2001

23.3

Old Southwest Humor as Intertext: Ray Stevens’ “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival”

To anyone knowledgeable about the pop and country music scene of the past four decades, the songs and videos of Ray Stevens are familiar fare.   Stevens, who has recorded over eighty albums and has won two Grammys, is probably best known for pop comic tunes such as “Jeremiah Peabody’s Poly Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green & Purple Pills” (1961), “Ahab The Arab” (1962), “Gitarzan” (1969), “The Streak” (1974), “Shriner’s Convention” (1980), “I Saw Elvis in a UFO” (1989), and “Virgil and the Moonshot” (1997) (Encyclopedia of Popular Music 5149).

Yet another and perhaps equally important dimension of Stevens’ comedy is in his music videos, particularly those collected in Ray Stevens Comedy Video Classics (1992) and Ray Stevens Live (1994), both immensely popular, the former selling over two million copies via a direct television marketing campaign (Price 16).   Indeed, in turning to comic the music video, Stevens discovered a vital and entertaining medium, which has proven to be immensely successful for him.   In offering his own assessment for the resurgence of country comedy in song and subsequently videos, Stevens told Chet Flippo of Billboard magazine: “People underestimated comedy. . . . They thought comedy records would be a fast burn¾in one era and out another. But they were wrong. These songs have a great shelf life.   People love comedy.   They love these characters, and they want to see them on video, and they see them on stage” (39).   On this same topic, Stevens has also claimed that “there is a lot of entertainment that goes into comedy” (qtd. in Price 26).

One of Stevens’ most widely acclaimed comic videos is based on his song, “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” which also has been one of the most requested songs at his live shows (Allen 71). Many of Stevens’ comic songs and videos, including this one, treat, as Bob Allen points out, “everyday situations that run amock [sic.]--predicaments that make the jump from the mundane to the fantastic” (71).    Yet the same might be said of many other comic forms as well, including the antebellum brand of southern backwoods humor, popularly known as the humor of the Old Southwest, which flourished on the southern frontier between 1830 and 1860.   The enduring legacy of old Southwestern humor exists in varying forms in writers and entertainers such as Mark Twain, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Roy Blount, Jr,, Woody Guthrie, Cormac McCarthy, Fred Chappell, Gamble Rogers, Jerry Clower, and others.   Furthermore, permutations of this tradition have been found in such popular forms as the comic strip, situation comedy, musical recordings, Internet websites featuring southern country humor, and music videos.

It might even be claimed that Old Southwest humor is an intertext in both modern and contemporary literature and popular culture, especially of the southern variety that features a subject matter similar to that which was first popularized by the South’s antebellum humorists.   Literary and popular culture forms that have appropriated materials resembling those used in Southwest humor actually acquire meaning in part because of the tradition which contributed to making them possible, making their meaning dependent on what has come before.   Jonathan Culler has noted that “literature [and by extension I would add other creative art forms such as the music video as well] is a practice in which authors attempt to advance or renew literature [or other cultural forms] and thus is always implicitly a reflection on literature itself” (35), becoming in the process a “cultural construct¾a product of various cultural discourses on which it relies for its intelligibility” (32).   Furthermore, as Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis observe, “intextuality . . . defines a text as always in process, continually changing its shape . . . simultaneously being woven and unwoven, made up not of a uniform ‘material’ . . . but by the traces of other texts” (x).

It will be my purpose to show that while Stevens’ “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” intersects with the humor of the Old Southwest, in that the video is comprised of “traces of other texts,” it likewise simultaneously transforms materials initially popularized in southern frontier humor so as to appeal to contemporary popular tastes, particularly the ongoing fascination for and attitude toward low-class southern whites and their everyday experiences.    One immediate level of intersection with southern backwoods humor is that Stevens’ music video lampoons a favorite subject treated in numerous Southwestern humorous sketches and tales: the southern rural religious experience.   Two of the most popular sketches in the Southwest tradition—George Washington Harris’s “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards,” published initially as “Sut Lovingood’s Lizzards” [sic] in the Nashville Union and American on 15 November 1857, and Johnson Jones Hooper’s “The Captain Attends a Camp Meeting,” which first appeared in Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845)—deride the extravagances and hypocrisies of those who purportedly practice primitive fundamentalism.   As we will note more particularly in “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” Stevens actually dares to dramatize hyperbolically, though not with malicious intent, the foibles of rural churchgoing folk as did his Southwestern predecessors, Harris and Hooper.   And this he does most noticeably through caricature and the fabrication of incongruously amusing situations, again adopting familiar strategies of antebellum southern humor.

