Reply #92: You're welcome.

[Withywindle]

It really is all about the Swampers, even in that song,

"They pick me up when I'm feeling blue"

Me too.

I love "The Ballad of Curtis Loew," It's really about how intertwined black and white culture really is in the South.

I'm a mixed white/Latina girl from Virginia, and that recent post about the DC chef who wanted to serve fried chicken, collard greens, biscuits and cornbread for Black History Month? I grew up eating that too! It's not racist, it's Southern culture food - and Southern music, be it R&B, blues, jazz, rockabilly, country, bluegrass, or old-time, is the product of white and black people together. Old-time hillbilly music is the result of the pairing of the fiddle (from Europe, especially Scotland and Ireland) and the banjo, which is an adaptation of an African instrument!

As a Southern Highlands girl, this is the Skynyrd song that moves me the most: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_I_Can_Do_Is_Write_About_It

I love the Blue Ridge Mountains of SW VA and south central WV. I grew up there. I took my first awareness of mortality lying on my back in the woods, and I was OK with it as long as these ancient landscapes that had been there long before I was born would still be there long after I was gone.

Anyone who wants to destroy those hills and woods is my undying enemy.