Director's Column

Shortly before the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture came out in 1989, I was at home watching television one night when a National Geographic television special came on. It began something like “The Okefenokee Swamp is a giant wetlands . . . .” I scared my wife, Marie, by loudly yelling, “There’s no entry on the Okefenokee Swamp in the encyclopedia!” Yes, it’s true, articles that might have been in the volume did not make it for various reasons. Our guidelines included judicious use of individual topical entries, and our editorial team decided that if we had an entry on one particular wetlands it should be the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana. The Okefenokee is indeed mentioned in the long article on “Wetlands,” but we included no separate entry on it.

I mention this incident as a way of announcing that the Center is preparing a second edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture–and the Okefenokee will definitely be in it and with its own entry, for we have now concluded that its cultural role in literature, films, and song, as well as its environmental significance, make it worthy. Elsewhere in the Register you can read about our outstanding new managing editor, Jimmy Thomas. Jimmy was in Oxford a good while in the 1990s, as a student and familiar face working around town, but then he went to New York and became an editor there. He thus brings to his new position maturity, editorial experience, great organizational talents, first-hand knowledge of Southern culture, and an engaging way in working with people. During one week in September he sent out over 200 e-mail messages to remind contributors that were in need of pledged articles.

We are producing the second edition in a new format, a series of paperback volumes that will take the 24 original sections of the book and make separate individual books, combining some sections together into one volume and adding new volumes on such topics as Foodways and Folk Art. We are reconceptualizing the Black Life section into a new one called Race, and the Women’s Life section will become Gender—both decisions reflecting changes in scholarship since the encyclopedia first appeared.

Some changes in the second edition will reflect changes in the South itself. Few of us were talking about globalization in the 1980s, but it is now a common term in discussions of the contemporary South. We are adding several entries on globalization to track its significance. The South has become the center of new automobile manufacturing, and an entry will cover that important change. The South has become a prime region for new immigration, and we are dramatically expanding the Ethnicity section to reflect the understanding of that topic’s central importance to not just the recent South but in earlier Southern history as well.

The new edition of the encyclopedia will note the recent passing of two giants of Southern music. Sam Phillips, who died in July, and Johnny Cash, who passed away in September, were linked by their early years on the Memphis musical stage in the 1950s. Phillips founded Sun Records in a building now a National Historic Landmark and recorded such musical luminaries as Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as Cash. He sold the studio in 1969 but remained active managing the radio stations he owned in Memphis and in Alabama. The Center honored Phillips in the mid-1990s, naming him an honorary Southern Studies professor and feting him and his family with a luncheon and ceremony.

Cash was a virtual national landmark himself. His rockabilly records are classics, his television show in the early 1970s was a breakthrough conveyor of country music to the nation, and his recent recordings brought a broad new audience of young and old alike. Throughout his career, his rough-hewn style, emotional intensity, and humane championing of those in need in society helped him transcend even his musical achievements to become a true Southern icon that the world embraced.

Like so many other giants of Southern culture who have passed away recently, Cash was a tie to the earlier Depression-era South, his life stretching from the South’s worst economic times up through new prosperity. His extraordinary creativity, rooted in that older South, is now a legacy for younger Southerners to emulate and extend.

Charles Reagan Wilson