This evening at the Cracker Barrel in North Carolina the music filling the restaurant was the famous folk hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” The chorus is familiar to most:
Will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
in the sky, Lord, in the sky.
Recounting the death of a mother and the hope for family reunion in the hereafter, the song was composed by the legendary Carter Family of southwest Virginia in the 1930s. It’s based on an early twentieth century conventional hymn that the Carters brilliantly translated into Gospel-tinged popular folk music.
Such a song is the perfect backdrop for the Cracker Barrel’s artful, mass produced celebration of rustic, backcountry, pious America. Each of hundreds of restaurants, with their accompanying gift shops of country kitsch, is nearly identical. Even the esoteric Americana that fills the walls and hangs from ceilings, as if magically assembled from a thousand flea markets, is actually choreographed from a central corporate design shop, a manager once confided.
Serving up endless dishes of carbo-rich country food, with baskets of biscuits and cornbread, plus unlimited ice tea, the Cracker Barrel reproduces a Sunday after church dinner at a country grandmother’s house somewhere in middle America, likely on the periphery of Appalachia. The rocking chairs outside confirm the intended ambience of country nostalgia, including rural religiosity, as largely defined by the Scots-Irish diaspora that populated the upper South and lower Midwest.
Earlier in the day, before dinner at Cracker Barrel, I lunched several hundred miles away in Virginia at the more genuine article, a restaurant tavern dating to 1760 on the main north-south colonial highway, now Route 1. Reputedly Washington and Jefferson stopped there.
Even for such landed statesmen, the lodging and food would have been modest if not primitive. Travelers shared beds with unwashed strangers on unwashed sheets after dining on often unwashed dishes. The food was prepared in less than sanitary conditions. Roadside taverns were often dirty, vermin infested, filled with disreputable characters, intoxication, and scandalous behavior.
How tame is the carefully modulated and tidy Cracker Barrel by comparison. So too are the predictable chain hotels almost always within reach of the typical Cracker Barrel at highway interstate exits. Today’s travel experience in America is a thankfully sanitized affair, protected from the filth, weather, danger, brigandage and discomforts of previous millennia, when for nearly all humanity, a long journey offered no assurance of safe completion.
The Virginia inn where Washington and Jefferson stayed was little different qualitatively from the inn 1800 years previous that turned away Joseph and a pregnant Mary in ancient Judea. And their mode of transportation was about the same as well. The last two centuries stand apart from all previous centuries for their human material advances. But the material victories would have been impossible without the spiritual groundwork.
Proliferating on the primitive often virtually impassable backcountry roads of early America were the itinerant preachers who helped tame a rowdy people. Mostly Methodist and Baptist, they often stayed in the grimy taverns, in route to congregations or in search of new flocks. They routinely confronted primitive savagery and faced it down with a story far better than the raw materialism that otherwise propelled the throngs surging westward for lands and riches.
Often at the expense of their lives, the early preachers constructed the spiritual nodules of civilization, order and technological advance that transformed a howling wilderness into a seamless network of speed, commerce, comfort, security and instantaneous communication.
There are few direct monuments to the early American evangelists who bent the frontier into modernity. But the Gospel mountain folk music pumped into the Cracker Barrel is a faint reminder that order doesn’t emerge from a void, and progress is not automatic. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” particularly reminds that we are all part of a wider trans generational connection with temporal and eternal ramifications. One particular stanza stands out:
We sang the songs of childhood
Hymns of faith that made us strong
Ones that Mother Maybelle taught us
Hear the angels sing along.
Comment by JuliaMarks on September 18, 2014 at 8:03 am
How nice. And how nicely written. Thank you.
Comment by Dan on September 18, 2014 at 11:31 am
What a great article! Nicely written. Your comments at the end remind me of the statement that Christianity is always only one generation away from extinction. We are entrusted with and admonished to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” and it is our responsibility to faithfully and carefully pass it on to succeeding generations. I know that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church, but we still have a part to play.
