The culture of the Southern United States, Southern culture, or Southern heritage, is a subculture of the United States. From its many cultural influences, the South developed its own customs, dialects, arts, literature, cuisine, dance, and music.Richard A. Peterson (1999-12-15). Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press. p. 9. . The combination of its history and the fact that many Southerners maintain—and even nurture—an identity separate from the rest of the country have made it one of the most studied and written-about regions of the United States.

From the 17th century until the mid-19th century, the central role of agriculture and slavery during the colonial period and antebellum era economies stratified society by land ownership. This landed gentry differentiated culture in the early Southern United States from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachians. The upland areas of the South were characterized by yeoman farmers who worked on their small landed property with few or no enslaved people, while the lower-lying elevations and Deep South were societies of more plantations worked by African slave labor. Events such as the First Great Awakening (1730s–1750s) would strengthen Protestantism in the South and United States as a whole. Communities often developed strong attachment to their churches as the primary community institution.

History

Starting in the early 1600s and lasting to the mid-1800s, slavery played an outsized role in shaping the culture, politics, and economy of the South. This included its agricultural practices, the outbreak of the American Civil War, and the imposition of racial segregation. Southern yeoman farmers, subsistence farmers who owned few or no enslaved people, comprised a large portion of the population during the colonial period and antebellum era, which settled largely in the back country and uplands. Their way of life and culture differed sharply from that of the planter class. The climate of the region is conducive to growing tobacco, cotton, and other crops, and the red clay in many areas was used for the distinctive red-brick architecture of many commercial buildings.

Southern culture was also shaped by the region's landscape and by the presence and practices of Native Americans. Events such as the First Great Awakening (1730s–1750s) boosted Protestantism in the South and United States as a whole.Great Awakening – HISTORY. Retrieved February 21, 2021. For a century and a half, the Southern United States was heavily rural; World War II launched urbanization that would lead to social and economic transformation of the South.Cobb, James C. (2011). The South and America Since World War II. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved February 21, 2021.

I had even ascribed this to it’s cause, to that warmth of their climate which unnerves and unmans both body and mind. While on this subject I will give you my idea of the characters of the several states. In the North they are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent; jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others; interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion. In the South they are fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent; zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others; generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.

These characteristics grow weaker and weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North, insomuch that an observing traveller, without the aid of the quadrant may always know his latitude by the character of the people among whom he finds himself. It is in Pennsylvania that the two characters seem to meet and blend and to form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue. Peculiar circumstances have given to New York the character which climate would have given had she been placed on the South instead of the North side of Pennsylvania. Perhaps too other circumstances may have occasioned in Virginia a transplantation of a particular vice foreign to it’s climate. You could judge of this with more impartiality than I could, and the probability is that your estimate of them is the most just. I think it for their good that the vices of their character should be pointed out to them that they may amend them; for a malady of either body or mind once known is half cured.

Thomas Jefferson

People

Anglo-Americans

In the time of their arrival, the predominant cultural influence on the Southern states was that of the English colonists who established the original English colonies in the region. In the 17th century, most were of South West England and South East England origins, from regions such as Kent, Sussex and the West Country who settled mostly on the coastal regions of the South but pushed as far inland as the Appalachian mountains by the 18th century. In the 18th century, large groups of Scots lowlanders, Northern English and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scots-Irish) (whose ancestors were Protestants from the Scottish lowlands and Northern England) settled in Appalachia and the Piedmont. Following them were larger numbers of English indentured servants from across the English Midlands and Southern England; they would be the largest group to settle in the Southern Colonies during the colonial period. They were often called "crackers", a derogatory epithet applied to rural, non-elite whites of south Georgia and north Florida.New Georgia Encyclopedia . Georgiaencyclopedia.org (2002-07-24). Retrieved on 2011-06-18. Before the American Revolution, the term was applied by the English, as a derogatory epithet for the non-elite settlers of the southern backcountry. This usage can be found in a passage from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth, "I should explain ... what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode."

Most European Southerners today are of partial or majority English and Scots-Irish ancestry.David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.633–639 In previous censuses, over a third of Southern responders identified as being of English or partly English ancestry with 19,618,370 self-identifying as "English" on the 1980 census, followed by 12,709,872 identifying as Irish, 11,054,127 as Afro-American, and 10,742,903 as German. It should also be noted that those who did identify themselves of German ancestry were almost exclusively found in the northern border areas of the region which are adjacent to the American Mid-West. Those from the Tidewater area of Virginia and the Tidewater region of North Carolina identified themselves almost exclusively as of English origins, while those from the Piedmont areas were a mixture of English, Scotch-Irish, Scottish and Irish origins. South Georgia has a large Irish presence, the ancestors of whom were largely at one time Roman Catholic; however, many were converted to various Protestant sects due to the lack of a missionary presence of the Catholic Church in the 18th and 19th centuries. The predominance of Irish surnames in South Georgia has been noted by American historians for some time. Meanwhile, a community of Scottish highlanders settled around what is now Fayetteville in North Carolina. Gaelic was spoken in this region into the nineteenth century.

People of many nationalities established communities in the American South. Some examples are the German American population of the Edwards Plateau of Texas and, whose ancestors arrived in the region in the 1840s. German cultural influence continues to be felt in cities like New Braunfels, Texas near Austin and San Antonio. Much of the population of East Texas, Louisiana, coastal Mississippi and Alabama, and Florida traces its primary ancestry to French and/or Spanish colonists of the 18th century. Also important is the French community of New Orleans dating back to the 1880s.

African Americans

Another primary population group in the South is the African American descendants of enslaved Africans.Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2005)Jacqueline Jones, Labor of love, labor of sorrow: Black women, work, and the family, from slavery to the present (2009). African Americans comprise the United States' second largest ethnic group and second-largest racial minority, accounting for 14 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census. In the South, they accounted for nearly 45% of the population from the Antebellum period through the early 20th century.

Despite Jim Crow-era outflow to the North and Midwest—the Great Migration—most of the country's Black population remains concentrated in the southern states from Virginia to Texas. Since the end of formal segregation, Black Americans have been returning to the South in large numbers—the New Great Migration.Sarah-Jane Saje Mathieu, "The African American great migration reconsidered." OAH Magazine of History 23.4 (2009): 19-23 online.

Hispanics

A sizable and growing fraction of the Southern population is Hispanic Americans, especially immigrants from Latin America countries and particularly in Texas and Florida. The Hispanic population of the South has expanded considerably in recent years, due both to natural population growth and immigration over the past half-century. Urban areas such as Atlanta, New Orleans, Charlotte, and Nashville have seen a major increase in Latino immigrants since the 1990s. Factory and agribusiness jobs have also attracted Mexican and Latin American workers to more rural regions of the South.

Religion

Part of the South is known as the "Bible Belt", because of the prevalence there of evangelical Protestantism. South Florida has a large Jewish element that migrated from New York. Immigrants from Southeast Asia and South Asia have brought Buddhism and Hinduism to the region as well."Overview: Religion and the U.S. South" . Southernspaces.org (2004-03-16). Retrieved on 2011-06-18. In the colonial period and early 19th century the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening transformed Southern religion. The evangelical religion was spread by religious revivals led by local lay Baptist ministers or itinerant Methodist ministers. They fashioned the nation's "Bible Belt."Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1998)

Protestantism After the Revolution, the Anglican Church of England was disestablished (meaning it no longer received local tax money) and reorganized as the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA. The Revolution turned more people toward Methodist and Baptist preachers in the South. The Cane Ridge Revival and subsequent "camp meetings" on the Kentucky and Tennessee frontiers were the impetus behind the Restoration Movement. Traveling preachers used music and song to convert new members. Shape-note singing became a fundamental part of camp meetings in frontier regions. In the early decades of the 18th century, the Baptists in the South reduced their challenge to class and race. Rather than pressing for freedom for slaves, they encouraged planters to improve treatment of them, and ultimately used the Bible to justify slavery.Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998