Southern Women and Our Words on Southern Nights

Although I was born in Texas and am geographically considered a natural-born Southern woman, I came from a mixed marriage between a Yankee and a Southerner. It never bothered me that I didn’t seem to have a Southern accent (unless various phrases and words I used gave me a distinctive speech pattern), as I am who I am like everyone else is who they are. We all speak based on who all we grew up around, who we heard speaking to us, reinforcing our understanding by loving intonations of various words being said and our learning to pronounce them similarly. When in Rome, and all…

Growing up in San Antonio, I remember the newscasters had what was then called Midwestern voices, where you weren’t going to hear any harsh northern pronunciations or any southern lilts in the words as they were read off the teleprompters. As I grew, I remember Mom saying that “the more Midwest you sound, the higher your salary would be on TV.” Never had I contemplated being a TV newscaster; however, random facts, once known as flotsam and jetsam, stayed safely in my brain for future recall at the strangest times. My high school class of 21 people was diverse but with few exceptions, I don’t recall deep southern accents spoken by my classmates, so I never gave it much thought.

Once I arrived at Texas A&M for school, though, I was certainly in for a shock. My freshman math class the first summer (nerd alert: takes a calculus class in the summer) was a wakeup call. Our teacher was fresh out of college and the only language he spoke as a grad student was Math. He was from Dallas but for all the words he said, it was blahblahblah Math. So, there were lots of questions from my fellow students.

I listened interestedly as students from all over the state posed their questions. Intonations, rate of speaking, and numbers of syllables in words once familiar were puzzling. Where were these people from? There was one fellow named Max who asked a question of the prof: “In equazhun three, you have some pa-ren-tha-seas there and I cain’t figger out wazzup they’re.” I was stunned, and then immediately sympathetic. I was sure he had a speech impediment. My heart was opened, and I thought about how brave he was to ask his question.

The prof couldn’t quite determine how to answer his question, and so the guy next to Max decided to help out. When “Jerry” asked the question, I swear he sounded exactly like Max! The words he spoke and how he spoke them blew my mind. There were two of them! Oh, bless their hearts. God love ‘em. How brave they were!

After class I went up and smiled and asked, “Where y’all from?” having fallen gently into the pattern of Texan talk. One smiled back and said, “Monahans.” From the blank look on my face, Max said, “It’s not too far from Odessa.” Ah, I made the connection and smiled. They didn’t have any speech impediments! They were from West Texas! I was the one with the impediment…in my brain. Clearly I’d grown up in the big city and was limited to observing Texas accents on television, many spoken by actors from New York and California. Oh well. That was my first memory of what it was like to be a true Texan, from the south, or any other distinctive quality about the world of the Texas Aggies I would ultimately enter and remain in for the rest of my academic career.

In my childhood, I enjoyed doing voices of various TV characters that amused me, and the wilder the better. In my repertoire was when Cher played the lady in the laundromat, Laverne Lashinski, whose gum-snapping witticisms and hand waves (punctuated with “Oh honey, let me tell you!”) were filled with a tinge of naughtiness, her cat-eye glasses perched at the end of her nose, and a leopard-skin costume collection that Bob Mackie outdid himself to produce. I had Laverne down cold.

Same with Carol Burnett’s Stella Toddler (“Please don’t hurt me!”). There's no question that Carol's voices made the character but there's also no question that Bob Mackie's costume designs brought those characters to life!

Her Mrs. Wiggins was another favorite of mine. Before classes started in the mornings, many of us would sit around the cafeteria and chat about what was on TV the night before. The sketches known as “The Family” produced the greatest memories and giggles. I had Eunice Higgins to a ‘T’ and could switch in and out of Eunice and Vicki Lawrence’s “Mother Harper” (Thelma) seamlessly.

Other people play piano concertos from memory…I remember things that make me laugh. Oh well. Another product of my wildly misspent youth in the school library.

My repertoire grew to include Cher’s “Sadie” and my poor victim as the preacher was my dear friend Bobby, whose stalwart patience for my routines was my home base.

I started a list of phrases I’d never heard growing up, but that I heard regularly here as I “grew up” in my years of studying at A&M. An early favorite came from someone whose name escapes me, but she used to say, “I hear tell that….” Meaning someone had told her and now she was telling me. I thought that was adorable!

