The South is a most ambitious tapestry, a journey through the warp and woof of the geography and literature, the politics and history, the real people and the equally real myths of the only American region that has ever known the devastation and aftermath of total war. It is the story of a place with strange weather and even stranger religions, home to a Good Old Boy cult ruled by a succession of demagogues unknown anywhere else in America, from John C. Calhoun through Herman Talmadge and Huey Long. It is a place with a feudal code and a populist history, a tragic psyche and an earthy humor. Hall and Wood have captured that magical place, revealing the South through its distinctive music from "The Bonnie Blue Flag" to Roy Acuff's "Great Speckled Bird" - and its distinctive literature - Faulkner, O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Margaret Mitchell. They have drawn portraits from hundreds of hours of interviews with Southerners famous and obscure - Eudora Welty and Tom T. Hall, Erskine Caldwell and Dee Brown. Here is the birth of the blues, from Robert Johnson to Bessie Smith, from Muddy Waters to John Lee Hooker. Here are Mother Jones at Matewan and Owen Madden, the New York syndicate chief who became the "owner and operator" of the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Here are hundreds of unforgettable images: a parade of Mercedeses driving Southern belles to cotillions along the Magnolia Trail in Mississippi; the Holy Ghost cult of Appalachia, where circuit riders bring the word of the Lord as translated through handling poisonous snakes, speaking in tongues, and drinking battery acid; and Alex Darkwah, a native of Ghana who is now a college professor in Arkansas, remembering W. E. B. Du Bois in the last months of his life.