Here is a subject which deserves, and has almost certainly received, a closer examination than I am capable of giving, or am aware of existing. It is true of America as a whole that its speech has been influenced by the King James Bible. Especially in the South, however, the Bible, and liturgics in general, somehow became part of the "grammar" of the culture, even apart from the original meaning of the text. Blues and country songs use the word "Lord" (usually "Lord, Lord") the way Homer used stock epithets--as familiar words with a set rhythm that serve to fill space or complete a rhyme scheme. Many Southern sayings rely on biblical phrases; even tobacco auctioneers would borrow lines from the Bible or gospel songs to round out their cry; and the cry itself was developed from Gregorian chant. A great deal of the cultural furnishings of the South, both high and low, are drawn from the Bible, from liturgical phrases, or church music. Particles of religious language are strewn throughout their day-to-day speechmaking, proverbial sayings, economic dealings, and comments on the weather.
I recall reading somewhere that John Crowe Ransom once asked himself why Southern literature used the word "God" so much, even outside of religious usage. His answer was that, of all words in the human language, "God" was the most poetical. I think this answer gets pretty close to the heart of the matter. When the Allman Brothers sing, "Lord, I was born a ramblin' man" they are invoking, by instinct, the transcendent qualities of that Name, and, by contrast, deepening the pain of their song of earthly mutability. Richard Weaver mentioned a sense of incarnation as an important quality of Southern literature. By incarnation he meant a union of particularity and transcendence, evident in the ability of Faulkner, Warren, et al., to link their minute and concrete images to a strong sense of meaning and eternity. This same incarnational union obtains in the culture out of which this literature sprang, and I suspect something of the sort is going on when the Gregorian modes echo in the cry of a tobacco auctioneer, when a rockabilly singer calls on his Savior while his guitar moans for a lost Eden (which may or may not be a girl), when a redfaced sweating stump orator draws on biblical cadences to heighten his ethos.
This kind of religious saturation of a culture is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, perhaps best seen in Chaucer or in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novels of Poland, where almost every common utterance defaulted to a paternoster or an Ave or mimicked liturgical exchanges in the Divine Service. Perhaps this kinship lends support to the idea that the American South was the last traditional member of western Christendom.
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