Talking Southern  —  Raising Cain

One used to hear this phrase – “raising Cain” – a lot in the church-going South, such as in the following examples:  

• “My mother-in-law was raising Cain with us about not getting up to see her often enough.”    

• “Tommy Ed was always sober as a church warden all week, but every Saturday night would go out drinking, partying, and raising Cain.”

• I swannee, what it’d take to embarrass that forever-complaining woman would scald a wash pot!  She’s always raising Cain about something or another.”

The more obvious phrase, at least in today’s anything-goes era, would be “raising hell,” which one heard quite often back then, too; but “raising Cain” was used in more genteel circles and could be said in mixed company.  One could tell his mama, Sunday School teacher, or flibbety-gibbet, sheltered spinster great-aunt that someone was “raising Cain,” but to say they were “raising hell” was liable to get one slapped so hard his clothes would be out of style, not to mention fit, when he stopped rolling.

Country singer Johnny Paycheck wrote a song a generation or so ago in which he sang,   “She tried to turn me on to Jesus, but I turned to the devil’s ways. And I turned out to be the only hell my mama ever raised.”  That always struck your compiler as a clever – not to mention poignant – play on words, and because of its religious undertones, it happens to feed right into the phrase under discussion today, “raising Cain.”   What does the latter phrase mean?

Quite simply, in the book of Genesis, we read that Adam and Eve begot Cain and Abel, whom we can be sure fought like wild animals if subsequent brotherly patterns of behavior are any indication.  Your compiler and his wife raised two sons, now in their thirties, who beat on each other all the time growing up, and the older of those sons now has two young boys of his own, who like nothing more than to wrestle and pound on each other.  Brothers fight — it’s primordial, really.   When Adam and Eve’s boys got about grown, Cain killed Abel in a fit of jealousy and rage over a sacrifice to the Lord, becoming the world’s first murderer.  

Whether one takes the Creation account in Genesis as literal truth or as metaphor is beside the point for this discussion (or any other, in your compiler’s personal opinion, but he digresses.)  What is important to walk away with is that the parents of Cain sowed the proverbial whirlwind – they raised a Grade-A troublemaker right in their own home.  Thus, someone who was “raising Cain” was stirring up trouble, perhaps more than he or she realized. 

Your compiler doesn’t know what happened to this colorful old phrase.  He does not know when he has heard it said in recent years, but believes it is a colorful nugget of Southern speech that ought to be saved.