SOURCE: Cohen, Hennig, and William B. Dillingham. Introduction to Humor of the Old Southwest, edited by Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, pp. ix-xxiv. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964.

In the following essay, Cohen and Dillingham delineate the defining characteristics of the Southwestern humor tradition.

The Southern frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century was an elusive, ever-changing line. What was wilderness in the 1820's became a settlement by the 1830's. The frontier moved rapidly from the interior of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia westward through Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and across the great river through Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. William Byrd, a Virginia aristocrat, and numerous other early travelers in this region wrote about the peculiar specimens of humanity to be seen in the backwoods. In 1728 Byrd portrayed comically the squatters of backcountry North Carolina. They were so lazy that they imposed all the work on...