Reimagined Old-Time Music Cultures in the Trainhopping Punk Rock South

This chapter presents the first consideration of a little known network of radical musicians which has coalesced in the last decade into a vibrant new subculture within the broader (but still obscure) “old time music” scene. Since the late 1990s, old time music has been adopted and repurposed via the language of liberation and autonomy with great seriousness and complete novelty by a fluid group of alternative minded DIY anarcho-punks, many of whom are originally from outside of the region. These young musicians have relocated from around the country to the contemporary South in search of deeply authentic old time forms of music, life, and economy standing in opposition to dominant capitalist consumer culture. These “trainhoppers” search for community and authenticity among alternative-minded people and construct a unique old time musical ecology embedded within related pursuits like radical environmental politics, squatting, off-the-grid homesteading, alternative fuel production, and other aspects of the radical quest for hand-crafted experience conceived of as oppositional to dominant, contemporary American consumer culture.

My Yankee Traitor Heart

This chapter ponders the unmistakeable draw of the South for a bohemian prodigal son. The author’s return South to Alabama is seen through time and memory from his current life in the city of Buffalo, New York. In this personal essay, a sociology of exile, the author confronts ghosts and memories of his past and the tensions of his ties to the region.

The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans

This chapter chronicles New Orleans as the first Southern city widely associated with bohemianism, where the Creole heritage and the French Quarter provided one of the likeliest stand-ins for the original homeland of bohemia--the Parisian Latin Quarter--in the nation. Bohemianism flourished in the New Orleans of the 1920s, taking root in a series of local institutions, including the modernist literary journal the Double Dealer. The journal carefully navigated bohemian-bourgeois tension, the modern and the traditional, the conservative and the progressive. Featuring such writers as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, the New Orleans bohemia that existed on and off the pages of the Double Dealer provided a liminal territory, alternately challenging and reinforcing dominant ideologies and mediating a series of social and cultural divides. The lively, engaging, and frustrating "talk, talk, talk" (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues featured in Faulkner's roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national, and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia.

We Think a Lot

The Research Triangle has been called North Carolina’s “axis of cool” and “hipster vibe factory” full of food trucks and indie bands. For decades, North Carolinians have boasted that the three-city “triangle” of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill includes the greatest concentration of PhDs of any region in the country. This essay shows planners and boosters successfully leveraged local universities and cultural resources to attract firms such as IBM and Glaxo since the late 1950s, arguing that smart people—scientists and engineers—wanted to live around other smart people. In doing so, they not only established one of the South’s most dynamic tech hubs, but also prefigured the “creative class” strategy of development over forty years before urbanist Richard Florida coined it.

Space, Time, and Race in Dirty South Bohemia

This chapter considers how historical and contemporary patterns of racial segregation influence the development of bohemian scenes in the South with particular attention to the establishment and maintenance of southern black bohemian cultural spaces. Using Memphis, a city with a rich musical legacy rooted in the Mississippi Delta Blues, as a case study, I chronicle how black cultural entrepreneurs create a separate arts and intellectual space within the constraints of class and racial cultures. These Dirty South Bohemians combine influences from black bohemian cultures concentrated in the urban Northeast, like the Afropunk movement, with regionally-inflected understandings of race and bohemianism to create a racially and regionally distinct articulation of bohemianism within racially segregated spaces.

Acting Out

This chapter examines the sonic landscapes of Athens, Georgia, which was an epicenter for cutting edge music from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, leading the way for college rock and other independent music scenes. The transformation of this small Southern college town into a new kind of bohemia and nationally and internationally recognized site of alternative culture is covered through the lens of several important Athens bands. These include the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M. The chapter also examines related elements of the emerging scene, such as drag and pop art.

Southern Expressions of the Blues Revival

Conventional narratives about blues revival activity in the U.S. in the 1960s treat it as a northern phenomenon. This chapter addresses lesser known efforts in the Deep South to enhance the cultural status of the blues, and how they were hampered by Jim Crow segregation. It also compares revival scenes in New Orleans, Memphis and Houston, focusing on the distinctive institutional arrangements of bohemia in each city.

Trash Food

This chapter explores the tensions of navigating cultured bohemian circles that sometimes touch the worlds of writing and academia. In particular, the author examines the links between social class and food, as well as the ways in which these can divide us and provoke suspicion and even shame.

Down Home and Out

This chapter examines poetry and fiction of Southern lesbian writers using the lens of food. Drawing on the works of Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Doris Davenport, the author explores how Southern lesbian writers transform the obvious, making lesbian eroticism and desire manifest through the vehicle of Southern food. These and other Southern writers have not only been at the center of important debates about feminism and identity, but also have created a sense of unity and sociality through a love of food and region.

Bohemian Groves in Southern Soil

This chapter defines the overall goals and aims of the collection, The Bohemian South. In addition to reviewing the broader history of bohemia in America, the author reviews bohemia’s long history within the American South. The chapter ends by outline the structure of the collection.