the early executive offices were Virginians. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Monroe worked from the habits of speech, law, and memory already current in that place. Those habits were not an abstract national invention; they were the ordinary forms and the “mother tongue” of a particular region. The Southern ballads, fiddle tunes, work songs, and shape-note hymns stand in the same relation to American music. They are the recoverable local forms through which a larger national repertory becomes audible and measurable. Just as the political settlement of the 1780s and 1790s can be read as an extension of Virginia practice into a continental frame, the later national songs can be heard as extensions, alterations, or departures from the Southern songs already in circulation. Cultural literacy that begins with those Southern forms therefore begins where the country’s own political literacy began: with the concrete practices of the region that furnished the largest number of its first makers.
The mechanism has already been successfully demonstrated and verified at national scale. In Hungary, the composer and teacher Zoltán Kodály insisted that children begin with the authentic folk songs of their own people. He and composer Béla Bartók had already collected those songs across the Hungarian countryside before World War II. The national school system later adopted the principle: daily singing of the peasant repertory came first, so that pitch, rhythm, and form were learned in the musical language the children already heard, recognized, and knew. Only after that language was secure did art music enter. One result was a population that could read and write music with precision and could hear the difference between their own tradition and any other. Another result was a population with a sophisticated musical ear and the ability of ordinary cab drivers, bartenders, farmers, and bankers to sing almost any song upon request.
The same sequence applies anywhere that a coherent body of native song still exists. In the United States the equivalent starting point is the American folk repertory, and within that repertory the Southern songs supply the clearest and best-documented “mother tongue.” American educators who studied the Hungarian practice adapted the order: begin with the songs of the child’s own place, make those songs the medium of musical thought, then open outward.
A child or an adult first acquires the capacity to recognize and judge cultural material through the forms already present, and those forms set the internal standard. New material is then heard and learned as either continuous with that standard or as a deliberate change from it. This is consistent with all available research on how human beings learn any music – progress from familiar to unfamiliar and from simple to complex. Consider the ballad “Barbara Allen.” In the versions collected across the South, the melody moves in a narrow range, often pentatonic, and the narrative turns on a refusal that brings death to both lovers. A singer who knows that version can later hear what happens when the same story appears in print collections or in concert arrangements. The intervals may be filled in, the cadence regularized, or the refusal softened. The change is measurable only because the earlier form is already known. A contemporary listener hearing Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” knows right away that the song couldn’t exist without “Barbara Allen” or “Scarborough Fair.”
The same process is visible in a melody that has moved from Southern tradition into successive popular songs. The traditional tune known in Southern collections as “Broken Ties” (or “Broken Vows”) was already circulating in the region when A. P. Carter collected and adapted it. The Carter Family recorded it in 1929 as “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.” That same melody reappears intact inside Roy Acuff’s “The Great Speckled Bird,” Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” and Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” In each case, the earlier song is the melodic ground still present and recognizable inside the later hit. A listener who knows the traditional tune, or the Carter Family recording of it, can hear exactly what was kept and what new words and emphasis were laid over it. The later songs grew out of the earlier one; the Southern tune remains the measurable standard.
The same process is visible in the ballad of John Henry as it has moved from Southern tradition into later popular songs. Southern versions collected across the region keep the hammer contest against the steam drill, the death at the tunnel, and the driving rhythmic pulse of the steel driver’s work. That material reappears inside widely known later recordings such as Johnny Cash’s “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer” and Harry Belafonte’s “John Henry,” as well as in the related work song “Take This Hammer,” which names the hammer that killed him. In each case, the earlier ballad is not merely an influence. It is the narrative and rhythmic ground still present and recognizable inside the later song. The same continuity also connects “Nine Pound Hammer” and Jimmy Dean’s hit “Big Bad John,” which intertwines John Henry with Paul Bunyan. A listener who knows the Southern ballad can hear exactly which elements of the contest and the death were kept and which details of setting or emphasis were altered. The later songs grew out of the earlier one; the Southern ballad remains the measurable standard.
The relation holds for dance tunes and hymns as well. “Old Joe Clark” and “Sourwood Mountain” carry the modal inflections and the short, repeating phrases common to Southern fiddle repertory. A player or singer who has those tunes in the ear can recognize the same phrases when they surface, sometimes straightened, in national play-party songs or in composed settings. “Amazing Grace,” in the shape-note settings that use the tune “New Britain,” moves with the open intervals and the plain declamation of the Southern hymn tradition. A listener who has sung that version can hear how the same text and tune have been harmonized differently in later hymnals, or how the cadence has been smoothed for concert use. The earlier form supplies the measure. The later form is understood as a variation from it. In each case, the Southern song is not enrichment added after the national culture has been established. It is the prior material that makes the national culture audible as culture rather than as a list of titles. The Hungarian schools showed that the same prior material, once made the ordinary medium of instruction, produces listeners who can make those measurements at will. American tradition confirms and verifies this process.
