I would venture to say that loudly denouncing Emmylou Harris will get you killed in any establishment that serves liquor south of Delaware.
–Steve Earle
Ahhhh, Steve Earle. For all his piss-and-vinegar-laden griping about Nashville, he still will stand up and pick a fight with anyone who hasn’t earned the right to criticize its ambassadors like he has.
[An aside: Steve Earle was interviewed several years ago on Terry Gross’s NPR show Fresh Air, and she asked him about his time in prison. She wanted to know how many songs he wrote while locked up and whether or not he played those songs for his fellow inmates to test them out. Steve Earle, characteristically, snorted with incredulity: “People have been watching too many movies, I think,” he said, “Nobody has a guitar in prison. Only in movies do inmates play guitar.”]
There are actually a lot of people (and things) that one shouldn’t speak ill of when south of Delaware. Like Bear Bryant. Or William Faulkner. Or, of course, anyone from the “Cash” or “Carter” family tree. It’s not that Southerners have a rose-tinted or unrealistically angelic opinion of these cultural heroes and heroines–after all, most of them are drunks, philanderers, ex-cons, rogues or some combination of these. (But, hey, we’re all sinners.) It’s just that Southerners don’t want other people (read: Northerners) coming down here and purporting to possess some measure of expertise about our local food, music, culture, literature, sport or politics. People who aren’t from around here sometimes don’t seem to know the whole glass-house/throwing-stones equation. And all the houses down here are glass…
Anyway, Steve Earle’s comment about Emmylou reminded me of a story involving my grandfather many years ago. He was a mild-mannered man most of the time– one of those “less is more” people that actually get things done while everyone else is talking about getting it done. He had a dog named Monty (after Montgomery County, where I was born and where he lived). Monty was a great dog but, to be honest, not a real “looker.” One day, over morning coffee at the local bakery, one of my grandfather’s friends said some negative things about Monty–namely, that the dog was ugly– which really got my grandfather riled. He came home and talked about that guy for days. As it turns out, what the other guy said about Monty was mostly true, as my grandfather readily acknowleged, but as he explained to me: “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You just don’t talk bad about another person’s dog. Just like you don’t talk bad about another person’s children. I can criticize my own dog and my own kids, but if some other man wants to come up here and criticize them, that just ain’t right. I gotta defend them.”
Consider yourself warned.