"You not gonna believe this, but Dump and Moochie Metz were on MSNBC," my dad said to me today.
"You kidding."
"No, for real. Some reporter was up in Cat Island Swamp, and ran into 'em. You can see 'em on the Internet. They talking over each other like they always do. It's something else."
Sure enough, here's Dump and Moochie. I love hearing those guys talk -- that's the old-time deep West Feliciana Parish accent. My grandfather sounded like this. My dad sounds a lot like this, but his accent is not quite this thick. I don't sound like this at all, I'm sorry to say. These men's voices and accents make me think of smearing butter and cane syrup on a biscuit. Nora, my two-year-old, heard this recording and asked me if that was her Pawpaw.
I didn't know until reading this story that Moochie's real name is Julius.
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How great. A couple of old farts talking about catching gar with sausage, and going into great detail on how to cook them up, which I guess is a typical Louisiana obsession.
We had old guys like this in the small-town Kansas of my childhood; we called them "characters." We'd say, "Old Enor, he's quite a character." The accent was different (Enor's parents were from Sweden) and there wasn't as much talk. And gar, like carp, was considered a "junk" fish that only poor people ate, although both are apparently real delicacies elsewhere.
Real America here, boys. Thanks for sharing Rod.
Unfortunately, up here in Boston, the regional accent is disappearing!
The young'uns I work with just don't have the old-time Boston accent even if they grew up in the Boston Metro area! I work in Boston and live in RI, 55 miles away. An RI accent is a bit different than a Boston accent, but the difference is fast disappearing, and I am sorry to see it go.
This reminds me of my granddads sitting together and swapping stories at some get together or another, except in their case the accent is Yooper through and through [get Jeff Daniels' Escanaba in Da Moonlight from Netflix if you're not familiar]. Toss in my grandma, who's ethnically Italian/Austrian by birth, and it's enough to make your head spin.
BTW, how exactly does one catch gar with sausage? Talk about your lost arts:)
I did not know Kevin Divine was, like me, of straight-ticket Yooper stock. My mother is from Negaunee, and my father grew up in Skandia, 10 miles west and east of Marquette, respectively. Though the UP looms large on the map, it only hosts 3 percent of the state's population (c. 320,000) in its 15 counties, with Marquette far and away the largest city or town at c. 20,000. And some of you may know that just as Francophone culture survives most strongly in the US among Louisiana's divers parishes and in my adopted state of Maine's northernmost Acadian edges and parts of its southern interior near Lewiston, so do Finnish-American ways in the UP, especially but not exclusively in and near Hancock and Houghton in the peninsula's northwest, with northern Minnesota near Duluth the closest sibling. As for sausage as bait, Yoopers would rely on cudighi, a highly-spiced Italianate version virtually unknown outside a few pockets up there, including in the Marquette area. On the sandwiches sold in bars and delis and restaurants up there, with tomato sauce and mozzarella, it holds its own with the sort of chicago deep-dish pizza we used to get at Due's six hours to the south.
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