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Front Porch

Front Porch On a sunny afternoon last spring, an ad hoc string band assembled outside our campus coffee shop. An overturned washtub laid down the beat, a gentle-eyed fiddler flourished away, and a rapt banjo picker hung soft streamers of notes around the melody. I couldn't place the tune exactly, but it was soothingly repetitious, lively without being raucous. The music was so infectious that a nearby foursome had playfully started a reel, one boy murmuring his calls to the others. A solitary clogger shuffled quietly on the side. All this was downright Arcadian, but I was struck by the reaction of the crowd, sipping lattes under the awnings and languidly gossiping about everything from symbolic logic to the doings of last weekend. Everyone seemed to enjoy the music, but nobody paid it much attention. Not loud enough to obstruct conversation nor urgent enough to compel a clap-along, it was just another part of the above: The gridiron is now deeply entrenched as a theater of southern manhood. Or as General Lee always said, the Battle of Chancellorsville was actually won on the playing fields of the Southeastern Conference. But in "`Fighting Whiskey and Immorality' at Auburn: The Politics of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

Front Porch

Watson, Harry L.
Southern Cultures , Volume 10 (3) – Aug 24, 2004
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488
Publisher site
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Abstract

On a sunny afternoon last spring, an ad hoc string band assembled outside our campus coffee shop. An overturned washtub laid down the beat, a gentle-eyed fiddler flourished away, and a rapt banjo picker hung soft streamers of notes around the melody. I couldn't place the tune exactly, but it was soothingly repetitious, lively without being raucous. The music was so infectious that a nearby foursome had playfully started a reel, one boy murmuring his calls to the others. A solitary clogger shuffled quietly on the side. All this was downright Arcadian, but I was struck by the reaction of the crowd, sipping lattes under the awnings and languidly gossiping about everything from symbolic logic to the doings of last weekend. Everyone seemed to enjoy the music, but nobody paid it much attention. Not loud enough to obstruct conversation nor urgent enough to compel a clap-along, it was just another part of the above: The gridiron is now deeply entrenched as a theater of southern manhood. Or as General Lee always said, the Battle of Chancellorsville was actually won on the playing fields of the Southeastern Conference. But in "`Fighting Whiskey and Immorality' at Auburn: The Politics of

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Aug 24, 2004

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