Name games: The last shall be first

Up the hill from my house in Athens, Georgia, looking out on Atlanta Highway, there’s a red brick building that houses the Foy Horne law office.

Foy and Horne are not partners. They’re one and the same. Foy is the attorney’s first name, Horne is his last. He’s a fine example of one of my favorite Southern traditions: family name first names.

Southerners are not the only cultural group that goes in for this, but we do seem to do an outsized share of it. Why this is, I’m not entirely sure. It probably has something to do with Scots being so heavily represented among the early white settlers of the southern regions. Scots were big on signifying lineage, honoring a father or respected uncle, or keeping a mother’s family name alive. So were the English and the Irish, for that matter. What I do know for sure is that because of this family name-first predilection, I grew up in a southern town — Laurel, Mississippi — among men and boys whose names sounded like law firms or advertising agencies even though, in most cases, they weren’t lawyers or hucksters.

The names weren’t just distinctive. They felt good to say. Still do. They’re part of the poetry of the South, part of the music. Say these out loud when you read them:

Hilton Landrum.

Chalmers McCallum.

Baxter Sellers.

Sellers Scoggins.

Larkin Davis.

Morgan Holifield.

Hutton Poythress.

Austin Guy

Ethridge Mixon.

Truman Mills

Hunter Cole.

Liston Shows.

Bancroft Weems.

Orr Summerall.

Summerall Poole.

Deavours Yelverton.

Nothing against the many fine Billy Rays and Joe Bobs I have known, but for me, it’s the Hiltons and Huttons –and the Lampkins and the Listons --that truly represent Southern naming.

I am not, as you may have observed, a member of this club. I would have been Simpson Holston, like my father and his father before him, if my mother hadn’t put her foot down. While she was carrying me, she told my father, “Simpson, I think you have a beautiful name, but I am not fond of your nickname. And I refuse to have our first son be referred to as Little Simp.”

They compromised by choosing Noel, the name of his father’s favorite brother. I got back on the family name-first name train when my first son was born and we called him...no, not Simpson. A certain TV cartoon show had by that time put comic hex on that one. My son got my mother’s maiden, name, Damon, and my grandmother’s maiden name, Spence. I love the rhythm of it, the meter – Damon Spence Holston. And whenever I write his name out, I feel like I should have it notarized.