I am a Tennessean. I spent my first eighteen years on small farms in the hill country of Middle Tennessee. They were just off the Delina Road,the first one down the hill from Ebenezer, a one-room school and a Methodist church; the last one halfway up the hill between Grab All and Gnat Grove. Grab All was a country store that had burned; Gnat Grove was a one-room school that had closed. But everyone still used those names, just as they still spoke of Cherry Corner, long after the cherry tree had toppled and been borne away.

After graduating from college, I’ve never resided in Tennessee again, but if you grow up around Ebenezer and Grab All and Gnat Grove, if you spent four years in Nashville as an undergraduate when Church Street was still the main street with all the movie theaters, when Printers’ Alley was where you went for a good stiff drink, then you will be a Tennessean for life. I still find all sorts of ways to end each day with a jigger of Jack Daniels. We’ve lived in Texas, Iowa, Missouri, and Florida, but we always make our way back to the hill country of Tennessee two or three times a year.

I try to ignore what it has come to stand for politically; I miss those small farms and the country stores and churches and one-room schools that served them. But the landscape is still Tennessee, and it’s still beautiful: those wooded hills, those fencerows overgrown with honeysuckle, those ragged fields where blackberry patches grow on rocky slopes and near creeks and gullies, those meandering rivers, the old US 70 highway, which descends from the Great Smoky Mountains in the east, winds around the Cumberland Plateau, dividing into 70N and 70S near the Highland Rim, reuniting in the Great Basin, straightening out in Nashville and heading through Jacksonville all the way to the Great Mississippi River bottomlands, right through downtown Memphis, past the Peabody Hotel where the Peabody ducks make their daily trek through the lobby.

“All Tennessee, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts.” That quoted sentence is the way mountain-woman Wilma Dykeman begins Tennessee: A History (Norton, 1975). She's referring to the mountains of East Tennessee, the hill country and the Great Basin of Middle Tennessee, the flat cotton country and river delta of West Tennessee.

The photograph on the dust jacket saddens me, dropping me down into the depths of nostalgia, for a time long gone. It’s the work of Joe Clark, HBSS, the famous Life magazine photographer, also known for his forty years of advertisements for the Jack Daniels distillery. The photo is captioned simply, “A dirt road in Middle Tennessee”; but it’s actually an old single-lane gravel road. It goes down a hill, by an old weathered barn, past a plot of cultivated land, and off into a range of hills in the distance. It’s a fall day, rainy or misty, the few leaves remaining on the trees giving it a rusty brown hue. How well I remember those days, and the despondency they evoked even when I was a child of nine or ten.

Dykeman’s book is one of the States and the Nation series, published for the 1976 US Bicentennial in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History, curiously enough headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s a quaint and enjoyable series – little books, about 200 small pages each. The spine of each dust jacket is black with the name of the state printed in bold caps: TENNESSEE. Lined up on a shelf together, they look quite impressive; in your hand, they defy the usual expectation that history tomes will be weighty and challenging. The sizeable print, the friendly prose, the b&w photo gallery near the center of each one (this one by Joe Clark, HBSS, of course) – all these features give the series a comfortable, inviting feel.

Dykeman was a natural choice for the Tennessee volume. Her first book was The French Broad, a part of the Rivers of America series, which originated in the 1930s to celebrate American regionalism and to engage poets and novelists and essayists and journalists in writing our history, rather than professional historians. The result was a varied, readable series, which started a whole movement: American Lakes, Regions of America, American Folkways, and the like. The States and the Nation series might be thought of as the culmination of this effort, its “ave atque vale.”

Dykeman’s preface to Tennessee: A History might very well serve as the introduction to the whole series, or a critical essay on its nature. This history is not really a history, she admits: “A more accurate description might be a portrait of Tennessee” (bold face mine). She goes on:

It has seemed less important to list every well-known historic event or to name every familiar famous person than to bring to life some of those who lived well, worked hard, struggled courageously – or , on the other hand, some who brought style, dash, flavor, a special bravura to their time and place. (pxiii)

We were not born of saints; we do not descend from a race of the spotless anointed. . . . The men and women who have measured up to new needs and changing conditions within these boundaries were just that – men and women, stout and frail, honorable and venal, courageous and fearful, rendered wise by optimistic faith and pragmatic experience and knowledge of their heritage, or callous by cynicism, apathy, and greed. (pxiv)

That’s exactly what Dykeman’s book helps accomplish: a new generation of descendants knowledgeable about their Tennessee heritage. The focus is on recurrent themes, not on chronology, on attitudes and values, not on battles and bureaucracies. The first chapter is “The Place.” It characterizes Tennessee as a frontier state (still), a border state (between North and South, between East and West). a secessionist state (the Scots left the Lowlands for their Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland, then Ireland for American back country, then North Carolina for the Wautauga Association and the aborted State of Franklin, then of course the USA for the CSA).

