Hillbilly

Hillbilly can be a pejorative term referring to people who dwell in remote, rural, mountainous areas usually of the United States. Because of its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term is frequently considered derogatory and is highly offensive to those of Appalachian heritage. However, the term is also often used in celebration of Appalachian heritage such as in the Hillbilly Hot Dog stand photo below.

History

Hillbilly Hot Dogs, a roadside hot dog stand located near Huntington, West Virginia.

The term "Hill-Billies" is first encountered in documents from 17th century Ireland. Roman Catholic King James II landed at Kinsale in Ireland in 1689 and began to raise a Catholic army in an attempt to regain the British throne. Protestant King William III, Prince of Orange, led an English counterforce into Ireland and defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. A significant portion of William III's army was composed of Protestants of Scottish descent (Planters) who had settled in Ulster in northern Ireland. The southern Irish Catholic supporters of James II referred to these northern Protestant supporters of King William as "Hill-Billies" and "Billy Boys" — Billy being an abbreviation of William.

It is believed that the term "hillbilly" in the United States was conferred during the early 18th century by the occupying British soldiers as a carry over from the Irish term, in referring to Scots-Irish immigrants of mainly Presbyterian origin, dwelling in the frontier areas of the Appalachian Mountains. These Protestant Irish colonists brought their cultural traditions with them when they immigrated. Many of their stories, songs, and ballads dealt with the history of their Ulster and Lowland Scot homelands, especially relating the tale of the Protestant King William III, Prince of Orange.

Yet another explanation for the term comes from the European immigrants to the United States who settled in the Appalachian Mountains. Many of these immigrants were of Germanic origin and were named Wilhelm with the short form Willy, a common Germanic name during that time. Those Wilhelms, who went by Bill or Billy, living in the Appalachian Mountains became known as "hillbillies," i.e., Bills who lived in the hills.

Alternatively, it is also speculated that the term emerged as a derogatory nickname given by the coastal plain-dwelling Anglo-Saxon Southerners to the hill-dwelling settlers of Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia (including modern West Virginia), and Eastern Kentucky, many of whom were ambivalent to the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

The use of the word was probably most apt (and relatively inoffensive) during the period between the western expansion of the early-to-mid nineteenth century and the post-war period of the 1940s. The advent of the interstate highway system and television brought many previously isolated communities into mainstream United States culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The Internet continues this integration, but many communities with relatively traditional lifestyles remain throughout the region.

Historically, there were conflicts between the mountain-dwelling "hillbillies" and the planters who lived on the coastal plains. During the American Civil War, many residents of western Virginia were pro-Union in that they generally did not own slaves and resented the political dominance of planters who did. The image of the Unionist mountaineer in West Virginia is misleading, however, as the mountainous counties of central, southern, and eastern West Virginia all voted for the Ordinance of Secession on May 23, 1861. A total war was waged against the mountaineers in much of West Virginia, whose residents were deemed "savages" by Union military authorities. Braxton and Webster counties were particularly targeted by Gen. George Crook. "Braxton and Webster are the haunts of the worst Rebel Bushwhackers in the country," wrote Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes. After the war, the Wheeling government carved two new counties out of Secessionist counties and named them after Lincoln and Grant.

Urban Slang Use

The term hillbilly is commonly used in non-Appalachian areas as a reference in describing socially backward people that fit certain "hillbilly" characteristics. Although the described person may not reside in a region that has hills of any kind, it is substituted in place of more disparaging terms like white trash. Regionally, it is also used as interchangeable slang for terms like Redneck.

Examples of such are present throughout popular culture and televised media.

• One example of this are the various hillbilly innuendos on the syndicated television show Married… with Children, which was set in Chicago and dealt regularly with Peggy Bundy's hillbilly upbringing in rural Wisconsin.
• Nickelodeon's syndicated cartoon program Hey Arnold! places a hillbilly residence inside of a sprawling metropolitan city.
• The town of Baileyville featured "The Baileyville Hillbillies" in their 2007 sesquicentennial parade

Music

Country music was originally called "hillbilly music," even by its fans. The term, coined in 1925 by country pianist Al Hopkins, persisted until the 1950s.

Now, the older name is deemed offensive (and inappropriate) and is hardly ever used. However, the term "hillbilly music" is now sometimes used to describe old-time music. An early tune that contained the word "hillbilly" was "Hillbilly Boogie" by the Delmore Brothers in 1946. Earlier, in the 1920s, there were records by a band called the Beverly Hillbillies. In 1927, the Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana, made a recording of black fiddler Jim Booker with other instrumentalists; their recordings were labeled "made for Hillbilly" in the Gennett files, and were marketed to a white audience. Also during the 1920s, an old-time music band known as the Hill Billies featuring Al Hopkins and Fiddlin' Charlie Bowman, achieved acclaim as recording artists for Columbia Records. By the late forties, radio stations broadcast music described as "hillbilly," originally to describe fiddlers and string bands, but was then used to describe the traditional music of the people of the Appalachian Mountains. The people who actually sang these songs and lived in the Appalachian Mountains never used these terms to describe their own music.

