Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies,
and Bluetick Hounds
Southern Culture Quiz
Book Published

I confess. I could not have come up with a recipe for preparing pork fries. Worse yet, I didn't even know where they fit in Southern cuisine. Not until, that is, I read Lisa Howorth's Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies, and Bluetick Hounds: The Official "Encyclopedia of Southern Culture" Quiz Book.

Perhaps those of us who have long toiled in the vineyards of Southern cultural studies should be expected to know such details as pork fries, but alas, the flesh is weak. My flesh had never experienced nor even had the occasion to research those delicacies from the King Hog Files. Howorth's book is filled with such intriguing information (see the Manners, Myth, and Religion section, question 160 for that pork fries recipe).

The tome, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, provided the beginning place for the questions and answers that make up this fact-filled book. Howorth had the good sense to condense the Encyclopedia's 24 sections into eight major categories: Manners, Myth, and Religion (her favorite, I think); Music and Entertainment; Literature; Science; Medicine, Business, and Industry; Art and Architecture; Sports and Recreation; The Land; and History, Politics, and Law.

This book is downright useful, a handy guide to factual information. It might have been subtitled "Essential Facts of Southern Culture." All of us need to know what the Father of Waters is, where the Vieux Carre' is, who the first Southern football player to be named All American was, what the tragedy of the Trail of Tears was all about, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is.

But Lisa Howorth has created an engaging book that goes beyond the useful. Her Preface is a well-written, sparkling little essay that outlines her view of studying the South. "Being Southern is a state of mind, not an IQ test," she writes, "and with a guide like this, it might could be learned by anyone who is not, by the grace of God, born southern." She talks the language and is in the spirit, too.

In explaining the book's distinctive focus, Howorth notes that the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, overruled her choice of a title, "Head Full of Trash." "Vengeance is mine," saith Howorth, and her book reflects that funky, clever, very Southern concept. "I admit it; my head is hopelessly full of trash, both schoolbook-variety and tabloidesque," she confesses, pointing out that anything important about any culture is going to be revealed in its trash. This archeologist of the Southern fact has burrowed deep in our collective regional trash pile, emerging with the nuggets worth preserving.

So, if you want to know about grabbling, where the most cockroach-infested house is located, who the Million Dollar Quartet was, or the answers to over 800 questions to sharpen your knowledge and understanding of the South, I recommend Yellow Dogs. If you want your interest piqued by odd and intriguing facts, this is your book.

Lisa Howorth's training as a librarian is reflected in the soundness and reliability of Yellow Dogs as a source book. Her curiosity, wit, and irreverence unify this book and make it fun, too. It could be the planning manual for a Southern trivia contest, and Lisa Howorth would be the Queen of the Southern Trivia Hop.

Charles Reagan Wilson

Photograph of Jennifer Bryant and Lisa Howorth, compilers of Yellow Dogs by Robert Jordan.