hillbilly
What does the term hillbilly refer to?
How have hillbillies been portrayed in American culture?
How did the 1972 film Deliverance impact the perception of hillbillies?
How has the term hillbilly been reclaimed or redefined over time?
The term hillbilly, which is often considered pejorative, refers to isolated white Americans with origins in rural and mountainous areas, often in the South, Appalachia, or the Ozarks. The hillbilly has been a particularly enduring image in American culture, one that has come to symbolize not only largely negative images of unsophisticated white rural Americans but also a values system based on a simpler life that has been portrayed in popular culture and elevated by politicians including Jimmy Carter and JD Vance.
Stereotype
Stereotypically, hillbilly describes an impoverished white person living in a rural or mountainous area with little connection to urban areas or other parts of the country. The hillbilly is portrayed as ignorant, uneducated, and unsophisticated; they are often depicted as being unkempt in appearance, perhaps noticeably dirty or walking around barefoot. The hillbilly occupies a status as a “white other” that is exotic and different to a middle-class white audience while also existing within the same racial group, making the hillbilly a figure that is more relatable, deserving of sympathy, and sometimes romanticized.
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History
One of the earliest appearances of the term in print was in 1900, in an article in the New York Journal by political correspondent Julian Hawthorne, in which he wrote:
A hill-billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.
Historian Anthony Harkins, author of Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2004), has linked the emergence of the term at the turn of the 20th century to the growing presence of extractive industry in Appalachia at that time, which disrupted the subsistence economies that had previously sustained the area’s residents. As local people protested the development of company towns and their poor working and living conditions, company owners sought to position themselves as agents of good by painting locals as backward and their lifestyle as unhealthy. Hillbilly does not appear to have been widely used, however, in the period before World War I.
During the 1920s and ’30s, the popularity of “hillbilly music,” a genre of commercialized Appalachian folk music, often with a farcical or self-satirizing quality, significantly contributed to the national spread of the concept of the hillbilly. Several Depression-era comic strips, such as Paul Webb’s Mountain Boys cartoon in Esquire magazine and Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, further developed and popularized both the visual image and the perceived social inadequacy of the hillbilly.
The emerging popularity of Minnie Pearl and Hank Williams at the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s and early 1950s nodded to the charm and even brilliance of country artists with hillbilly roots. As evidence, Williams came to be known as the “Hillbilly Shakespeare.” The popularity of shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show in the 1960s further sanitized the hillbilly image. That more wholesome take on the hillbilly was decisively upended by 1972’s Deliverance, which featured Southern mountain people as sadistically violent degenerates, a film adaptation that Harkins describes as “indisputably the most influential film of the modern era in shaping national perceptions of southern mountaineers and rural life in general.” The film ushered in a horror subgenre of stories of modern suburbanites and city folk suffering a gory demise at the hands of deranged hillbillies, notably including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). At the same time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of the civil rights movement, working-class white people began to reclaim the term hillbilly as a point of pride. The 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer from Georgia, helped further the embrace of the values of a simpler life as being admirable and not backward.
The term saw a resurgence in the 21st century with the 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, a memoir in which the future senator and vice president recounts his upbringing in Ohio and Kentucky by his “Mamaw” and “Papaw.” He writes of the dignity of people dealing with hard times and poverty:
Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics. But the stories made me feel like hillbilly royalty, because these were classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side.
Meanings
The meanings assigned to the hillbilly and the rhetoric in which the hillbilly has appeared has varied throughout the term’s history. During the Great Depression the presence of the hillbilly in popular culture reflected public anxiety about social and economic collapse. In some cases, such as the early years of the Li’l Abner comic strip, the character of the hillbilly provided a moral contrast to characters meant to embody the excesses of capitalism. In Li’l Abner, Capp’s portrayal of the unsophistication and ignorance of the hillbilly residents of Dogpatch facilitated his criticism of the wealthy outsiders who tried to take advantage of them. Also in the 1930s the prevalence of portrayals of mountain-dwellers as largely intellectually disabled as a result of inbreeding fueled eugenic calls for compulsory sterilization. Midwestern city-dwellers’ anxiety about increased migration from Southern and rural areas beginning in the 1950s elevated the concept of the hillbilly as a negative counterpoint to the more refined nature of modern life.
Harkins identifies similarities between hillbilly and other terms meant to denigrate working-class rural white people, such as the intent to indicate “a diet rooted in scarcity…physical appearance and clothing that denoted hard and specifically working-class laboring conditions…ignorance and racism, and…economic, genetic, and cultural impoverishment,” but ultimately finds hillbilly to be a highly malleable term, capable of also encompassing positive qualities, such as romantic ruralness, pioneer heritage, and personal and communal self-sufficiency. He argues that the term’s ability to hold so many disparate meanings has been key to its endurance for more than a century.