Genuine Curteich – Chicago. “C. T. Art – Colortone” Postcard, early 1950s. (click to enlarge)
hill billy n. Uncouth countrymen, particularly from the hills. “You one-gallused hill billies, behave yourselves.”
This definition of a hillbilly is from an entry by University of Arkansas professor J. W. Carr in Vol. II of Dialect Notes, published in 1904. It is the earliest academic recognition of the word, which was likely coined in the preceding decade. “One-gallused,” denoting suspenders with one broken strap worn by a poor rustic, is earlier rural slang than “hill billie”.
Relax, self-identified hillbillies and hard country music fans. We are not assailing your proud but mythological heritage. Things hillbilly – music, humor, cartoons, feuding mountaineer fables – have been motivated by capitalism, facilitated by industrial technology, and distributed by mass media to serve modern sensibilities.
Don’t believe the advertising. Disregard the packaging. Unwrapped, this anti-modern icon is revealed to be a hybrid rural/urban interactive product assembled from many sources. Our uncouth, but musical, countryman is not exclusively of the Appalachians, his legendary association with the mountain South notwithstanding.
Hillbilly humor for instance has been influenced by New England books and plays, minstrel shows, and vaudeville. Country music, originally called ‘hillbilly’, has undeniable southern white roots, but has had players, fans, and management from other demographics. Folks with a rural family background are especially interested in accounts of that rude past. Authentic or contrived, they don’t seem to care. Few, however, wish to return to the harsh privations and poverty of subsistence agriculture as the “Who Longs For The Good Old Days?” postcard asks. Visions of Arcadian rusticity are more likely to be floating in the heads of educated urbanites.
Only comic strip hillbillies are true primitives. Country musicians from the start embraced improvements to transportation and communications. They have since shown an extraordinary capacity to respond to changing public taste and unfolding commercial opportunities. Though this genre ritualistically acknowledges rural traditions, its performers and their audiences are forever evolving and adapting to new circumstances.
This pop culture icon is a product of the machine age’s alternating nostalgia and disdain for our agrarian past. Hillbillies are not really an outsider, other, or folk phenomenon. Hillbillies are interesting, sometimes captivating, even if they are manufactured rustics. There is no one hillbilly type, but many and they continue to evolve.
Just as the country was slipping into a catastrophic financial chasm in the late 1920s, mass media discovered the public had an insatiable interest in the outlandish behavior of impoverished rustics. The hillbilly is the incarnation of anti-materialism. Yet he lives self-satisfied within a family, in a community, somehow surviving though ignorant, foolish, and often a vessel of bad habits. He does possess frontier skills and is stubbornly self-reliant. It was during this tragic time that the colorful mountaineer character thrived providing some consolation to a populace who felt its streamliner train ride to modernity had gone off the rails.
Hillbillies are a six-pack of fun, but with hangover potential. Droll, but given to outbursts of violence, they are a blend of half a dozen stock American characters. Unlike African-Americans or Native Americans, these rustics are yet allowable stereotypes. The rains of reform have not sanitized this personification of multi-dimensional incorrectness. Nor has he been completely forgotten.
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