I did have one southern expression down cold, though: "Lick of sense." When I was 10 years old, I heard that phrase in Bobbi Gentry’s song, “Ode to Billy Joe.” You know, “It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, delta dayyyyy.” Yeah, that one. Anyway you go on into the song and there was a phrase, “Well, Billy Joe never had a liquorsince, pass the biscuits pleaseeee.” I remember my sweet neighbor Susan’s mom, Dolores, driving me to the dentist appointment one summer day while Mom was at work and that song came on the radio.

I asked Dolores, a true Southern girl, what she was singing, and she said, “Oh you know, a lickofsense” and I said, “No, I’ve never heard that. What is she singing?” “Lickofsenselickofsense.” By the confusion on my brow, she said, “He was slow, he didn’t have one bit of common sense about him.” Oh. OH. OHhhhhhh! Finally, breakthrough. Thank goodness for Dolores, because Mama didn’t have a clue what Bobbi Gentry was singing either!

Another favorite expression came from my adoptive grandma, aka MamMaw, who’d call me sometimes at 8:30 am if she had a question, and my late-night study hours were happening while she was fast asleep. If I sounded the least bit groggy, she’d ask, “Are you still laying up in the bed?” and I’d truthfully reply, “Yes, ma’am!” and she’d giggle and say, “It’s long past when you should have gotten up, so get going, girl!” and I’d promise her I would.

It was lovely to hear MamMaw's voice, even if it was to wake me up. She was the same MamMaw who insisted, 20 years later, that I call her when I drove back into town from Houston on business and had arrived home safely. I was in my 40s but I loved the fact that she made me call her to let her know I was safe. That was love. That was MamMaw. She wasn’t my blood relative, by the way. We adopted each other, thanks to her daughter-in-law and son who shared her very sweetly. I’ll have more to say on shared family later.

Another favorite expression I learned was “Momandem” and virtually all of you know instantly that you are reading the words “Mom and all of them” (in the family). When someone inquires about your well-being here, being polite Southerners they are all-inclusive, so they say “How are Momandem?” and you answer, “We are all doing well, thank you!” Or, if someone’s doing poorly, you break out that information at that time, too.

Sweet tea. Um. Is there any other kind? Oh yeah, unsweet tea. It’s when you grow up without sweet tea, you get started out on the wrong road of sipping brown water with virtually no flavor. Southern women make sweet tea, and if you’re fortunate enough, you learn exactly the right way to make it. Boil your water, get out your favorite tea bags (and that is a topic until itself…Lipton, Luzianne, Bigelow…. For another time), and steep them for a good while, then while your brew is still hot as a pistol, you open up a 5-lb bag of sugar and start slowly stirring your concoction. The more seasoned the cook, the more automatic the process, but the end product is worth it.

Homemade sweet tea is to die for. It’s basically a food group and if you have that and just a little of anything else, you’re all set! Through the years, I have been an iced tea afficionado, preferring this nectar to any soft drink by far. I will have much to say about iced tea in another post, but back to southerners and our tea. It’s just “home” for me. I’m not alone. I had to learn temperance, or unsweetened tea, for as much as I consume, but a little discipline is good for you. I call it going off the wagon when I drink the fully uncut sweet tea, but most of my favorite places offer “half and half” tea regularly on their menus. Pretty sure you won’t find that up north at the drive-thrus. I have lots more to say about drive-thru iced teas, for another time (Hint: HTeaO).

Kona — Okay, this one escaped me for a long time as several of my friends said that was where they were going to be and we could meet up there. I hid my ignorance on that one for years and just tried to find a friend to go with me so I wouldn’t be alone to guess where the kona was. Until I meet sweet Nita. Nita was a true Southern girl and she spoke so slowly but sweetly that you didn’t mind waiting for her to finish her sentence, but it was definitely slower than my usual motormouth pace.

Nita said that word first, in my memory, “kona,” when she described an intersection of two blocks and a store there. It didn’t register what she meant because I knew the store’s name. Finally, it was when my buddy Harold Presley was on the radio, playing Lou Vega’s “Mambo No. 5” one day, out of the blue it hit me….”Down to the kona”…..I heard it again!

“One, two, three, four five Everybody in the car, so come on, let’s ride To the liquor store around the corner…”

Bingo! You’d have thought I was Thomas Edison seeing the light bulb work for the first time, haha. My ear became better tuned. I just loved it when Nita said “corner.” Every time I hear “Mambo No. 5” now, I think of Nita, and smile.