According to critic David Estes, many travelers and observers of the early nineteenth-century southern frontier “created a popular image of the camp meeting as an orgy of self-indulgence and sensual excitement,” and “writers of humorous ante-bellum frontier literature helped to popularize this image through depictions of licentious revivals and hypocritical parsons.” (54).   While Stevens does not replicate this scenario exactly in “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival”¾avoiding as he does the treatment of an open air camp meeting revival and the debunking of a backwoods preacher¾he still draws on resources of folk humor which correspond closely to some of the motifs and stock situations frequently employed in tales of Southwestern humor that treat religious experiences.   In the video, the inciting incident that transforms a state of momentary solemnity into a farcical comedy of errors is precipitated when a boy, apparently accidentally, releases from a shoe box a squirrel which he has brought with him to show a friend during a Sunday morning church service.  While the boy may not have deliberately intended to instigate the amusing series of events that ensues, it seems quite possible that in his sneaking the squirrel into the church, mischief may have been on his mind.    When the squirrel jumps out of the box in which the boy has transported it, the mood quickly shifts from one of relative peace and tranquillity to ludicrous disorder.   Intentional prank or not--this remains ambiguous--the effect is the same as that which takes place in “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards.” What follows is a commotion-filled, rollicking spectacle, a hilariously incongruous situation which distinctly deviates from the standard of respectable behavior one would expect to witness in a southern small-town Protestant church.

Chaos predictably follows when the crazed squirrel runs under the pews, the humorous consequence being that this action has forced willing participation by and self-exposure of many in the church’s presumably pious and proclaimed self-righteous congregation. This act, in fact, which initiates a series of embarrassing situations that Stevens comically accentuates, follows closely in the manner both of Harris’s “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards” in which the vengeful Sut Lovingood intentionally releases a sack of lizards up the trousers’ leg of a deserving victim, a hypocritical and scoundrelly    preacher at a backwoods camp meeting and of Hooper’s “The Captain Attends a Camp Meeting” in which the rascally Suggs cleverly and deceptively manipulates a group of backwoods believers and preachers and personally profits by exposing their cupidity and hypocrisy.   In both of these literary sketches, the authors prominently feature physical comedy to inflate in a disparaging manner the behavior of the churchgoers, thereby superbly executing their satiric intentions of burlesquing the eccentricities of rural southern religion.

To highlight how the people in the First Self-Righteous Church of Pascagoula, Mississippi, spontaneously react when the squirrel goes “ berserk,” Stevens graphically exaggerates the action, caricaturing the churchgoers and their behavior and thus adopting comedic strategies that closely correspond to the linguistic manner of Harris, Hooper, and others in the old Southwest tradition who employed a similar subject matter and who presented it farcically.   Consider, for instance, how in “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards” Harris has Sut Lovingood, his notorious but likable trickster, retrospectively describe with unrestrained amusement Parson Bullen’s reaction when the parson is convinced, as Sut puts it, that the “‘Hell serpents hes got me!” (56).   When the lizards crawl up the minister’s trousers,    “He stop’t preachin rite in the middil ove the word ‘damnation.’ And looked fur a moment like he wer listenin fur sumthin—sorter like a ole sow dus, when she hears yu a whistlin fur the dorgs. . . . He gin hisself sum orful open-handed slaps wif fust one han’ an’ then tuther, about the place whar yu cut the bes’ steak outen a beef.   Then he’d fetch a vigrus ruff rub whar a hosses tail sprouts; then he’d stomp one foot, then tuther, then bof at onst” (54).   Similarly, in the video, when the excited squirrel runs up Harve Newman’s coveralls, the viewer has no more difficulty laughing at Harve than readers of “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards” do when they visualize the comedic disparagement of the parson’s reputation through the accentuated and ridiculous physical antics described in the previous passage.   In much the same manner as Harris, Stevens rapidly converts the scene with Harve into unrestrained physical comedy, using close up camera shots to accentuate the bewildered facial expressions of a man totally caught off guard by what he thinks may be happening to him.   Stevens clearly creates a self-deprecating image of Harve, much as Harris does when he lampoons Parson Bullen through verbal exaggeration.   Harve, who exhibits a bovine manner and is dressed in overalls, epitomizes the stereotype of an unsuspecting countryman who because of the rapid and unexpected turn of events which befalls him is predictably transformed into a laughingstock.   Harve’s immediate reaction, as he excitedly jumps to his feet, is, as he exclaims, “‘Something’s got a hold on me!’”    Concerning what has a “hold” on the clueless Harve, part of the congregation thought it was religion, while others interpreted it to be a demon.   What takes place in this scene is a slight modification of the situation in Harris’s sketch, where the frenzied Bullen, also believing himself to be possessed by demons, reacts, as Sut comically puts it, by going into “a heavy lumberin’ gallop, like a ole fat waggon hoss skared at a locomotive” (56). Both in the video and in Harris’s sketch, the perceptions about demons are wrong, of course, for the viewer and the reader, who possess superior knowledge of the situation, know what has actually happened to Harve and Bullen.   As beneficiaries of this knowledge, the respective audiences of Stevens’ video and Harris’s sketch have no trouble justifying their laughter because both characters conform to the standard stereotype of the eccentric and unsophisticated lower class southern white who is typically viewed with amusing condescension as a social and cultural misfit.  

