John Shelton Reed’s Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South is a 1990 collection of short essays previously published over roughly the decade prior. Most of these essays were originally published in Chronicles, a conservative magazine of the Pat Buchanan variety. Reed clumps his essays into six groups of ten or so, organized sort of thematically: “The Southern Nation” looks at southern identity and “The New South” at developments in southern life like economic change or migration. “Southern Culture” is self-explanatory. “Hot Flashes” collects some regional round-ups, of the a-local-newspaper-reports-this-charming-or-wacky-happening sort. “Public Life and Public Policy” by and large deals with politics, nationally and in the South. The last section, “Views from the Lower Right,” is a hodgepodge which defies organizational description—a mostly positive essay about Bob Jones University is followed by a somber discussion of the suicide of a Marxist with whom Reed attended school, which is followed by a consideration of contemporary Protestant denominations and why Reed remains an Episcopalian.

All of this barely hangs together as a book, which Reed more or less admits in the preface. “Why would people want to read these?” Reed asks in his introduction, “Beats me, but I’ll tell you why they should” (xii, emphasis in the original). Contrary to popular belief that the United States is homogenizing, Reed argued in 1990, “good-sized regional differences in this country” remain and even in some cases are getting larger (xii). Reed, then, is writing to emphasize that at least one Southern perspective (his own) exists distinct from a national or non-southern regional perspective and how it reflects the South from which he comes—a perspective, presumably, that could not be held by someone from Idaho or Maine. If Whistling Dixie has a through line, it’s a rejection of the idea that the South is no longer a distinctive region, making the case for a continuity of Southernness.

But what is that South? Who is included, and how is membership defined? Much of it, for Reed, is about food (something that has become more pronounced recently; most of Reed’s books since his retirement from academia in 2000 are about food and drink), particularly barbecue. Four straight essays (“The Garden of Eatin’,” “Hey, Good-lookin’, Whatcha Got Cookin’?” “Through the Stomach to the Heart of Dixie,” and “Thank You for Smoking”) are reviews of cookbooks or books about Southern cuisine. Tobacco use, gun ownership (and a willingness to use those guns), certain types of Protestant Christianity, and country music are other indicators of Southern identity.

The best pages of the book, to this reviewer, make up a pair of essays about popular Southern magazines. “Editing the South” provides a brief overview of a few Southern magazines and how they reflect different beliefs and narratives of Southern identity. Some of these are for upper-class white Southerners or people who aspire to be (like Southern Living and Southern Bride), while others (Southern Guns & Shooter and Southern Partisan) aim at a different, less-reconstructed crowd still worried about Yankees coming down and taking away their guns. “Editing the South: The Final Chapter” is focused specifically on Southern Living and its sort-of rivalry with the short-lived Southern magazine. Southern appealed to a younger, broader crowd; rather than take it on directly or start a competing magazine, Southern Living bought out majority ownership in Southern and replaced it with Southpoint: The Metropolitan Monthly, which ended up folding—in Reed’s opinion, because it failed to understand and embrace its own Southern identity, as demonstrated by moving its headquarters from Little Rock to Atlanta.

Whistling Dixie suggests that Reed is less interested in sports, especially college sports, than one might expect for an observer and analyst of Southern identity and culture. Stock car racing gets a couple of off-hand references, and professional wrestling (which, while not exclusively a Southern sport, has had a tremendous southern influence and popularity) is absent. The one essay about sports, titled “Bad Sports,” is mostly complaining about Southerners taking college sports too seriously and the variety of cheating and NCAA infractions that result. Reed devotes just as many essays to poetry (“Poetic Gems”) as to athletics. Possibly relatedly, one essay is dedicated to rejecting “Southeastern” as a term to replace “Southern,” suggesting a disdain for perhaps the most successful emblem of Southern identity, the Southeastern Conference.  

This rejection of “southeastern” also indicates that as much as Reed emphasizes that the South is a distinct region from the United States as a whole, he is less interested in regional and cultural variety within the South. The notion that Texans might think of themselves as Westerners rather than Southerners, or that Appalachian people might imagine Lowcountry South Carolina to be as culturally distant from themselves as is central Pennsylvania, if not more so, does not interest him. The only important regional variation Whistling Dixie allows within the South involves barbecue styles. In his effort to emphasize Southern identity within the United States, Reed dismisses beliefs and narratives about separate identities within (or beyond) the South.

Much of Whistling Dixie strikes me as faintly ridiculous and, for lack of a better term, loser behavior. Reed’s comments about how it’s fine to have a Southern accent, or complaining about the Memphis airport getting rid of an announcer with too strong a Southern accent, or how in fact when one is in the South, actually we don’t have an accent, the visitor does—it’s hard to take this sort of thing seriously. Rather than arousing a sense of righteousness or Southern pride, it just inspires second-hand embarrassment, even thirty-six years after publication. The notion that Southerners are a minority group suffering from meaningful bigotry, complaining about white Southerners being cast as villains on television shows and the like, was silly and whiny in the 1980s, and it is still silly and whiny today.

Or worse. Reed makes some gestures toward including African Americans in his definition of “Southern,” and he expresses optimism that the South has finally shed its segregationist past (a celebration which seems a tad premature, looking back from 2026), but he also admires Confederate flags and the people who wear them, even as he recognizes that for some, it truly is a symbol of hatred and white supremacy. Comparing a book titled White Trash Cooking to actual racial slurs (94) is out of touch at best, suggesting a perspective that if not actively hostile to African Americans is at least mostly unconcerned with their history and contemporary circumstances. Reed wonders if “Southerners are one of those exemplary minorities—like Catholics, like Jews, like blacks, like Mormons—who ought to keep sticking their oars in” (xiii), which at least implies that Catholics, African Americans, and the rest are somehow not inherently Southern.

Reed was also displaying a very specific kind of conservative politics from the 1980s. “Real Americans don’t like Washington” (172), Reed asserts, among complaints about higher taxes, presidential libraries, seatbelt laws, smoking bans, and the like. Reed has a vaguely libertarian mindset, except when it comes to banning things he doesn’t like (like abortion and explicit art). Jesse Jackson is practically a communist, which is a problem for Reed because he sees communists as a problem, along with homosexuals, NPR correspondents, and atheists. Bob Jones University, despite having a policy against interracial relationships and which had been admitting unmarried black students for only just over a decade at the time of Reed’s essay, is explicitly “not the problem” (213).

If it isn’t clear already, I don’t go in for much of this. The best parts of Whistling Dixie are when Reed describes and analyzes Southern life and culture, often in insightful or interesting ways. But too many essays are about policing the boundaries of Southern culture, establishing what ideas and behaviors count as Southern and just as much which do not. Much of Reed’s effort at defining and defending his notion of the South here is the same as other forms of nationalism or identity-making: it is about excluding people (many of whom I would imagine as Southern or as potentially Southern) more than it is about including people.

reviewed by Charles Kenneth Roberts

Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Charles Kenneth Roberts received his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and PhD in history from the University of Alabama. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Huntingdon College.