In response to Charles Hughes's excellent post:

Two quick points:

1)  The derivation of "crunk," according to several
web-based hip-hop lexicons, is the words "crazy" and
"drunk." I'm wondering if you're right when you say:
"[g]etting "crunk" owes a great deal to the energy of
the gospel church..."

I suspect that some older gospel-embracing folk might
object as fully to this characterization of crunk-energies
as their grandparents would have objected to a younger
blues-embracing generation back in the 1920s hanging
out--and getting, well, crunk--at the local juke.

2)  You don't specifically invoke the category of
contemporary soul-blues, of the sort that gets lots of
airplay on the I-55 axis between Memphis and Jackson, MS,
but it certainly deserves mention. Self-consciously
southern, audibly modern (well, all those synthesizers DO
sound kinda 70s, I guess), and unabashedly raunchy AND
wisdom-conveying, it--unlike southern soul and Dirty South
hip-hop, has stayed almost entirely below the national
pop-cultural radar. It gets very little airplay outside the
South. I'm talking about Sir Charles Jones (“Love
Machine”), Marvin Sease (“Women Would Rather Be
Licked”), Peggy Scott-Adams (“Hot and Sassy”), and
Willie Clayton (“Call Me Mr. C”), plus the ceaseless
replays of  Z. Z. Hill's "Down Home Blues" (1982) and Little
Milton's "Hey Hey, The Blues is Alright" (1984).

Those last two songs in particular need to be a part of
your narrative, since they both accompanied and legitimized
African American return migration to the South. As much as
any two songs of that era, I daresay, they articulated the
black southern imaginary for those in the diaspora.

Adam Gussow
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Program in
Southern Studies
The University of Mississippi
P.O. Box 1848
University, MS 38677

(ofc) 662-915-7333
(h) 662-281-8596

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