I suppose it all “took,” my ear and new education in language skills after a long stretch of time living here.Just ask my friend Patti. When I see her number come up on my phone, I’m known to answer with a rather raucous response, “WAZZZUPPPP” to which she will reply (unless it’s business) with an equally splendiferous response and when we stop laughing, we begin to talk.

When I talk to my friends in Chicago, they tease me about my southern accent and yet, I swear up and down I don’t have one, unless it’s on purpose and for a character voice I’m doing…but we all fall into a groove that we love with and for the people we love, and we just tend to all blend in.

Oh, were that so...beyond simple speech patterns, the ability to blend. And that we could extend and expand that to better understanding of different points of view on various subjects…explored with interest rather than fear…with curiosity rather than concern…with respect rather than righteousness…as my dear brother from another mother, RC, would say, “I know that’s right!”

In the days to come maybe we can all take a page from TAMU Interim President Mark A. Welsh III’s playbook on listening…the more closely we listen to one another, and our hearts, the better we can hear what we are all saying, and welcome new ideas and thoughts different from ours without jumping to approve or disapprove. Just listen. It all begins with one person…no one person is as smart as all of us…my profs at A&M used to share that message with me all the time…back in the day.

Bidding you a good, southern night.

Cher at 75 — When You Only Need One Name

In the past 75 years, Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere Bono Allman has had a longer-lasting career than most of her contemporaries. One would have to go back as far as Buddy Ebsen to find a versatile entertainer of the same longevity and versatility across TV, film, stage, and music. Then, there’s Dolly Parton, whose endless talent makes for an enduring career in music and film, not to mention substantial philanthropy in her hometown.

Anyone born in the 1950s has likely heard of Cher, the singer/actress/entertainer whose impact on the music, stage, and movie worlds spans at least one major radio hit for every decade in which she was been a working entertainer.

There are just a handful of performers who are identifiable by just their first name alone—Cher, Dolly, and Oprah to name a few.

Cher is in an illustrious group of performers who have won all but one of the EGOT quadfecta (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony). All she needs is the Tony to join the 16 people who have won all four awards. This group includes: Julie Andrews, Mel Brooks, Common, Viola Davis, Dick Van Dyke, Audrey Hepburn, Helen Mirren, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rita Moreno, Lily Tomlin, and Kate Winslet.

The singer whom people have enjoyed mocking at times yet whose fan base carries greater longevity than some of those mockers have been alive has been nominated for seven Grammys and the winner of one. Who’s laughing now?

Her first Grammy nomination was in 1965 for best new artist. Six years later, she was nominated for Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” and best Pop Vocal Performance by a duo, group, or chorus for the single, “All I Ever Need is You” in 1971, and the Record “Believe” was nominated for Record of the Year, Pop Vocal Album of the Year, and Dance Recording of the Year in 1999, winning for Dance Recording. In 2003 she was nominated again for Best Dance Recording for “Love One Another.”

With just the single “Believe,” Cher set records that were listed compiled in a 2020 article by Rhino Records:

“Oldest Female Artist to Achieve #1 hit on Billboard Hot 100

Solo Artist with longest time span between #1 hits (1974’s “Dark Lady”)

Longest gap between first #1 song (“I Got You Babe”) and 1999’s “Believe”

#1 on both 1999 Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Dance Club Play charts

#1 for seven weeks in the UK (won three Ivor Novello Awards—Best Selling UK Single, Best Song Musically and Lyrically, and International Hit of the Year)

First female solo single to be certified Triple Platinum in the UK (2014).

Now we’re in the new 2020 decade, surely Cher has one more Billboard charting hit awaiting her. No matter, Happy 75th birthday, Cher! You continue to set the bar higher for those who are on their journey now. Keep rocking, girl!

Then there is the entirely noncompetitive yet valid competition she won hands down every time—most unique style in the room, any room. Over the years she was on television and at awards shows, it was designed brilliantly by Bob Mackie.

Every key photographer in the country, Richard Avedon, Annie Liebowitz, Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh, and so many others captured her essence for just a moment through their lenses to last through seven decades of people discovering her talent.