It has been said of the Scotch-Irish that they feared God – but nothing else. They kept the Sabbath – and anything else they can get their hands on.

My father and grandfather always claimed we were of Scotch-Irish descent, though every family name for generations back was as English as English can be. Tennesseans like being Scotch-Irish, freedom-loving, proud, suspicious of overlords of every variety, loyal to family, and testy and contentious within families. One of the most fascinating and poetic passages in the book is her answer to her own question: Who is this Tennessean? She begins,

He is the exuberant warrior, John Sevier, and the peace-loving Secretary of State Cordell Hull; he is Andrew Jackson, who opened the White House to Westerners, and Andrew Johnson, who sought to return Southerners there. . . . (p18)

. . . quiet, scholarly Sequoyah, whose unique genius developed a Cherokee alphabet or syllabary and turned his people into a literate nation; and fierce Dragging Canoe, one of Tennessee’s earliest secessionists, who separated himself from the treaty-makers among his people and led an implacable band of warriors, the Chickamaugas, in the Moccasin Bend country of the Tennessee River to contest every acre of shrinking land. (p19)

Dykeman could write of all these contrasts, innovations, and tensions, for she was an independent mountain woman, who at age 35 married the heir of the Stokely-Van Camp canning company, just two months after they met. She was a novelist, a columnist for local ad city newspapers, a free-lance writer for national magazines, a public speaker giving up to 75 lectures a year, a sometime teacher at Berea College and the University of Tennessee, and a tireless worker for world peace, improved race relations, civil liberties, and the greening of French Broad country.

In this, her first chapter alone, she carries us from the twang of “Barbara Allen” to the syncopation of “Beale Street Blues”; from Sevier at Kings Mountain to Jackson at Horseshoe Bend; from the first emancipation journals in the nation to the first klavern of the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski; from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811-12 and the Reelfoot Lake it formed to secret atomic labs at Oak Ridge and the harnessed power of TVA; from Davy Crockett and his opposition to land speculators to Olympic gold medalist, Wilma Rudolph; from Adolph Ochs, whose Chattanooga Times was a forbear of the New York Times to Clarence Saunders, whose Piggly Wiggly Stores was an early version of the modern supermarket.

Her second chapter deals with the settlement of East Tennessee, especially two utopian approaches to the native tribes. The first was the monumental effort of Sir Alexander Cuming, a self-appointed ambassador of good will from the King of England to the Indian monarchy. Finding only a principal chief, he named him Emperor Moytoy of Tellico; squired a delegation to London; and created a treaty that led to lasting loyalty of the greatest Cherokee chief, Attakullakulla, or the Little Carpenter, to the British crown. The second “Kingdom of Paradise” was also situated at Tellico, with the vision of a German scholar-dreamer, Christian Gottlieb Priber, who had himself appointed secretary of state for the Great Tellico government.

The next few chapters proceed chronologically through the settlement of the territory, efforts at self-government, and finally the Civil War. The remaining chapters are topical rather than chronological: politics, religion and philosophic idealism, music and social unrest, education (of all sorts), and modern science (Oak Ridge and TVA).

Stories told in the chapter on politics, for example, include “Parson” William Gannaway Brownlow, a Methodist circuit rider who became Tennessee’s Reconstruction governor and adversary of Nathan Bedord Forest and the Ku Klux Klan; Boss Ed Crump of Memphis, head of the city machine that controlled city, county, and state politics; Estes Kefauver in his coonskin cap, campaigning successfully against Crump’s candidate in 1948 and unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1952 and 1956; and the earlier War of the Roses, a gubernatorial race pitting brothers, Democrat Robert Love Taylor and Republican Alfred A. Taylor against each other. “Tennessee has contributed both statesmen and politicians to the nation,” Dykeman concludes. “Tennessee is divided in its unity and unified in its diversity.”

The same might be said of Dykeman’s book: presenting the state’s history, it is fragmentary and anecdotal, “divided in its unity”; presenting the state’s personality through the generations, it is informative, well-researched, surprising, and quite entertaining, “unified in its diversity.”

Here’s to you Ms Dykeman/Mrs. Stokeley. Tonight I’ll raise my Jack Daniels/Lynchburg lemonade in your memory.

Wilma Dykeman was a friend of Thomas Wolfe's. Her mother's people had lived in the North Carolina mountains since the 18th century.