As Harve jumps up and down in the aisles, Stevens comically magnifies Harve’s predicament, revealing that “Harve thought that he had a weedeater loose in his Fruit of the Looms.”  Coupled with showcasing Harve’s amusing antics, Stevens follows the conventional practice of humorists generally and of the old Southwestern humorists particularly by emphasizing the less desirable characteristics of the physical body.   Bodies in Southwestern humor, Milton Rickels has noted, “are too fat or too thin, too short or too tall to represent that stability and completion of being represented by Vitruvian man” (“Grotesque Body” 155).   Such is also the case of Stevens’ Harve Newman, who is stocky, with disheveled hair and a face covered with several days’ growth of beard, all of which, along with his outlandish and humorously denigrating physical actions, make him a caricature, exemplifying certain popular cultural notions about southerners, especially of the low-class ilk.

The next scene in the video shifts to the “Amen pew,” where we observe a self-righteous overweight, bespectacled, and disgustingly unattractive woman, whom Stevens aptly calls “Sister Bertha Better Than You,” a caricature of a busybody, a holier-than-thou type.   The obese Bertha, who sports a large head with a double chin and eye glasses too small for her enormous face, and who plainly exemplifies the grotesque, sits bemused, sadistically enjoying Harve’s public humiliation and misfortune and the uneasiness of the rest of the congregation that, as Stevens sings, “was fighting for survival that broke out in revival” as “they were jumping pews and singing halleluia.”  What follows is even funnier than what happened to Harve Newman.   Whereas the Southwestern humorists depended largely on the linguistic medium to disparage despicable mannerisms and improper behavior, Stevens can complement his graphic dramatization of human foibles and frailties with song lyrics to amplify an incongruously hilarious situation. Moreover, he introduces subject matter suggestive of sexual improprieties, but with far less indirection and subtlety than the more inhibited writers of old Southwestern humor typically used.   While they were the “frankest of the ante-bellum writers in their situations and language,” according to Milton Rickels, in their use of “sexual, bodily, and excretory images,” these humorists were forced to contend with the etiquette and standards assumed for respectable literature of their time (“Inexpressibles” 76, 80).

 As the squirrel scampers into Bertha’s dress, a close up camera shot captures the absurdity of the action, exaggerating the squirrel’s gyrations as it moves quickly beneath Bertha’s garments, sexually exciting her and creating a risqué suggestiveness exceeding that sometimes found in narratives of Southwestern humor.   In Harris’s “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards,” for instance, Sut Lovingood casually introduces a sexual innuendo in his hilarious description of one of his lizard’s sudden encounters with an unsuspecting fat woman attending the camp meeting:

