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Have You Ever Been “Drunk as Cooter Brown”? Here’s How the Saying Came About
The first of many tales explaining the origins of Southern sayings
If there’s anything the South is known more for than their football teams and sweet tea, it’s their colorful dialect. In this series, we will look into how some of these sayings came to be common in households across the South.
We’ll begin with one of my favorites — “drunk as Cooter Brown”. Who is Cooter Brown, why was he drunk, and how has his penchant for booze lived on?
Technically there are two versions of how this phrase came to be.
The first claims that Cooter Brown was a white man who lived on the Mason-Dixon line between the North and South during the Civil War. Brown knew that he could potentially be drafted by either side, but he wasn’t having any of that. As he had friends and family on both sides, he needed to find a way to prevent becoming a soldier.
Brown began drinking excessively, so much so that whenever he was approached by members of the Union or Confederate army, they deemed him unfit to join their ranks. He kept this up every single day until the war ended.
The other version claims that Cooter Brown was a Cherokee Indian or bi-racial (Cherokee and black) man…
