My family is from the South, I am from the South and so growing up I would always hear stories from my grandfather about how poor they were. He always told me they had no roads in his East Tennessee farming town or electricity, or running water, or sewage, and a plethora of other common things. My grandfather ended up joining the Tennessee Valley Authority and as I've read and as he's stated they brought more modernity to the region. My question is was the South in general this poor and backwards (barring cities like Charleston, Atlanta, etc,) and if so what brought about the urbanization of the South?
The civil war and the end of slavery exhausted the Southern economy. So yes, a lot of the Southern States were very poor. In fact, during the governorship of Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi(1928-1932), the state had less than $2000 in it's treasury and was over $10,000,000 in debt.
Prior to the New Deal, the standard of living in all rural areas was quite low in comparison to city residents. Since the south was quite Rural, it had a very poor standard of living. Without electricity, you can't have running water or sewage systems. By 1935, these amenities had been common in cities for thirty years. Before the Rural Eletrification Act passed as part of the New Deal, only 10% of rural households had electricity. Manual labor like carrying water and chopping wood occupied a huge portion of daily life. Having electricity was a dramatic improvement in southern living standards, and brought the rural areas into the economic fabric of the nation, in that they could buy the same things and had far more similar lifestyles to urban residents, even if they were not precisely urbanized in the sense of physically moving into a city.