Well, I got a gal that's sweet to me
She just ain't what she used to be
Just a little high headed
That's plain to see
Don't get above your raising
Stay down to earth with me
Now looky here gal, don't you high hat me
I ain't forgot what you used to be
When you didn't have nothing
That was plain to see
Don't get above your raising
Stay down to earth with me
Now you don' have to raise your head so high
Every time you pass me by
'Cause it don't mean nothing
To me, you see
Don't get above your raising
Stay down to earth with me
Now looky here gal you better be yourself
And leave that other stuff on the shelf
You're country, baby
That's plain to see
Don't get above your raising
Stay down to earth with me
Well, I got a gal that's sweet to me
She just ain't what she used to be
Just a little high headed
That's plain to see
Don't get above your raising
Stay down to earth with me
I'm collecting material about the phrase, and found these gems:
At its most benign, it's simply a reminder of remembering your roots and not looking down on those with less success. But, quite often, it's an admonition not to strive too hard to better yourself."Gettin' above your raisin'" is a phrase I've heard all my life. The notion is you want to change social classes. You try to change social classes, there's this feeling that you're forsaking the family, you're forsaking place, you're forgetting where you came from ... and here's this real fear that if you leave, that you'll become ashamed of where you came from. — Michael Birdwell, historian
Presumably, it's a protective mechanism. While succeeding despite humble beginnings requires a lot of "luck" (in TNC's estimation) or being "blessed" (in Dreher's), it inevitably signals to the vast majority who don't that they've failed. It's not at all surprising that they'd resent that.
That sentence is the title of historian Bill Malone's new book about country music (the subtitle is Country Music and the Southern Working Class). Before that, in 1981, it was the title of a hit record by country music neo-traditionalist Ricky Skaggs. In 1951, it was recorded by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. But long before any of this, it was (and still is) a common piece of folk wisdom among lower-class white people, especially in the South.For many people of other regions or social classes, the saying may sound odd, counter-intuitive, and even un-American. In America, we're often told that "getting above your raisin'" — transcending the circumstances of birth — is the main point of existence. If Abe Lincoln had stayed in the log cabin, who would care? If Elvis had become a sincere but flat-broke folk singer, we wouldn't know his name. Americans don't buy stories about virtuous poor boys who stay poor, and we're offended at the suggestion that there might be something wrong with individual self-realization. The impulse to rise above our origins is buried deep in our national DNA. Immigrants have always come here to escape poverty and persecution and become rich and powerful. The right to perpetual self-invention might as well be enshrined in the Constitution.
The heretical wisdom embodied in "Don't get above your raisin'" suggests that roots, family, communal identity, and solidarity are all more important than individual striving or success. This is a way of thinking that most American intellectuals would associate with "traditional" or "pre-modern" cultures. But Malone, a professor emeritus in history from Tulane University, is also a good old boy from East Texas who knows that the preference for group loyalty and solidarity has lived on in modern America among rural people and blue-collar workers. In Don't Get Above Your Raisin', he argues persuasively that, in the last half of the 20th century, country music, which expressed the daily concerns of white Southern working people, broke out of the Southern region to become the cultural voice of America's white working class.
Appalachian values define success differently than the rest of the culture. You can be successful if you want to be, but your first goal in life is to take care of your "blood-kin." Family is more important than the lure of things and the "finery" of "fancies." It is a reality in these hills that parents will try to keep one child at home to take care of them in their old age. They keep them from experiencing the wider world in order to keep them from wanting to leave. A young lady in a rural community where I served a church was one such person. She was thirty years old before she had ever seen one of the Tennessee Valley lakes or the big town of Kingsport, TN, which was only about 45 minutes from home. They didn't want her "gettin' above her raisin.'"This is possibly why when I was serving in another county, in the late 1980s, I was told that there were still homes along the Kentucky line in Southwest Virginia where folks lived that the houses didn't have anything but dirt floors. It "floored" me when I first heard that. The person telling me told me that they had nice cars in the driveway, seemed outwardly to be as well off as anyone, and there was usually a big satellite dish in the yard somewhere, but the house had a dirt floor. Folks were practicing the saying.
Well, admittedly, that's an extreme example, but the people of the mountains know, in a deep and entrenched way, that material good times are often followed by materially poor times. The Lord does give and take away. As Grandmother Ketron used to say, "Everything, whether good or bad, comes to an end." It takes strength of resolve to weather hard times, and good times often soften us in ways that will hurt us when the next downturn comes. The coal industry is one example of that.
If you live humbly, stay within your means, learn to do as my Uncle Conrad told me ("put something in the ground" by which he meant, "grow your own food"), keep yourself humble, and take care of the people around you first, you will come out a lot better than those folks putting all their faith in their swollen bank accounts. Beware the person who "eats too high on the hog" or builds too many rooms on the house, or wears too fine a pair of shoes, or drives too fancy a car. They're getting above their raising.
...and compare and contrast THESE versions:
Ricky Skaggs