Word: jeffs
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When Jerry Jeff said something about grits, country living and the good life, everybody started whooping and hollering in agreement. During a break, my roommate from New York City yawned incessantly and made snide comments about rednecks, but I struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next...
Then Jerry Jeff sang another slow, sad song relying on a plaintive steel guitar, and lyrics that struck a common chord in all southern hearts. He was singing about being displaced and socially alienated, about wanting to leave the cold, impersonal city to go home to friends, family, farms and lovers...
...another song Jerry Jeff tells of a man who leaves his home to earn fame and fortune in the big city, only to realize that his ties back home were far more important to him than the money he hoped to win. Again and again Jerry Jeff sang about men lost in the shuffle of modernization and mobility, men incapable of forming roots and finding stability and meaning in life, men no longer a part of a tightly-knit social unit but standing completely alone instead...
...Jerry Jeff and fellow country western singers differ from other songwriters telling about alienation because the characters in the country songs still have one place to go, a place where the community is still close-knit--the rural South. In rural states like Mississippi where there are few large cities and many small, fairly isolated towns, the sense of community is still intact. Most people work on small farms or in some small commercial enterprise. Work is organized at a personal level; everybody knows everybody else. There is a common set of social mores and values rooted in Biblical faith...
...this kind of life that the characters in Jerry Jeff's songs long to return to. It is a life of close contact and strong bonds with others. It was something closer to the small town lifestyle that the Hampshire College freshman was searching for. She was looking for people who share her small-town values and mores, instilled at an early age by a self-confident community certain that its Biblical interpretation of life is right...