 I was recently asked about the ways that Appalachian culture, with a Scots-Irish foundation, is different from lowland Southern culture, which has a more English foundation with African-American influences. I'd love to share my answer. First, the entire South has a few things in common. Unlike the industrial North that was established to be Puritan and to center around shops, factories and the sale of goods, the South was set up like English and French baronial estates. Most of the South was created to be an all-encompassing, self-sustaining series of micro-communities. There were the Lord and Lady of the manor house, and then the indoor servants, grounds keepers, farm labor, etc. They had their own church onsite, as well as their own school. They produced their own entertainment as well. This led to a very self-sustaining community view in the South, which helped give us our well-known good manners and kindness. We are used to working together, but not needing anyone or anything outside our own community. In contrast, the North needed trade and harsher manners towards others (who were your competitors instead of your community) to sustain their system. Northerners had rules that applied to everyone instead of respecting how individuals choose to run their own materials and time. The culture of each area in the South (the art, music, stories, etc.) were heavily influenced by their founding population: Scot-Irish for the Appalachias, French for the Louisiana area, English for Virginia and coastal Carolinas, Spanish and German in Texas, Spanish and Greek in Florida, etc. Geography played a role too. Most notably, in the Appalachias we did have baronial estates, but we were limited in our amount of flat land. So over the generations, families spread into the hollers and settled in more mountainous areas. This meant we became more clan-like as in Scotland. Small communities formed, mostly closely-linked family groups, living in one holler. So we became more feisty and independent than other folks in the South. Our diet changed to be what we could grow on a mountain side which was mostly corn and apples. Both crops were hard to carry down a mountain so we quickly learned it was easier and made more money to make the corn into moonshine. Selling moonshine made us more anti-authoritarian than the average Southerner. It pitted us against lawmen and drew us closer to our families than average. It also led to us developing car racing as we learning to outrun the law men while trafficking liquor. Our isolation in the Appalachias also meant we were poorer than the average Southerners and we were less dependent on slave labor - and less slaves meant less influence from slave culture. For example; think of how voodoo or rock-and-roll came from Haitian and African traditions in places like Memphis and New Orleans. We didn’t have that. We clung closer to churches, and therefore our music, until only a few decades ago, was primarily hymn-based. We had less material goods and relied more heavily on faith and family. We made our own instruments, our own crafts, and spent a long time becoming master craftsmen. (For example, some of the best furniture ever crafted came out of Southwest Virginia.) This isolation led to a very unique culture which only existed in these mountains.
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