For a young girl who grew up disconnected from others thanks to dyslexia, she managed to complete tenth grade before busting out of the doors. She found herself dealing with the fears and pleadings of her somewhat jealous mother, whose ego and beauty once reigned prominently under the same cameras her daughter would be destined for. Cher loved her through it all–eventually as she understood what it was like for women to prevail in a field that finds few friends when you look left and right.

At the end of the day, on this 75th anniversary of her birth, Cher still doesn’t take herself too seriously. The forthright, blunt, surprising, creative, stubborn, kind performer has left at least one legacy as a given long before she is past her age of entertaining audiences.

Personally, I’ll just wait for the next Farewell Concert Tour— I always love attending those. You can’t keep a good girl down. Happy Birthday, Cher, and thank you for all the entertainment that made life just a bit better for your gifts and talents.

A favorite painting of Cher: (Artist M. Fitzgerald)

Musician, Blues Guitarist and “Rock Star” Gregg Allman Dead at Age 69

The inevitable passing of Gregg Allman on May 27th was coming; we all knew it. From tour cancellations to invasive music gossip, Gregg Allman’s body was shutting down, even when his heart for the music that kept him alive kept going. The impact of his life and career spanned one of the broadest ranges of people from all walks of life.

Photo credit: alchetron.com

As young man born in Nashville but growing up in Daytona Beach together with his brother Duane, as legend went, both were all-A students who also played football. Bright futures ahead of them, right? Maybe they’d go on to be doctors or lawyers, or—if they were very lucky—they’d grow up to be world-class musicians, beloved across five decades.

Music historians know all the details about Gregg’s and Duane’s life growing up, they know every song on every album and the inspiration behind so many of the songs. Many will undoubtedly be impacted by Gregg’s death as they fervently search for words to say what he and his music meant in their worlds. They are the experts, most qualified to speak to Gregg’s career and work. On the audience side of the music, however, southern rock is surely as popular as it remains today, in large measure on the shoulders of their earliest work. Any music lover who grew up in the 60s and 70s surely has at least three (or more) Allman Brothers’ albums in their collections.

It’s too simplistic to say that, in his lifetime, Duane was a first-call studio guitarist and touring great before a motorcycle accident would take his life. Gregg, the one left behind, grew to became a standout singer, organist, guitarist, and songwriter of rock classics. Neither of the brothers would choose a smooth path to fame.

Early successes in minor bands taught them the joys and benefits of touring (groupies, drugs, and unparalleled excess). A CNN report today quoted Gregg as saying, “My generation were heavy drug users,” Gregg Allman told the Daily Telegraph in 2011. “We didn’t know no different, we didn’t know no other way.” In an early interview, Gregg's plan, having lost his father at age 2, he and Duane were raised by their mother Geraldine ("Mama A"), was to graduate high school, play in bands for a few years to get it out of his system, and probably go to medical school to become a doctor. If he'd have put his mind to it, he could have been a great doctor.

The Allmans started their careers the exact same way as anyone else—playing in high school bands, and all the early versions of what would ultimately become The Allman Brothers Band. With each different band experience, they’d pick up musicians who’d ultimately join them for the rest of their music lives, three of whom were Butch Trucks, Dickey Betts, and Berry Oakley. Sadly, Oakley didn’t much outlive Duane, which takes us back to the life and living of The Allman Brothers Band.

Their 1969 self-titled debut album didn’t take the country by storm but it did increase their touring stock in the south. On “The Allman Brothers Album,” two of the best-known songs were “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” and “Whipping Post” and was classified as Blues and Southern rock.

“Idlewild South” (1970) contained three of my favorites of theirs: instrumentals “Revival,” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Midnight Rider.”

Gregg wrote the song with help on lyrics from roadie Robert Kim Payne. Gregg’s voice didn’t help put “Midnight Rider” over the top anywhere for years, but others had greater success with the song and it was covered or recorded by everyone from Joe Cocker to Michael McDonald to Hank Williams, Jr. to Alison Krauss. Today it’s known as “The Allman Brothers Band’s most covered song.”

Historians recall that between 1971-1972, the “Eat a Peach” time frame, Duane, Berry Oakley and roadies Robert Payne and Red Dog Campbell entered rehab simultaneously for heroin addictions. And then on October 29, 1971, Duane died in Macon, Georgia in a motorcycle accident. Bandmate Oakley would die a year later, November 11, 1972, in a motorcycle accident, “three blocks from where Duane had his fatal accident.” The band members are “buried directly beside each other at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia.”

