Excerpt from Paul Hemphill's The Good Old Boys
Posted: Sep 24, 2007Excerpt from Paul Hemphill's The Good Old Boys
9/24/07
In preparation for my upcoming article on Paul Hemphill, I thought I'd chose a paragraph from an introduction he wrote to his book The Good Old Boys in 1974 for your perusal. This mean piece of writing proves why Swampland strives to preserve the lineage of art, culture and history.
In this light, one is able to see how things turned out three decades later and why today's southern art and artists prove vital as ever. Artists living today realize, sooner or later they have to compete with their dead heroes accomplishments if they want to stand out against all the living "artists" of today. In other words, if you're trying to set the world record in the mile...you not only have to beat the guy in the lane next to you...but you have to beat the clock.
"The need for a book like this occurred to me at that precise moment, although I had started thinking about it a couple of years earlier when I returned as a columnist to The Atlanta Journal after a year as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard. The first thing I did upon returning to the paper was talk my way into a meandering two-month foray through the South. Driving the backroads and mailing back four coulmns a week, I wanted to capture the flavor of the region--to assemble a series of 1,000-word vignettes that would, as a body, characterize the South as it moved into the 1970s. "Hemphill Rediscovers the South," read the house ads as I made notes on the people and the places I was certain I would find; Dying Appalachian Town...Sat. Nite Roadhouse...Dirt Stock-Car Track...Moonshiner...Isolated Mountaineers...
"It was frustrating. The dying towns were being revived, I found, by bland Chamber of Commerce types self-consciously concealing their drawls as they recited their mindless Babbittry. The 'fightin and dancin' clubs' were being replaced by Holiday Inns. The stock-car tracks were now high-banked asphalt 'superspeedways'. The moonshiners had sold out to absentee syndicates. The isolated mountaineers sat in front of color television sets, laughing along with the East at the absurdity of 'Hee-Haw'. Over drinks one night in Greensboro, North Carolina, I told these things to a friend. 'You're not rediscovering the South', he said. 'You're writing an epitaph to it.'"
For more information on Paul Hemphill, standby for the latest Swampland article and visit his official site.
James Calemine
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