Growing up in southern Rhode Island, I thought everyone knew what a swamp Yankee is. Working in the Big City now (that would be Boston, not Providence), I now know how wrong I was.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, I found the following description of “Swamp Yankee,” from an academic no less, Ruth Schell, in her article “Swamp Yankee” in the book American Speech:  “A rural dweller—one of stubborn, old-fashioned, frugal, English-speaking Yankee stock, of good standing in the rural community, but usually possessing minimal formal education and little desire to augment it. Swamp Yankees themselves react to the term with slight disapproval or indifference…The term is unfavorably received when used by a city dweller with the intention of ridiculing a country resident; however, when one country resident refers to another as a swamp Yankee, no offense is taken, and it is treated as good-natured jest.”

Schell continues, “[t]he term is most frequently applied to older people and is often preceded by old. Sometimes it is shortened to swampy [or swamper]…[Swamp Yankees] were not among the religious and ambitious Pilgrims who had sailed to America on the Mayflower; but rather they were more often among the undesirables who had left England as the result of some form of misconduct and who retreated to the swamps when they arrived here.”

So what does this all have to do with my dad Archie? In truth, he is a very smart guy and has had plenty of book learnin’. But he was raised in Usquepaugh, which consisted of a few homes, lots of cows, and a chicken to human ratio of probably 10.000:1. We grew up knowing we were swamp Yankees. And we were proud of it.

I agonized about the tagline for the blog.  Would folks know what a Swamp Yankee is? Ultimately I liked the sound of “Tales of a Swamp Yankee at Sea.”  Maybe it captures the arc of Archie’s life. And it sounded better than “Old Coot and His Boat.”