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There are a lot people who make up Texas — people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some people so new that they still haven’t had a chance to change their license plates… others whose families have been here since before Texas was Texas!
Texas Standard commentator dug deep into the roots of some of the ancestors who’ve called Texas home — and found some commonalities among at least some Texans today.
The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
WF Strong [00:00:00] If you spend just five minutes listening to Texas political ads, you’ll likely hear the word freedom a great deal. It’s baked into our state identity, a currency we deal in daily, but compared to the people who actually built the foundations of the Anglo Texas culture, our cries for freedom are rather tepid to understand why you have to go back 400 years to a lawless 96 small strip of land. Between Scotland and England. It was called the border country. For generations, these people, for some of us, our ancestors, were caught in a violent struggle between rival kings. They learned that the government couldn’t protect them, the taxes there were state sanctioned theft, and that survival meant relying on your clan and your weapons. They answered to no king. When the British crown tried to civilize them, it didn’t take. Instead, were pushed into Northern Ireland, hence the name Scotch-Irish. But they didn’t stay long. By the 1700s they were sailing for America. When they arrived they didn t settle in the quiet orderly towns along the eastern seaboard. Seemed too organized. Too much government. They headed straight for the ungoverned freedom of the Appalachian mountains. In his brilliant book, Albion Sea, David Hackett Fisher notes just how fiercely anti-government these folks were. In the 1790s, the newly formed US government passed a tax on whiskey. The immigrants thought this was outrageous. That tax was too much government for them. They either attacked the tax collectors or packed their wagons and move further into the wilderness. And by 1820, a steady stream of these Scotch Irish were moving to Texas for cheap land where no one could tell them what to do. They were a people on the move. One man said When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs, and start. Throughout the 1800s, they flooded into Texas. Sam Houston and Jim Bowie were Scotch-Irish. David Crockett was Scotch Irish and French. This wave of immigrants brought with them their poetic borderland language. When we say, I reckon, or call our family kinfolk, or say someone’s plum crazy, we are speaking the exact dialect. Of these 17th century borderlands ancestors. Our grammar outs us too. If you’ve ever said, I might could do that, you are using a double modal grammatical form born on the Scottish border, preserved in the Appalachian hollers and taken on tongues right into Texas. Here are a few more words and pronunciations that came from that time and remain in use by some today. Y’all, war for where, Thar for their hard for hired a hard him today Critter for creature a going for going i’m going over there fixin as in fixing to far for fire Naked for naked rassle for wrestle Winder for window Witter for widow youngins for young ones Author David Hackett Fisher says that this became the language of country music truck drivers cinematic cowboys, and back country politicians. Coming back to the idea of freedom today, when Texans talk about freedom, they often mean freedom from federal regulation, freedom from high property taxes or freedom to drive massive lifted trucks or ride motorcycles without a helmet. It’s a corporate, comfortable kind of liberty. But to our Scotch Irish ancestors, freedom didn’t mean a lower tax bracket. It meant absolute, Radical. Autonomy. Their idea was more in keeping with oil man Eddie Charles advertised mantra, the government should deliver the mail and stay the hell out of my business. Next time you see a bumper sticker celebrating Texas freedom, remember those Scotch Irish, those fiercely independent and freedom loving souls who helped give Texas its swagger and vocabulary. Given this perspective, some of y’all might could be feeling the urge to shut the and call the dogs. I’m W.F. Strong. These are stories from Texas. Some of them are true.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
