PATRON + Beautiful story by a real person from the mountains in Alabama
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Very interesting story Alan Wisdom
Ugh……What Mountains? Do you mean isolated hills?
From Cheaha north is considered the mountain region. Aka Appalachian region of Alabama.
From Cheaha to Sand Mountain to Guntersville Mountain to Huntsville is our Mr. Regions in our state
Good post Debby
What a beautiful commentary on life as he lived and knew it. I read it thinking he might have been on my family tree, then I read he came from Georgia. My family came from South Carolina. My loss. Thank you for making it available to your readers.
Most enjoyable
My home state
Loved reading this story! “Sweet Home Alabama.”
The meddling of the Presidents woman! Great story.
I found this really annoying and condescending. The person who wrote it is obviously literate so why do the ridiculous spelling? It could be really charming and informative.
Hannah Harman Brown The writer wrote it the way they talked at the time. No offense was intended, that was just the way it was. When I was younger a lot of people still used the same words in the story.
Hannah Harman Brown went right over your head
It was inconsistent. Some of it was standard English. I am
old enough to have heard many people speak that way, which is one of the reasons I found it so condescending.
Jill Hagood on the contrary. My point by clearly went right over your head. I found the content charming . My complaint was with the way in which it was delivered. It was contrived and awkward because of its inconsistency.
Hannah Harman Brown I agree, I couldn’t bare to read past a couple paragraphs. Writer should have written in proper English, if I was interviewing a person who carried an Ebonics style accent I wouldn’t purposely misspell words so that the reader had to read them that way.
This was great!!!!
Dean Carroll – read
WPA writers were employed to capture the American way of life and dialect of various people they interviewed. Words were misspelled to try to capture the dialect.
The life history interviews were conducted before the days of tape recorders, so the stories had to be reconstructed from notes and memory. Federal Writers were encouraged to listen for characteristic speech patterns and vernacular language. Words were spelled phonetically to try to capture the dialect. This beautiful dialect is disappearing now so I am glad they at least made an attempt to save it.
This kind of misspelling is patronising, and makes things difficult to read. The other way round, a dialect speaker misspelling a speaker of standard English, can have (in small doses) a comic effect.
I loved it. I’m one of the valley girls but my husband’s people have been from the mountain for generations. Many still use the old dialects. My husband’s daddy used the term “Georgy” for Georgia. Dialects have always held a facination for me and a mirror of a culture and its people. One must also realize that these wonderful regional dialects are disappearing into history..I’ve seen evidence of this in my own lifetime. Even though the article may have been a tad inconsistant,it still gave us a good example of patterns of speech that were used then as well as today.
Mountain folks got it…
I truly enjoyed reading this. Had the writer written this story with proper grammar, it wouldn’t be the same. For this time period, proper grammar would not reflect the annunciation used. In my memories, I can still hear my great-grandfather call my name, “Lindy”.
#NotAshamed
#MissingAlabamaDirtRoadsAndWoods
#MissingTheGreatestGenerationEver
and my Grandfather called m “Wander” or “sister” .. love that I have that memory!
Johnny Stowe, thought you’d enjoy this.