Louisiana Down Home

By Garland Strother / March 1, 1977

This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 5 No. 1 "Good Times and Growing Pains." Find more from that issue here.

Backwater sired there

of cotton sharecroppers

whose plantation dreams

died like dried-juice trees,

I was born to the Baptist

pines of Tensas Parish,

Louisiana down home,

and grew up to

the poor white litanies

of breakdown, waltz-time blues

and tongue-shouting, two-step

hands up gospel

till the bloodlines rang.

 

Lord how we sang.

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