This installation of the Franklin Stove Blog is a departure from the usual format.

It’s fictional, based on accounts of actual events.

It might even be considered a ghost writ post.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

In 1968, when I was last alive in Bryant-Denny Stadium, the song “Dixieland Delight” wouldn’t have appealed to many students.

I wouldn’t have in my wildest imagination thought that students could get into such a redneck anthem.

Spend my dollar, parked in a holler,
‘Neath the mountain moonlight.
Hold her up tight, make a little lovin’,
A little turtle dovin’.
On a Mason-Dixon night.
Fits my life, oh so right,
My Dixieland Delight.

The song was so hokey that students began chanting vulgar taunts along with it, leading to it being banned from the stadium in 2015. In 2018, the song returned, under the condition that it would be sung without the obscene chants that had been added by students.

During the Alabama Vanderbilt game, if I hadn’t been a ghost, I would’ve puked when the song was sung along with by thousands of seemingly hysterically happy fans. The team’s elephant mascot “Big Al” led the crowd’s singing which was accompanied by the flashing lights I can’t stand.

I wonder what my friend Estelle would have thought to see black cheerleaders dancing along to the song, making lasso moves as if they were on horseback. I know she never cottoned to anything with “Dixie” in it.

Since so many students come from areas that have no relationship to the Mason-Dixon line and certainly have been nowhere near a holler, maybe they just used the song to let off some steam. They had been percolating in pheromones for hours. I could chalk it up to pent up sexual frustration.

The football team continues to win at Bryant Denny Stadium, my home away from life. But the fans in the stadium could well be in a redneck version of a Fellini movie.