In urban areas this would indicate that the rate of dispersion would be very rapid so after two generations the culture would largely vanish unless the children actively attempt to connect to their parent’s heritage (many did and music played a role in this). In the rural counties, the culture would start to break down but not nearly as rapidly. Churches would in many or most cases remain thanks to new converts but the underlying culture gradually would shift.  The educational system also would break down the culture further as it generally represented a liberal progressive and later post-modernist perspective that actively targeted Southern culture. The end result of this is that the Black migrant culture remained and became distinctly different from Southern culture in many respects while the culture of White Southern migrants fairly rapidly broke down especially in urban areas. There were only two areas where the density of Southern White migrants was high enough to become regionally dominant, those being several counties in southwestern Ohio and the San Joaquin Valley, the southern part of the great central valley of California.(2)(1)

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Black discrimination was a serious and lingering problem in Northern and Western cities but all Southerners received some degree of resentment and hostility from the existing populations in the places they went.  This was to be expected in a tight labor market that existed during the depression. Western migrants were referred to as “Arkies” and “Okies” and generally looked down upon (3 p. 114). They typically filled low end labor intensive jobs including agricultural field hand jobs that would later come to be done primarily by immigrants but over time would advance economically.

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Southern bars and music spread Southern culture to the rest of the country. “Country” music wasn’t a specific name initially and the terms “Hillbilly” were commonly used, then “Country and Western” and finally ”Country” were arrived at to avoid calling it what it really was, which was Southern. Clyde Wilson describes the gradual acceptance and modern trends in Country music by saying, “The New York record execs first disdained it, then learned that they could make money from it, and now are in the advanced process of destroying it by their tastelessness and lack of creativity”(2). Coal miner’s Daughter Loretta Lynn from Butcher Holler, Kentucky started her music career in a lumber town in Washington State after the mine closed down. The music appealed not only to Southerners but to a much broader audience (2). In the Central Valley of California the Bakersfield style developed with artists like Buck Owens, born in Texas, Roy Clark, born in Virginia, and Merle Haggard, the Okie from Muscogee. Driving through Bakersfield today on Highway 99 there are prominent streets named after Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Bakersfield music was in most respects more truly Southern than what was coming out of Nashville having been commercialized to be made more appealing to a national audience. Some of these songs spoke specifically of the life of displaced Southerners like Dwight Yoakam’s “I Sang Dixie” which described the passing of a homesick Southern Man in Los Angeles lamenting “what life here has done to me”.

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Black communities also developed music that changed history. The Motown sound and the performers that made it generally came directly out of churches and Gospel music. Like Southern or Country Music, it spread not just to the Southern audiences but across the nation and internationally. Prior to specialization of musical genres on the radio in the 1970’s it was common to hear both these styles played on the same stations especially in rural areas. The blending of different styles of Southern music created Rock and Roll.

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As a final point on Southern migration there are a number of misconceptions that have been propagated in popular history that, as usual, are useful to the progressive left and demeaning to Southerners and Southern culture. One of the worst race riots in American history was in Detroit in 1919 leaving 38 people dead. The Northern press at the time blamed the riot on blacks. Later interpretations have tried to associate the conflict with Southern white migrants and, while it’s impossible to account for the origins of hundreds or thousands of people involved in a riot, the location and circumstances of the riot align with the existing northern white population of the area.  As addressed in an earlier section, the 2nd Coming of the Klan in the 1910’s and 20’s was principally anti-Cahtolic and anti-Jewish and Klansmen in the North were overwhelmingly from the North appealing to Yankee Nativist beliefs. This was primarily a Northern movement with some Southern symbolism (2).  A violent Klan offshoot, the Black Legion, committed murders and other crimes in Michigan and Ohio.  A subsequent investigation determined that 64 law enforcement officials were involved with this group (2) and they weren’t Southern immigrants. The Northern white population committed many acts of violence against the black immigrants including lynchings and several of these atrocities were captured in photographs. By the 1940’s with the New Dealers in charge, a race related riot in Chicago in 1943 was portrayed in the media as being caused by white Southerners who brought their evil ways with them but this also proved to be untrue (1 pp. 120-22) and was tied principally to local housing policies. Steinbeck’s renowned and Socialist leaning book of the dust bowl and depression, The Grapes of Wrath depicts demeaned Southern farmers migrating to California as marginally human victims in need of a government savior. These immigrants adapted and took care of themselves and tried to present themselves not as desperately poor but independent and able to fend for themselves. Southerners are sometimes depicted as being lazy and poor workers but this also wasn’t true. Employers frequently sought out Southern employees and recruited extended family members.  When the Civil Rights Movement took shape In the 1940’s and 50’s the press ignored anti-discrimination protests in the north and didn’t focus on the issue until the Civil Rights movement moved to the South in the 1960’s (2).

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There were also migrations during this period of two other notable protestant ethno-religious groups. One was the Mormons who established themselves not just in Utah but also throughout the West and have continued to have a slow but steady growth rate. They were dominant, however, only in one state and influential as a group arguably in a few western states with smaller populations. The second group were the Lutherans from the Dakotas, Minnesota, and to a lesser degree other Midwest states. Lutherans largely formed into two groups.  The Germans largely aligned with the Missouri Synod which was very orthodox and conservative. The Scandinavian Lutherans associated themselves for the most part with other synods that were more inclined to modernization and secularization. Both groups urbanized moving towards larger Midwest cities and to the West. The Missouri Synod churches grew and established school systems extending through college that have thrived. The other more liberal Lutheran groups established many smaller churches that also functioned as cultural centers but after a couple generations, these generally closed for lack of membership or merged with other groups.

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Below are a few songs of the Southern Migration:

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