Popular songs whose style bore characteristics of both "hillbilly" and African American music were referred to, in the late 1940s and early 1950s as hillbilly boogie, and in the mid-1950s as "rockabilly." Elvis Presley was a prominent player of the latter genre. When the Country Music Association was founded in 1958, the term "hillbilly music" gradually fell out of use. However, the term "rockabilly" is alive and well.[1]

Later, the music industry merged hillbilly music, Western Swing, and Cowboy music, to form the current category C&W, Country and Western.

The famous bluegrass fiddler Vassar Clements described his style of music as "hillbilly jazz."

In Poland a hillbilly was reference to the people who live in the mountainous south of Poland in the part once occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Billy Hill and the Hillbillies are a musical/variety group at Disneyland Park (Anaheim) in Anaheim, California.

In fiction & popular culture

Hillbillies have often been characterized as naïve or ignorant hicks.

• The hillbilly lifestyle of the Ozarks was gently parodied in the comic strip Li'l Abner, which inspired a Broadway musical and movie by the same name.
• Another comic strip, Snuffy Smith offers a less gentle hillbilly family parody, featuring a lazy father, a hard-working church-attending mother, and a simple son "Jughaid" who wears a pan for a hat.
• Ma and Pa Kettle were very popular characters in comedic movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
• Hard Haid Moe in Disney's comics.
• In the 1960s American sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, the Clampett family were supposed to have come from the hills near a fictional hamlet in Arkansas known as Bugtussle. While Granny was from "across the river" in Tennessee, Jed and his family were from Arkansas as noted to the references of Tulsa and Joplin being close by.
• Festus, a prominent character on the TV series Gunsmoke, belonged to a hillbilly clan.
• Fuzzy Lumpkins, a villain from the Powerpuff Girls TV show, is a hillbilly.
• An episode of The Dukes of Hazzard saw Bo and Luke rescuing Daisy from being forced to marry into a family of sociopathic hillbillies.
• A recurring character on The Simpsons, Cletus Spuckler (aka the "Slack-Jawed Yokel") and his family are stereotypical hillbillies.
• In the WWF, a character known as Hillbilly Jim was made to portray a large man with a huge beard and wearing overalls back in the 1980s as a frequent tag team partner of Hulk Hogan.
• The 1960s American sitcom The Andy Griffith Show has two contrasting stereotypes of recurring hillbilly characters: The ignorant but kindly, impoverished but generous Darling family, portrayed by bluegrass band The Dillards and Denver Pyle; and the belligerent, paranoid, frankly violent buffoon, Ernest T. Bass, portrayed by Howard Morris.
• In 1970, the author James Dickey published the novel Deliverance, a story about four men going for a canoe-trip on a river in the mountains of Georgia. They encounter several sociopathic hillbillies and are subsequently attacked, captured, tortured, and raped by them. (Based on a real canoe trip in which he was actually helped by friendly mountaineers.)
• On Nickelodeon's The Amanda Show, starring Amanda Bynes, a recurring skit titled "Hillbilly Moment" would be featured. Amanda Bynes and Drake Bell would appear as stereotypical hillbillies and behave accordingly.
• A popular television comedy-variety show "Hee Haw" starred several well-known country singers and regularly lampooned the stereotypical hillbilly lifestyle.
• Rob Zombie's 1998 album, Hellbilly Deluxe, Hellbilly is a direct derivative of Hillbilly.
• In the popular late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live, hillbillies are portrayed in the skit Appalachian Emergency Room, with injuries only associable with the common media representation of hillbillies.
• The Arkansas Chuggabug, driven by Luke & Blubber Bear — hillbillies in a wooden buggy driven by a coal-fired range in Wacky Races is an American animated television series from Hanna-Barbera Productions.
• The Hillbilly Bears another animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, played on a social stereotype of the "hillbilly," with a gun-toting, mumbling father who was always "feudin'" with the neighbors.
• The Adult Swim show, Squidbillies, focuses on a family of hillbilly/redneck squids and their stereotypical misadventures.
• In the 2006 Disney/Pixar hit film, Cars and the video game of the same name, there is hillbilly tow-truck named Mater.
• In the Nickelodeon animated show Avatar: The Last Airbender, the episode "The Swamp" features a tribe of swamp-dwelling waterbenders that speak and behave like stereotypical hillbillies.
• Lum and Abner was a popular radio show about two stereotypical hillbillies that ran from 1931 to 1954.
• In Thomas and Friends, there is a hillbilly tank engine named Billy.
• In the animated series King of the Hill, Hank Hill's neighbor Kahn Souphanousinphone often refers to Hank and the other Arlen, Texas locals as hillbillies.
• In the film October Sky, about a group of young West Virginia amateur rocketry enthusiasts, the characters refer to themselves as 'hillbillies'.
• In Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, Solaceon Town is also known as Hillbilly Town.

See also

• List of ethnic slurs
• Hillbilly heroin
• Redneck
• White cracker
• White trash
• Poor White
• Trailer trash
• Yokel
• Cletus Spuckler
• Mountain men
• Daniel Baker College: College Mascot
• Hillbilly armor
• Verona High School (New Jersey) Sports Teams known as The Hillbillys

References

• Hillbilly, A Cultural History of an American Icon, by Anthony Harkins
• Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains & What the Mountains Did to the Movies, by J.W. Williamson
• Baltimore Psychobilly - Internet radio show featuring hillbilly music