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November 30, 2011
Roy Herron's Tennessee Political Humor: Some of These Jokes You Voted For.
Lawyer, leader, author and Renaissance man, my friend Roy Herron is a mega-smart, energetic and genuinely people-loving Tennessee state senator who many observers expect to see in Congress some day. Or expect to see as Governor. Roy has written, with co-author L.H. "Cotton" Ivy, another well-known Volunteer State public servant and professional humorist, a fine and, in my view, much needed slice of history, color, quirk and wit of Pols in America: Tennessee Political Humor: Some Of These Jokes You Voted For (University of Tennessee Press).
In case you're from Los Angeles, New York City or New Canaan, Connecticut, your governess never told you or you were stoned all five years at Choate, let's review a bit. Tennessee is the state in the American South nestled in the middle of eight other Southern states, excluding Missouri (which is actually a bit Southern itself; see below). Europeans did not start taking serious liberties with the locals in Tennessee until the 1760s. General Andrew Jackson is its most famous native son. During the Civil War, Tennessee furnished more soldiers for the Confederate Army than any other state, and more soldiers for the Union Army than any other Southern state. Then they had Elvis.
The small mouth bass fishing in Tennessee is to-die-for. I fished there a few times as a kid with my Missouri-bred dad, near Cookeville. Further north in Kentucky, but in the same lake system, Dad, a successful and storied retired Procter & Gamble executive who I fully expect some day to supervise at my funeral, caught a record small mouth (over 8.5 pounds) in the 1970s. Years later, when we were living in Cincinnati, Dad made me climb out of a boat and up a steep hill in a freezing late-fall rain to nail a sign saying "Hull's Gulch" into a gorgeous lake shore tree owned 100% by the U.S. Tennessee Valley Administration that stretched over the site of that holy event.
Tennesseans, like some folks from southern Missouri, are not just wickedly funny and Scotch-Irish feisty. They are straight-up warriors and heirs to a rich tradition in law and politics that predates Andrew Jackson, the first real Democrat. Roy's book mirrors all of that--and there is great color, hubris and of course funny-ness throughout this well-researched but entertaining 157-page work. In Tennessee, I also claim DNA and certain ancestry on Dad's side going back 250 years--in politics, law, business, farming and even whiskey-making--along with more reputable kin who were on parole or probation only once or twice. If you buy and read Roy and Ivy's book, you've got shot at knowing at least what they were thinking.
Roy Herron
Posted by JD Hull at November 30, 2011 11:59 PM