I also noticed on my last Cracker Barrel visit that they were playing gospel music. I hope no one from the Freedom From Religion foundation notices, but I doubt many of them eat there – no gluten free options as of yet. If Cracker Barrel is the Southern nostalgia place to go, I nominate Bob Evans as the Midwest version, although neither place really gets grits right and you can’t get spoonbread! BTW, would you be willing to share the name of the place on Rt. 1 where you ate? From your description I thought it might be the Halfway House Restaurant.
Comment by Namyriah on September 18, 2014 at 2:19 pm
Mark, don’t mean to sound snarky, but there is a reason chain restaurants exist: so that a traveler knows what he’s getting when he parks his car. You might get a good meal at Aunt Martha’s Home Cooking, or you could find it to be a greasy spoon with overpriced and really crappy food. People like to whine about “mass-produced,” but there’s a reason the mass-produced places make a profit: we don’t like unpleasant surprises when we’re on the road. Ditto for the hotels. Super 8 and Baymont won’t be plush, but they’re predictably clean and reasonably priced, and you won’t get shuttled off to the stable where you’ll be using a donkey for a pillow.
Btw, having lived in Virginia, I’m familiar with those “historic taverns” you refer to. Their ambience comes at a price.
Comment by Pudentiana on September 18, 2014 at 4:55 pm
It is the consistent Christian refrains that matter.
Comment by Tomas Pajaros on September 19, 2014 at 11:24 pm
Gregg Allman version is unforgettable, a short time after loss of his brother Duane. Yes, you have to close your eyes and open your mind these days to keep the connection with our frontier spiritualism alive.
Comment by Ted Edwards on September 20, 2014 at 7:47 pm
Unliking unpleasant surprises, aye!
Sundays in recent months I have been a substitute celebrant/preacher for a good friend who is on the “sick and injured” list, and I am glad to do it. There is a Cracker Barrel near his church, and after the drive to get there I stop for breakfast. Maybe that makes me a “regular” as I get greeted by name and they know what I want for breakfast early on a Sunday morning.
Fast food restaurants are not much fun, but when traveling you know what you will get, about what it will cost, and that you will not be poisoned.
All those stories about travelers two centuries ago in Virginia and nearby colonial states might be told the very same way: people were glad to get the hospitality and knew pretty much that they would be safe, have a place to sleep, and be served reasonable food. All those places where “George Washington stayed here” are not so very different, and neither was George.
With that thought in mind, it seems as if our traveling culture has not really changed very much!
Comment by Mack on September 21, 2014 at 9:48 am
What a catalogue of clichés, stereotypes, and recycled 1960s put-downs.
The country-and-western milieu is tedious, but Cracker Barrel offers a varied menu with many healthy choices. The staff are unfailingly polite and efficient and Cracker Barrel restaurants are clean.
And, no, I’m not voting for the Huckabee-hillbilly band-Fisher-Price-Play-Church continuum.
Comment by Padre David Poedel on September 22, 2014 at 11:44 am
Having recently taken a 3 day sabbatical from parish life in order to pick up and deliver a used mini-bus our congregation purchased for our Lutheran high school,(from Kankakee, IL to Phoenix, AZ) I too reflected on the “homogenization” of America, at least along our Interstate highways. As a fairly regular patron of Cracker Barrel, I have observed many of the characteristics identified by the author.
But as I drove along the Interstates and tried to decide where to have my next meal, where to buy gas, and where to lay my head, I did something I have never done before: At each stop I took out my iPad and, using various apps I found the places I trusted, and yes, they were “chains” because after a long day behind the wheel I didn’t want any surprises.
I did something else that I am not sure how I feel about: rather than trying to get local stations on the terrestrial radio, I plugged my iPhone into the charger, got our my ear-buds and turned on my SiriusXM app. Much to my surprise and delight, I was able to listen to Fox News, or Deep Tracks….no local flavor, I could have been anywhere. I got to decide almost exactly what I listened to, and as a bonus the arrangement drowned out much of the wind noise inherent in these types of vehicles.
Expecting to be exhausted when I arrived, I was most grateful that I returned relaxed and ready to get back to being a parish pastor. Good stuff
Comment by Supertx on September 29, 2014 at 9:39 am
We just lost my mother a few weeks ago, who was the greatest influence, raising us with strong faith. We can’t let the work of our ancestors be in vain. How good a job are we doing of carrying on where they left off?