One ove the smartes’ ove my lizzards lit head-fust intu the buzzim ove a fat ‘oman, es big es a skin’d hoss, ni ontu es ugly, who sot thuty yards off, a fannin hersef wif a a tucky-tail.   Smart tu    the las’, by golly, he imejuntly commenced runnin down the centre ove her breas’-bone, an’ kep on, I speck.   She wer jis’ boun’ tu faint: an’ she did hit fust rate—flung the tucky-tail up in the air, grabbed the lap ove her gown, gin hit a big histin an’ fallin shake, rolled down the hill, tangled her laigs an’ garters in the top ove a huckilberry bush, wif her head in the branch an’ jis’ lay still.   (55-56)

Like Harris’s “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards,” William C. Hall’s 1850 Southwestern sketch, “How Sally Hooter Got Snakebit,” exploits bawdy subject matter involving a woman and a reptile.   Hall’s sketch is narrated by a Mississippi bear hunter, lay preacher, and sometime prankster named Mike Hooter.   In the best deadpan manner, Hooter, suggestively describes an apparently indiscreet situation at a camp meeting when his daughter Sally mistook a sausage which she has been wearing about her waist as a fashionable make-shift bustle as a snake after it starts falling about her ankles.   In retrospectively relating this incident, Hooter says:

I spy Sal er rarein’ and er pitchin’, er rippen’ and er tarein’ amd er shoutin’ like flinders!    When brother James see that, he thought she’d done got good, an’ he cum down off the log, an’ sez he, “Pray on sister!”. . . Then the wimmen they all cotch holt of her by the har, and commence wollerin’ her ‘bout in the straw, an’ sez I, “that’s right, sisters—beat the Devil out’n her.” And they did too!

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Well, when Potter [one of the men attending the camp meeting] he went and sorter felt ur [the snake] on the outside uv her coat, an’ I pledged you my word, he was the whappinest biggist serpent that ever scooted across er road. . . . Well, when Potter diskiver that she [Sal] helt the snake fast, he begin feelin’ up for the reptile’s tail, sorter like he didn’t like to do it at fust, an’ then sorter like he did.   When it come to that, Sal she kinder turned red in the face and squirmed er bit, but ‘twarn’ no time for puttin’ on quality airs then, and she stood it like er hoss.   Well, Potter he kep er feelin’ up, an’ feelin’ an’ er feelin’ up, sorter easy like, an’ toreckly he felt somethin’ in    his han’.   “I’ve got him,” sez Potter, “well I have by jingo.” (Hall 373-74)

 In Stevens’ video, as the squirrel crisscrosses Bertha’s thighs, the sexually excited Bertha not only freely discloses gossip and church dissension that she has heard, but she also shouts the names of church members with whom she has had affairs, the end result being public exposure of her own hypocrisy as well as that of some of the purportedly respected male members of the congregation.   In portraying    Bertha as a caricature, Stevens makes her a fitting candidate for ridicule, her personal defects blatantly exposing her as a hypocrite.   And all this seems amusing because of the stark incongruity of Bertha’s behavior which drastically violates the etiquette, reverence, and decorum commonly associated with traditional Protestant church services.   Yet there is another angle for examing the humor here.   This scene also encourages laughter because it may be viewed in the context of Freudian aggression release, a comic response whereby the laugher may find in an incident a respectable outlet for the pent up psychic energy normally used to suppress forbidden desires and hostile impulses.   After all, most people can comfortably express derision at a hypocrite who, like Bertha, is publicly sanctimonious but who privately is a miscreant.

