From David Gates’ review of ‘The Outlaw Bible of American Literature’: The Rebel Establishment complete with great quote and weirdly out of place tech reference (extra points if you get it):

From Waylon Jennings’s autobiography, … the Platonic country-music anecdote, about Hank Williams:

“Faron Young brought Billie Jean, Hank’s last wife, to town for the first time. She was young and beautiful, and Hank liked her immediately. He took a loaded gun and pointed it to Faron’s temple, cocked it, and said, ‘Boy, I love that woman. Now you can either give her to me or I’m going to kill you.’

“Faron sat there and thought it over for a minute. ‘Wouldn’t that be great? To be killed by Hank Williams!’ “

I’m with the levelers on this one. That’s not literature? All right then, I’ll go to hell.

Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there’s anybody left around, people will be amused at their great-grandparents’ failure to grasp the self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians. (Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous.