John Shelton Reed Quotations

As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South.

Country music historically has been sort of middle-aged people's music.

I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.

The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?

Southerners smile more than other Americans.

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.

I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.

I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.