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As you know, the South is known for its hospitality, traditions, football, pageants, and food. Football is almost like a religion here. People say their priorities are faith, family, and then football. People eat, breathe, and sleep it in the South. It's a huge deal.

Southern people are raised with a work ethic. My son is 5 years old and does chores. My mom was a dance teacher, and the training and discipline it takes to be a dancer I've carried with me in Hollywood.

Oh man, I love what the South brings as far as the soul, and I really have noticed from even the early days of listening to OutKast and Goodie Mob that Atlanta and the South has a diverse sound to it. You have bounce music. You have soulful musicians. You have artists with vocals who try to do different things.

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern.

I have a tight-knit Southern family.

My style is not specific to the antebellum South, but it's heavily inspired by the Jim Crow era.

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.

Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.

I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music.

Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.