A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne
When I was growing up in suburban California, whenever my high school baseball team had an away game in farm country north of San Francisco, as soon as we passed the first cow pasture some wiseass in the back of the bus would break out an imaginary banjo and start into the theme song from Deliverance.
Dum-da-ling-ding-ding-ding-ding. Dum-da-ling-ding-ding-ding-ding.
This was the 1980s, so we were too young to have seen the 1972 film, and I’m sure none of us had read the novel on which it was based. Still, the infamous scene from the movie was by then such a part of American pop culture that the brief banjo riff had become, for kids like us, a kind of snarky shorthand for “rural” and “backward.” Each time, the joke would spread outward from the back of the bus until half the team was picking imaginary banjos, all of us cracking up at these inbred hillbillies who would within a few hours beat the tar out of us soft suburban boys at baseball.
