These songs and stories depict a broader, more general South rather than engaging in hyperlocal storytelling, which demonstrates how the merciful lie is a regional response to personal dissatisfaction, trauma, and hard times. 4 Notably, Timberg relates Hood’s songwriting to authors and artists from across the South, which I continue in this article by reading “Mercy Buckets” alongside works by Lewis Nordan, Dorothy Allison, and Jason Michael Carroll. Cash, and the southern novelists he read as a kid.” 3 Timberg links history, songwriting, and fiction to show how Hood fits into the region’s tradition of cultural observation and interpretation. Scott Timberg demonstrates this range in the Los Angeles Review of Books when he characterizes Hood as “one of the sharpest observers of southern culture and society since C. The texts investigated in this essay respond to a more self-consciously pluralistic cultural moment than those mid-century epigraphs do, so it follows that interpreters of southern history work across media and within multiple genres. In this article, I investigate a strand of southern storytelling that pretends the truth of an acknowledged lie. The speaker of Jimmy Work’s 1955 country standard “Making Believe” also hopes for something better and, like “Mercy Buckets,” this song refers to the personal struggles that cause him to retell his past and rewrite the future. As seen in the epigraph, for instance, the grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” tells a story that she knows to be a lie, expressing a desire for a different type of history. In so doing, he displays a crafty wishfulness that the song shares with a long history of southern cultural production. Drive-By Truckers thus construct a mostly merciful South based in compassionate kindness for people who are struggling in one way or another: “When you’re down and out, I’ll pick you up down at the station / Give your hard times some vacation / And get you headed on your way.” 2 Hood thus reimagines southern cultural history by combining the song’s rewording of the French phrase with his own storyteller’s wink. Hood’s notion of mercy depends on everyday kindnesses, such as a chat, some cash, or a ride home. Instead, songwriter and lead singer Patterson Hood takes the phrase seriously, explaining just what it would mean if bringing someone “buckets of mercy” were a recognized part of southern culture. As might be expected, however, DBT do not reinforce stereotypical notions of the ignorant southern redneck. – Jimmy Work, “Making Believe” 1Introductionĭuring World War II, GIs began saying “mercy buckets” as an intentional, joking mispronunciation of the French “merci beaucoup.” 1 In the 2011 song “Mercy Buckets,” the southern rock and alt-country band Drive-By Truckers rewrite the phrase’s origin by treating it as an idiom of the American South. My plans for the future will never come true – Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” “There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were.
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