It sits on the border of largely what is the Midwest and the South. People from Louisville area call it Kentuckiana since its part Kentucky and part Indiana. In my honest opinion, you don’t get to the true Midwest until you get about 1/3 of the way into Indiana or somewhere above Bloomington, Indiana and Columbus, Indiana. The same can be said for Ohio that you don’t really get into the Midwest until you get somewhere north of Cincinnati or closer to Columbus and then its definitely northern.
In Indiana, I notice a big difference in the cultural aspect of people whereas the Southern 1/3 of the state pretty much from US 50 on southward identify more with Kentucky than they do with the Indianapolis area or Northern Indiana. They might claim to be from Indiana but the truth is that a lot of their kinfolk came from the South and especially Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and that area of the US.
So in my view you only really get into the Midwest once you get about 50 miles or 75 miles north of the Kentucky border depending where you are Indiana or Ohio and then you lose the Southern cultural aspects of things in many cases.
For example, my nearest very large city is Indianapolis which has a great many streets with Northern names for states and some of the main thoroughfares are New York Street, Massachusetts Avenue and although they do have some north south streets like Georgia Street or Kentucky Ave a great many of the downtown streets take their names from places in the north rather than southern states.
Louisville is definitely in the South. You can tell by the accents and by the cultural leanings even though it yearns to be a Midwestern city like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, or St. Louis its simply never going to be Midwestern. That goes doubly with the mentality that I’ve seen in Kentucky and Louisville over the years. They just have a lot of Southern mannerisms and attitudes. For example, when it comes to race in many northern locations such racial comments would be seriously frowned up but in places like Louisville or other Kentucky cities they have a pre-1960s mentality when it comes to civil rights and equality under the law.
That’s one of many issues that I think keeps Louisville into being a Southern city and Southern culture and attitudes being among the biggest factors. It’s probably also why Louisville really hasn’t graduated to being a top tier city even though its not going to ever be a large US metro area it could still be a lot better than what it really is. Which is a southern town with the Mayberry complex that doesn’t really know what it wants to be when it grows up. Most of that you can chalk up to Kentucky being one of the most backwards economically and socially as well as in the quality of education.
I spent a few years of life in the Chicago region and the difference between say Northern Indiana, SW Michigan and NE Illinois and what you will find in the Southern 1/3 of Indiana and Kentucky is like night and day. Of course, there are racists in all places but in Kentucky and Southern Indiana its more of a cultural stigma that we might get afraid of those people of different color in those big bad cities.
What’s quite hilarious is that I’ve been told by native Kentuckians and people in Southern Indiana that I should move to Chicago because I don’t share their Southern cultural values in this region. What’s comical about that is that they have more in common with the poorer parts of Chicago than I really do in that the South Side of Chicago is actually about equal in per capita income and family income as Southern Indiana and Kentucky. The only real difference is based on skin color and crime issues. The education level in most of the South End of Chicago is about equivalent to the educational achievement level that one would find in most of the Kentucky and Southern Indiana.
A person that befriended me a few months ended up in the part of South Central Indiana where I live and her city of origin is Chicago, IL. When I first met her she noted that I said nothing negative about Chicago or the area around the lake stretching from Wisconsin state line all the way through Illinois, NW Indiana to Michigan. I told her that the reason why I didn’t end up as sour grapes when she mentioned Chicago was my 6 plus years in NW Indiana so I went to the city many times for relaxation, shopping, travel, etc. She said when Chicago is mentioned in these parts its like most people get all disgusted and turn their nose about a place 90 percent of them probably haven’t even been much less a region that they are putting down.
The difference is that I’ve lived near and around Chicago before and I’ve also lived in Kentucky for about the same amount of time just under a decade at some point. The differences couldn’t be any more different than night and day between the two regions at least for most of those areas. The one difference is that most of Kentucky economically, socially and educationally is much like what one would experience in the South Side of Chicago and certain NW Indiana areas like Hammond, Gary, etc where the incomes are closer together than one would think considering that Kentucky is 47th in the US income wise, 47th in median family income, etc. Just having topped over 50,000 a year in recent years and the average income of places in South Side of Chicago are pretty close. In fact, the South Side of Chicago has an average household income of 54,000 a year while in Kentucky its about 50,250 dollars so in fact all those Kentuckians and Southern Indiana residents talking about how much better they are than Chicago need to look really hard in the mirror.
I’ve even heard these derogatory comments among a lot of people from Louisville which isn’t exactly a peach of a city and nothing to really brag about. If anything, Kentucky is definitely in the South and has more in common with parts of dirt poor Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia than anywhere in the northern 1/2 to 1/3 of the country.
Louisville’s claim to fame is stuff like bourbon distilling, the Kentucky Derby, Muhammad Ali and basically rolling up the streets by about 9 pm on most nights unless you can find a dive bar or one of the few upscale establishments opening up around the downtown area or Main Street.
As far as the music scene in Lousiville, its that it mostly consists of country and or rock with a mix of grunge or alternative type bands that practice in a garage somewhere and sound like they’ve never taken any music training or classes in their lives. That’s why you don’t find quality and talented musicians coming out of the hills and hollers of Kentucky versus what you would find in other urban areas like Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta or elsewhere.
Kentucky likes to think that its Midwestern but its not anywhere close to being Midwestern in attitudes, educational levels, personal sensibilities and common sense. Its like a place where common sense mixed with quality education was sent to die and the mentality is alive and well. I never had any preconceived notions about Kentucky until I had lived there for a few years and I started looking at what kind of places I was living in as far as the culture and the quality of state and local governments and I was like “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
I was raised up to tell the truth, be honest, work hard and have self discipline and I don’t find a whole lot of that in the character of a lot of the people from Kentucky. Its like having a bunch of people with such shady and narcissistic outlook on everything that it clouds their judgment and potential because they refuse to adapt to the outside world.
It’s kind of like the educational system in many parts of Kentucky especially around Louisville being generally of such poor quality that half or more of the kids in high school can barely read and write at a 12th grade level much less understand harder concepts that they will have to master in trade schools and college training. That’s why a good deal of them have to take remedial classes at the University of Louisville, UK, Kentucky Technical Colleges like KCTCS, etc.
The schools are so crappy that even my in-laws in Kentucky actually had to pay extra money to have their daughters children educated in a Christian type of school as the public education system in Kentucky is so bad that it ranks constantly in the bottom 10 states of the USA in most years. Not to mention that Kentucky ranks 47th in educational achievement which is at least a dozen places below or more than most Midwest states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc.
That’s another big difference between most Midwestern states and Kentucky and that’s the difference in quality of education and quality of colleges whereas the University of Louisville only ranks like 165th out of all of the top colleges in America and University of Kentucky is only about 125th. This despite those two schools being supposedly the best that Kentucky really has to offer and they can’t even make the top 100 colleges and universities in most every discipline. Not even in engineering does U of L rank in the top 100 and not even in law schools. That’s despite that university having one of the largest endowments in the entire nation that it can’t even place above many other schools with less in the way of resources.
It’s those sorts of things that really count along with the large state land grant colleges that were started in the North like Indiana, Purdue, Michigan State, U Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin and then other schools of good academic standing like Notre Dame, Northwestern, Iowa, Minnesota, etc.
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