She was convinced it would be chock full of rednecks who we could poke fun at, or at least square dance with".
Yet as Curtis Wilkie, a retired journalist who teaches here, readily acknowledged, the woods only 10 miles away are "full of unreconstructed rednecks," and 25 miles to the west lies the largely black Mississippi Delta, an area of wretched, unrelenting poverty.
The preconceived notion of Kansas is that it's full of a rednecks and wheat fields, and to some degree that's true but I was fortunate enough to be raised in Lawrence which is a college town with it's own unique artistic subculture.
The US, after all, has those awkward bits that so many fly over from east coast to west coast, full of white trash, rednecks and Republicans.
Sociology: full dentition is not compatible with redneck status, at least if we're to believe Honey Boo Boo's sister who indignantly rejects the title during a family argument with the conclusive line "We all have our teeth don't we?" I'm not sure that Sugar Bear, the man of the house, actually does have all his teeth, but let that pass.
While still in high school, Galifianakis developed what he considers his first full-fledged comic "character": an effeminate redneck, with a wildly exaggerated lisp, whose mother warned him about coming into physical contact with black people.
Raylan Givens is back with the Season 5 premiere of "Justified," and it looks like he's going to have his plate full this season with another family of redneck crooks.
But in this stripped-down context, the wit and quirkiness of songs like "Redneck Yacht Club" and "International Harvester" were on full display, and Mr. Morgan's voice, which can get lost amid thick production on his records, was firm.
More than that, he shines some light on characters we might hold in a kind of unconscious contempt, people we might reflexively assume to be living less than a full life: a priest, a hippie in a van, a redneck logger, a druggie runaway.
I Love LA and Rednecks are equally wonderful (although the former loses something without the full call-and-response chorus), but Newman seems stifled during his more recent, less sardonic, songs from Bad Love and Toy Story, where the orchestra takes a bigger role.
