Southern culture and understanding from a Southerner

This is an article from last year by Gayle Crabtree on the traditions and way of life that make us who and what we are:

Southern culture is an experience all its own. Most of us learned at the knees of our grandparents or great grandparents. My father’s family is not from here but my mother’s family has roots going beyond the War of Northern Aggression (You can call it the Civil War or the War of Southern Independence) to the Revolution and even before that.

As a kid, I grew up in East Tennessee but spent good portions of my life in Chattanooga. My mother grew up around Rossville, Georgia in the Chattanooga area. Her father was from a town on Sand Mountain called Rainesville, Georgia and for awhile my family and I lived in North Carolina. A small segment of my maternal side of the family grew up around Red Clay and purportedly walked to Oklahoma (that’s another article).

Sunday dinner usually meant a history lesson from my grandmother or perhaps my grandfather. These weren’t usually lessons found in the history books but were tales of a more personal nature
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