Their 1971 live album, “At Fillmore East,” featured “Statesboro Blues,” “Hot ‘Lanta” and “Stormy Monday” and the album would ultimately be inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 1999. Two primary musical forces wouldn’t live to enjoy a career or the fame that would follow them the next four decades.

Skipping ahead to 1974, the music of the Allman Brothers flourished on the strength of the writing and playing of guitarist Dickey Betts and Gregg Allman. Betts often is identified as the glue that kept Gregg, and the band, moving forward after sustaining two losses.

In an entirely strange tangent straight out of Hollywood, newly named Billboard icon, Cher, divorced Sonny Bono and began dating Gregg. Meantime, Cher’s personal assistant and lifetime best friend, Paulette Eghiazarian began dating Dickey Betts. The story in a May 1977 People Magazine issue provides interesting backstory, if not the trials and tribulations of the Cher-Gregg-Paulette-Dickey tandem. Lots of screaming, yelling, men behaving badly, and southern rock going on.

If memory serves, at the time Cher became mesmerized by the intelligence and strong silent type that Gregg presented, I used to wonder what in the world she saw in Gregg. He mumbled, he shuffled, and he only seemed to show signs of life when on stage. Otherwise he was brooding. Guess she set her criteria as being “as far away from Sonny as you could get.” Mission accomplished.

Cher used to tell the story on numerous talk shows that on their first date, Gregg came over and thought he was “in for the evening” and proceeded to remove his cowboy boots to become more comfortable. Cher being Cher, never at the loss for words, she proceeded to cuss Gregg out, insisted he put his boots on and get out of her house. He did.

Ultimately, he proceeded to “court her” properly, to Cher’s satisfaction, if not amusement. Cher married “Southern gentleman” Gregg about three weeks after her divorce from was finalized and Paulette married Dickey. Betts’ compositions did carry the band forward, particularly on the strength of “Southbound,” “Ramblin’ Man” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” essentially the core of the 1976 “Wipe the Windows, Check the Oil, Dollar Gas” album.

Cher and Gregg photo from Pinterest; Dickey and Paulette photo from JVB Photography, Pinterest

Both strong women were credited for bringing the southern wild men out of a self-destructive path and into some kind of calm, for however long it lasted. Before they broke up for the final time, Cher gave birth to a child with Gregg, Elijah Blue, who began touring with Gregg almost as soon as he was old enough to do so. Elijah is one of Gregg’s five children he leaves behind.

Elijah Allman image from Heavy.

Son Devon Allman founded the band Honeytribe; he’s co-leader of the Royal Southern Brotherhood band as well as a solo artist.

Robert Randolph and Devon Allman; Photo Credit: Getty Images

Daughters Delilah Island Kurtom and Layla Brooklyn Allman survive him, as does eldest son, Michael Sean Allman, who is virtually his image remade.

Of his five children, “four are professional musicians (Delilah is not).” Gregg was also survived by his wife, Shannon.

All the love, the romances, the marriages, and the throes of “normal daily life” weren’t sufficient to keep Gregg away from the music business or the temptations of the weariness that comes from perpetual road tours.

Gregg Allmann Photo credit: Getty image

Ultimately, drug abuse and attempts at rehab put his body through a lot of torture, but the music kept him going. Although Gregg’s appearance at the end of his life showed a shell of the once robust man who loved making music, the point was you just couldn’t keep him off the road; he attributed the band’s success to the faithfulness of the fans.

In all, The Allman Brothers band featured 19 members; they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995; “Rolling Stone ranked them 52nd on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2004,” and they received seven gold and four platinum albums out of their 18 releases—live and studio recordings. The band made household names of Jaimoe Johanson, Butch Trucks (later Derek Trucks), Chuck Leavell, in addition to Duane, Gregg, and Dickey and others who true fans can name without thinking. The number of living legends we’ve lost, as those of us who “grew up together” with the household names of rock and blues know well, has just increased by one today.

The song for the final ride home tonight, if I get to pick just one, is from 1973: “Will the Circle be Unbroken”

and the matching version from 2014, as Gregg was surrounded by a “few friends.”

Rest in peace, at last, Gregg, and thanks for all your music.

Photo from Allman Brothers Twitter page