Stories travel with the songs and obey the same order. The murder ballad “Omie Wise” or “Tom Dooley” tells its events in a compressed sequence: the meeting, the promise, the killing, the discovery. A reader who knows that economy can recognize how Twain uses a similar compression in episodes of Huckleberry Finn, or how Faulkner expands and fractures it in his narratives of violence and inheritance. The shape-note hymn supplies another prior form. Its cadences, built on the old shapes and the open fifths, underwrite stretches of American public speech. Washington’s Farewell Address moves with a biblical and hymnic rhythm that is already familiar to anyone who has sung “Amazing Grace” or “Wondrous Love.” The address does not invent that rhythm. It employs a rhythm the Southern hymn tradition had already made ordinary. Remove the hymn and the address loses the ground against which its elevations can be heard.
The inventory that supports this sequence is selective rather than exhaustive. It consists of the Southern songs that still function, or can be restored, as ordinary material, the national songs that extend or borrow from them, and the Western works against which both have been measured. On the Southern side stand the ballads “Barbara Allen,” “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender,” “The House Carpenter,” “Pretty Polly,” “Omie Wise,” “Banks of the Ohio,” “Tom Dooley,” and “Railroad Bill.” Beside them are the fiddle and play-party tunes “Old Joe Clark,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “Cripple Creek,” “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “Alabama Gal,” and “Great Big House in New Orleans.” The work songs and spirituals include “John Henry,” “Casey Jones,” “The Boll Weevil,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Go Down, Moses.” The shape-note core includes “Amazing Grace” on “New Britain,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Wondrous Love,” “Idumea,” and “Windham.” These are not the only songs. They are the ones whose interval habits and narrative turns reappear, recognizably, in the wider repertory. They are also the songs that American adaptations of the Hungarian practice have used as the starting repertory.
Against that Southern ground stand the national songs that either preserve the turns or depart from them in audible ways: “Shenandoah,” “The Erie Canal,” “Home on the Range,” “The Streets of Laredo,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Oh! Susanna,” and the larger body of Stephen Foster songs. Foster’s melodies often regularize the modal inflections of the Southern tunes while keeping their narrative directness. A singer who knows both can hear the regularization. Beyond the national songs lies the Western inheritance: the Bible in the King James text whose cadences shaped both the hymns and the public speech; Homer and Shakespeare, whose narrative and dramatic forms supplied models that American writers measured themselves against; and the art music of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, whose formal procedures become intelligible once a listener can already hear phrase, cadence, and modal color in the songs of his own place. The lists remain working inventories. Their sequence is the point. The Hungarian example showed that the sequence can be carried through an entire school system. The American adaptations have shown that the same sequence can begin with Southern song and open onto the national and Western repertories.
A selective inventory of Southern literature that has entered the national standard can be stated in the same terms. On the Southern side stand Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding and her collected stories, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Wise Blood, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. These works are already known, or can be restored, as ordinary material. Their narrative economies, compressed sequences of violence or inheritance, and regional speech patterns reappear, recognizably, in later American writing. A reader who knows the murder-ballad compression the essay has already named can measure how Twain uses a similar economy and how Faulkner expands and fractures it. The same measurement applies to the others.
Unfortunately, American visual art supplies fewer single works that function at the same level of ordinary recognition as music and literature. No Southern painting occupies the place the Mona Lisa occupies. Certain bodies of work come closest: the portraits and history paintings produced in Virginia and the Carolinas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (including those by artists such as Thomas Sully who worked extensively in the region), the Newcomb Pottery of New Orleans, the quilts of Gee’s Bend, and selected canvases by twentieth-century Southern painters such as John McCrady or the self-taught artists whose images entered wider circulation. However, these remain specialist rather than common knowledge.
Now, we must address the uncomfortable parts. The contemporary prevailing objection to cultural literacy is that this process is either racist, xenophobic, or both. However, this fallacy mistakes a description of acquisition for a ranking of peoples. Every coherent culture transmits its ordinary forms first. Those forms become the internal standard by which later material is recognized and measured. Naming the process for the forms that have circulated in the West, in America, and in the South does not assert that other cultures lack equivalent forms, nor that one set ranks above another. It asserts only that a person measures new material against the material he already knows, and that the material he already knows is the material of his own place and language. The prior standard is not an act of exclusion. It is the ordinary condition under which any language of thought is formed. A Hungarian child beginning with the peasant songs of his own country, a Japanese child beginning with the folk songs of his, and a Southern child beginning with ballad and shape-note hymn are performing the same operation. Each acquires the capacity to hear difference. That capacity is lost only when the prior standard is removed, and no equivalent standard is put in its place. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening in the current political climate. It’s not that American and Southern cultural building blocks are being replaced by others; it’s that they’re not being replaced by anything at all. The cultural literacy sequence itself makes no claim about race, ethnicity, faith, or geopolitical influence. It simply describes the order in which human beings acquire the ability to measure one cultural form against another. Hungary’s results followed from observing the order, not from any assertion of superiority.