While Stevens successfully turns what begins as an apparently commonplace church service into motion-filled pandemonium, using as a vehicle for doing so a “half-crazed Mississippi squirrel,” he also brings his free-wheeling music video, fraught with turbulence and repeated comic turns, to a harmonically contrived but still hilarious resolution. Like many sketches of Southwestern humor, Stevens’ video employs an adaptation of the frame device, which he uses to introduce in the opening words of the song the circumstances leading up to the raucous activity featured in the main story line    and then at the end to restore stasis and some semblance of    harmony by noting the beneficial moral effects that this bizarre misadventure has had in reforming the religious and moral lives of the church’s congregation.   And no doubt Stevens knows exactly how to orchestrate the diverse ingredients of such a scenario to achieve the desired comic effect; namely, to entertain his audience.   As a consequence of this “Mississippi squirrel revival,” seven deacons and the pastor get saved; $25,000 is donated in the collection; fifty parishioners volunteer for missionary service in the Congo; five hundred church members rededicate themselves; and everybody gets rebaptized, “whether they needed it or not,” as Stevens comically puts it.   Unlike some of the frame narrators of Southwestern humor, however, Stevens is neither condemnatory of nor condescending toward characters like Harve and Bertha; instead his humor, while satiric, has a genial, almost forgiving quality about it.   To put it another way, in his modification of the frame, Stevens functions as a contemporary troubadour, one who actually portrays a persona who identifies with his characters, and who clearly enjoys the shenanigans he dramatizes by assuming several secondary roles.   In this capacity, Stevens functions in a dual role.   On one level, he plays a minor part in the video’s central narrative; and on another, he functions as a tolerant outsider, one who exists at a comfortable distance from the action, but still    finds himself amused by the principal humorous incidents generated by the outlandish physical antics and foibles of the eccentric churchgoing country folk.   Moreover, Stevens’ attitude toward the churchgoers and their amusing aberrations may be regarded as ambivalent.   While Stevens identifies with the world of a southern backwoods community and its religious ways, still, in the manner of an Horatian satirist, he conveys an attitude of congenial amusement toward his subject matter. Furthermore,, it seems clear from his portrayal in the video that Stevens actually enjoys the quirks and incongruous behavior displayed by his characters and therefore treats their personal weaknesses with gentle and amiable mockery.

In “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” Ray Stevens has traversed territory resembling that which the humorists of the Old Southwest had traversed first.   Yet in doing so, he likewise modified the subject matter of the southern rural religious experience, combining song and dramatization to create lively and amusingly incongruous scenes, and effectively employing caricature to debunk gently the characters he features.   It is also apparent that, like sketches and tales in Southwestern humor, this video exhibits a democratic appeal, a key trait associated with the tradition of American humor generally and with antebellum southern humor particularly.   In fact, the widespread popularity of “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” may in part be explained by linking it to this democratic tradition.   After all, the video’s appeal, I would argue, depends largely on Stevens’ use of popular stereotypes long associated with lower-class southern rural and small-town whites, stereotypes which have typically conveyed a negative image (Carr 5).   As psychologist Gordon W. Allport has aptly noted, a stereotype functions not only to provide a rationalization for accepting or rejecting a specific group, it also serves as “a screening or selective device to maintain simplicity in perception and in thinking” (191). This justification is similar to the reason why many of the gentlemanly readers of antebellum southern humor could laugh at and thus distance themselves from the common folk featured in many of the tales and sketches.   And clearly while the contemporary viewer’s humorous response to “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” may be generally viewed within the context of Allport’s claim about stereotypes, the stereotype of the low class white southerner provides only a partial explanation concerning why a contemporary audience may find Stevens’ video amusing.

 Another reason for the appeal of “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” may be attributable to the ironic tension between knowledge and ignorance, a tension which Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham perceptively claim to be an essential and frequently recurring ingredient found in Southwestern humor.   And this tension occurs, they go on to say, because the reader, enjoying the advantage of superiority, typically knows more than the characters know, characters who often make fools of themselves because they lack the knowledge the reader possesses (xxxiii-xxxiv).   This is clearly the case for the viewer of Stevens’ video who finds plenty of stimulation for amusement in the ludicrous antics and surprising disclosures of the unsuspecting Harve and Berha.

Ray Stevens’ “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” indeed shares an intertexual relationship with the tradition of old Southwest humor.   In part, the video’s significance to American popular culture, as I have attempted to demonstrate, depends on this tradition which popularized a humorous precedent and which therefore seems to have made¾regardless of direct influence or not¾ what Stevens did possible.   In what is essentially an affirmation of the significance of intertextuality, twentieth-century poet and fiction writer William Carlos Williams once remarked that “whatever is new in literature the germ of it will be found somewhere in the writings of other times”    (255).   This same claim may profitably    be extended to art forms other than literary texts, such as Ray Stevens’ “ The Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” where the materials of Southwestern humor have undergone a reincarnation, being reborn and finding new life in the contemporary popular medium of the comic video.

Ed Piacentino

Department of English

High Point University

High Point, North Carolina 27262

Works Cited

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—. “Inexpressibles in Southwestern Humor,” Studies in American Humor 3 (1976): 76-83.

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Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1951.