H.C. Nixon was born in Merrellton, Calhoun County, Alabama, in 1886. A faculty member at the University of North Carolina and Vanderbilt University, Nixon was a contributor to the Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, in 1930, and was the author of Forty Acres and Steel Mules (1938) and editor of the Vanderbilt University Press. Lower Piedmont Country was first published in 1946.

Sarah N. Shouse is on the history faculty at Alabama A & M University in Huntsville.