The practical consequence follows directly. Any instruction or argument that aims to establish American cultural literacy can begin with the Southern forms that are still recoverable. Those forms are sung, told, and examined until their distinctive turns are stable in the ear and in the memory. Only then does the sequence open to the national repertory that grew out of them or borrowed from them. “Shenandoah” is heard against the river and parting songs already known. Foster is heard against the modal tunes he regularized. Washington’s Farewell Address is heard against the hymnic cadences already sung. After that national layer is in place, the Western inheritance can be met as a further measurement rather than as an unrelated canon. Bach’s phrases are heard by ears that already know phrase and cadence from the ballads. Shakespeare’s narrative turns are recognized by readers who already know the compressed economy of the murder ballad. The expansion uses the starting point as the instrument that makes the later material intelligible. American teachers simply made that order explicit in the classroom: the Southern and American folk songs first, then the wider inheritance.
After clearing the hurdles of racism and xenophobia, what about the old fallacious fallback charge known as “cultural appropriation”? The claim is that cultural literacy treats the ordinary movement of forms as a moral trespass, and results in cultural appropriation. However, cultural literacy actually treats that movement as the normal way any tradition anywhere in the world becomes usable. Humans learn from each other. More than thirty thousand years before humans documented anything by writing it down, they were passing songs along to each other through memory. Cultural appropriation is our nature.
A song, a cadence, or a narrative pattern is acquired by hearing it, singing it, and measuring later material against it. Once it is internalized, it functions as part of the language of thought. The Carter Family melody that reappears inside “The Great Speckled Bird,” “The Wild Side of Life,” and “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” did not remain the exclusive property of the first singers who knew “Broken Ties.” It became the measurable ground for later songs. The Carter Family themselves held no exclusive claim to the Western harmony, polyphony, and the duple meter they employed. Those resources had already entered the common stock centuries before 1929. Southern music has repeatedly taken forms from elsewhere, altered them, and sent them forward again. The result is “cultural appropriation” at its most magnificent: a regional practice that absorbs, stabilizes, and then extends what it receives into something extraordinary.
The appropriation charge reverses the sequence. It requires that a form stay attached to a prior group and that any later use outside that group be illegitimate. Under that rule, the Hungarian schoolchildren who learned the peasant repertory before art music, the American singers who carried a Southern tune into a commercial hit, and the readers who recognize Romeo and Juliet inside the Titanic pitch would all be engaged in appropriation. The claim therefore denies the most important cultural condition that exists: a population must first possess a stable set of forms before it can recognize, alter, or extend them.
The measurement remains practical. Where a later song or speech still contains the earlier Southern form in recognizable shape, the continuity is audible. The appropriation charge supplies no additional fact about that continuity. It only reclassifies the normal transmission as an offense. The forms circulate, they are learned, and once learned they become the standard against which later material is heard.
This order does not require the claim that every American form originated in the South, as a few did not. It requires only the observation that the South preserved, in living practice and in extensive early collections, a body of song and story coherent enough to serve as a first language of thought. Cecil Sharp’s Appalachian gatherings, the Lomax field recordings, and the shape-note singing that continues in the Sacred Harp all document that coherence. The material is close enough to ordinary hearing that it can still be restored as the starting point. Once restored, it supplies the standard against which the national repertory becomes measurable, and the Western inheritance becomes an extension rather than a substitution. Hungary proved that a nation can build musical literacy on its own collected folk songs. The American adaptations have shown that the same proof can begin with the Southern songs that remain available. Those songs are not a supplement to American cultural literacy. They are the forms through which that literacy can be acquired with precision.
The capacity to measure difference is produced by the sequence, not by any ranking of peoples or regions. When the sequence is observed, Southern cultural literacy functions as the first stage of American cultural literacy, and American cultural literacy functions as the stage through which the Western inheritance is met. The American classrooms that begin with their own folk songs, Southern songs among them, show that the sequence can be transferred. When the sequence is reversed or removed, the later materials arrive without an internal standard. They can be named, but they cannot be heard as preservations or departures. The songs we already know remain available. They are the ordinary forms that make the larger culture thinkable.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
