book recommendation about Southern culture

I am writing a Civil War novel. I have some characters who are Yankees and some who are Rebels. My rebel characters are poor farmers. I was wondering if anyone in this group could recommend a book about Southern low culture? So I could have some of those details in my book. The family is from Tennessee. However, it does not have to be about Tennessee in particular.

Thanks for your help.

It deals with South Carolina, not Tennessee, but Masters of Small Worlds by Stephanie McCurry might be close to what you're looking for.

There has been a recent trend in Civil War history towards doing community histories, which might be particularly useful for you. I know there have been some for the mountains of Western NC and Northern GA, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone has done work in Eastern TN.

"Poor Whites" by Charles Bolton might be worth a look.

I highly recommend an article written by Elliot Gorn --Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry-- which was available on the web, and it certainly available in journals. I found it rather eye opening in regards to southern, and then westerning American culture.

The Cotton Kingdom relates the author's travels through the ante-bellum south. It does provide many details of how people lived and the author had a very good ear for accent and dialogue. He visited rich and poor so you may find some useful information. It was described by Arthur Schlesinger as " A uniquely candid and realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South." The author, Frederick Law Olmsted, is better known for designing Central Park and other parks in major American cities.

"First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. This collection can be found at http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/. If you want a first person account of battle in the war by a Tennessee foot soldier I would recommend Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War by Sam R. Watkins. If you want some realistic dialogue of the poor farmers in the south you could look up anything by Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell wrote of poor farmers well after the civil war but the dialogue had not changed very much except for the tools that were used.

Here are some books on Tennessee(note: I have not read them). Some seem to be more on politics than on culture, but still they might be helpful, and they might contain useful references.

Middle Tennessee society transformed, 1860-1870 : war and peace in the Upper South by Stephen V. Ash
Parties, politics, and, the sectional conflict in Tennessee, 1832-1861 by Jonathan M. Atkins
Mountain rebels : East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870 by W. Todd Groce
Middle Tennessee, 1775-1825: progress and popular democracy on the southwestern frontier by Kristofer Ray

I would recommend perusing the works of Howard Bahr,
who to me (a Mississippian), seems to do an excellent job of capturing the tone of realistic Southerners.