Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else but Me was published by Peachtree Publishers in 1981, one of Grizzard’s earliest collections of newspaper humor columns and a book that established his readership beyond the Atlanta market. The title (a riff on the World War II standard “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”) announces Grizzard’s method: take something familiar and make it Southern, make it funny, make it ache a little.
Grizzard wrote a syndicated column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1977 until his death in 1994 — over 3,500 columns that made him one of the most widely read humor columnists in America. His subjects were the textures of Southern life: church dinners, high school football, pickup trucks, hound dogs, country music, grits (endlessly), divorce (he was married four times), and the changes transforming the South from rural to suburban, from segregated to integrated, from agricultural to corporate.
His humor was personal, confessional, and deliberately provincial — he wrote as a man who knew his world was disappearing and chose to celebrate it rather than analyze it. Critics accused him of sentimentalizing the Old South and ignoring race; defenders argued that his comedy was a form of grief disguised as entertainment, that beneath the jokes about grits and dawgs was a genuine elegy for a culture being erased by progress.
The columns work best in small doses — each is a performance of perhaps 600 words, building to a punchline or a moment of unexpected tenderness — and the books collect them without much editorial shaping.
Collecting Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree
First edition (Peachtree Publishers, Atlanta, 1981): Softcover original.
Market values:
- First printing: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $25–$60