Garden & Gun has a nice article about the English-based folk/rock band Mumford and Sons. One line in particular caught my attention:
“The South is a lot like Ireland,” he says. “I have no family, no connections at all. But within a week you meet everyone’s relatives. That never happens in England.
I always hear about how "reserved" the British are, and I thought that extended to the Irish. Maybe it doesn't. I wonder if the Irish and English view each other in a similar manner that Northerners and Southerners in the USA do. If so, where does that put Scotland?
Thinking about the Irish/Southern analogy more: There's a similar history of armed conflict (that both losing sides are still somewhat sore about) and there is a similar agrarian/industrial difference. Now...we just need the Irish to dominate a sport like the SEC dominates college football, and we'll be complete. Drinking is a sport over there, right?
Read the whole article at Garden & Gun.
I recommend "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America" by David Hackett Fischer.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-Cultural/dp/0195069056/ref=la_B000AQ4LL8_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1348244751&sr=1-2
It won't answer your question directly or simply (not possible) but it will give you a starting place and a partial understanding of the mostly protestant Irish (many of them originally from Scotland) that populated parts of the South prior to 1776.
The Irish immigrants that came in the mid-1800s due to the potato famine mostly settled in northeastern cities and were mostly Catholic.
I'd loan you my copy of the book, but I've loaned it to the guy that fixes computers for me and I need to stay in his good graces right now.