90-Second Book Review: You are My Sunshine by Robert Mann Reveals a Connection Between Country Music and Louisiana Politics

 You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis & the Biography of a Song is Robert Mann's insightful examination of Louisiana's official state song and the Louisiana politician who claimed to have composed it.  In addition, Mann's book explores the relationship between country music and Southern politics in the 1930s and 1940s.

Like most Americans, I had long assumed that Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis wrote "You Are My Sunshine," but in fact, he did not. As Mann relates in his book's first chapter, Davis and Charles Mitchell purchase the song's copyright from Paul Rice in 1939, along with the right to list themselves as the song's authors. 

At the time of the transaction, Davis was an up-and-coming star in the world of country music, which in the 1930s was more commonly called hillbilly music. After Davis and Mitchell purchased the song, "You Are My Sunshine" became famous worldwide and was eventually recorded by over 200 artists, including Johnny Cash, Bing Crosby, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ray Charles.

Davis was also an aspiring Louisiana politician who would serve two terms as governor of Louisiana. As a singer and country music performer, Davis honed a folksy public speaking style and became a facile radio performer. Like Wilbert "Pappy" O'Daniel, who campaigned for the Texas Governorship with the Lightcrust Doughboys, Davis recruited his own country band to accompany him on the campaign trail.

As Mann explained, Louisiana politicians were split into two hostile camps in the 1930s and 1940s: the Long faction and the anti-Long forces. Neither group had a rigid political agenda beyond keeping the rival faction out of power. Davis was elected to the governorship in 1944, partly because both the Long and anti-Long parties found him palatable, and voters saw him as a unifier who could bring harmony to Louisiana's fractious political culture.

Davis was elected to a second term as governor in 1960. Unfortunately, his tenure was marred by his state's adamant opposition to school desegregation.  When a federal judge ordered the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools, Davis "sent a squad of State Police troopers to New Orleans to enforce a state-ordered school holiday."

As Mann pointed out, Davis was not branded as a virulent racist in the stamp of Alabama Governor George Wallace and other Southern governors of the time. Still, he was an implacable foe of integrated schools. Indeed, Davis allied himself with Leander Perez, the district attorney in Plaquemines Parish and a rabid racist whose opposition to the desegregation of Catholic schools was so strident that the Catholic Church excommunicated him.

Mann's book sketches the portrait of a flawed and complicated man. The son of a poor sharecropper in Quitman, LA, he discovered a way to advance himself through country music. He was among the first poor Southern boys who clawed their way off the farms to create a unique style of American music: Bob Wills of Kosse, TX; Elvis Presley of Tupelo, MS; Hank Williams of Mount Olive, AL; Johnny Cash of Kingsland, AR, and many others.

Louisianians should remember Jimmy Davis as a country music and gospel music star and forget his second term as Louisiana governor. He was a gifted country music artist who could not rise above the prejudices of his time.

Don't let college professors persuade you that learning to speak Standard English is optional

I've been to Georgia on a fast train honey,

I wudn't born no yesterday.

Got a good Christian raisin' and an eighth-grade education

Ain't no need in y'all a treatin' me this way.

Billy Joe Shaver 

A while back, I met an elderly man who told me he had grown up in the Texas Panhandle back in the 1950s.  As a child, he spoke with a strong West Texas accent. But then his family moved to Arizona, and no one could understand him at his new school.

Fortunately, the man recounted,  an Arizona teacher began tutoring him on a one-to-one basis and taught him to speak standard English without a Texas accent. "If it hadn't been for that teacher," he said, "I would never have made a success of my life."

This man's story made an impression on me because I grew up in western Oklahoma, where the people speak very much like the West Texans.  To this day, I have some range dust in my diction; and I think at least some of my classmates at Harvard wrote me off as hick when they first heard me speak.  

Now there is a movement to de-emphasize standard English because it disadvantages minorities--particularly African Americans.  For example, Professor Asao Inoue of Arizona State University argues that students should not be graded based on the quality of writing but "purely by the labor students complete . . ." 

Why should professors stop grading students on the quality of their writing? "Because, Professor Inoue maintains, "all grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist."

 Rebecca Walkowitz, chair of the English Department at Rutgers University, is on Professor Inoue's wavelength. She sent an email recently, announcing an initiative to incorporate "critical grammar" into the department's pedagogy.

Critical grammar pedagogy, Professor Walkowitz's email stated, "challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as not to put students from multilingual, non-standard 'academic' English backgrounds at a disadvantage."

Professors Inuoue and Walkowitz's views on language are in harmony with the ebonics movement, which asserts that Black English should be regarded as a language in its own right and not a substandard dialect of proper English.

I sympathize with the academics who argue that we should show more respect for non-standard English. Indeed, some of America's greatest literature contain expressions in non-standard dialect. Huckleberry Finn, for example. And the lyrics of country music (which I love) are full of non-standard English phrases.

When Merle Haggard wrote Hungry Eyes, he penned, "us kids was too young to realize."  Should we give him a C- because he didn't write "we children were too young to realize"? And Elvis--should he have sung "You are nothing but a hound dog"?

Nevertheless, I believe all Americans should strive to master standard English in both their speech and their writing. After all, shouldn't we endeavor to build a common culture? And if that is so, isn't a common culture built on a common language?

I acknowledge that some Americans grew up in subcultures that did not value standard English. Those subcultures should not be denigrated.  I said "y'all" as a kid, and I still say "y'all." 

But standard English is not that hard to learn. I keep Strunk and White's Elements of Style on my desk, which I consult occasionally; and I subscribe to Grammarly, an online editing tool that checks my writing for spelling and grammar. All our commuters have a spell check function.

Besides, every young American must eventually leave academia, where grammar and spelling are being emphasized, and get a paying job. American employers may insist that their employees write and speak in standard English. Indeed, job candidates who misspell words on their job applications and converse in an obscure dialect may not get hired.

In my view, academics who want to deemphasize standard English grammar and diction are doing their students a disservice. Millions of young people are graduating from universities with crushing student loans. If they leave college speaking and writing no differently from when they entered, what was the point of all that education?