Q1: You know the ones. Little education, marrying cousins, moonshining, live in the Ozarks, Tennessee, or:
Q2: Did hillbillies ever actually exist?
God, yes. I used to be married to someone who turned into a hillbilly (except for the sex with relatives part)when we moved to the Ozarks.
First sign of where a hillbilly lives is the 2 or 3 dead cars in the yard
Well, moonshine is still made in various regions and counties with very low median incomes and poor roads tend to have fewer educational opportunities than the really rich suburbs of large cities.
As to all the other stereotypes, they are probably supported by some number of the inhabitants, just as inner cities, barrios, and ethnic ghettoes tend to find some individuals whose lifestyles tend to demonstrate the stereotypes of those places. On the other hand, while working my way through college in successive summer jobs, I encountered three different men who had “come down from the hill country” for work. One was absolutely illiterate and another could just about read a newspaper with a lot of effort, but each of the three had an unbeatable work ethic and a rigorous honesty that shamed most of their co-workers.
“Marrying cousins” was probably a function of having few enough opportunities to find exogamous mates in an area that was rather isolated. I know of a couple of examples, but I am not aware of it as a “standard” of their lifestyle, particularly as better transportation has made it into those regions.
If you mean semi-literate, dirt-poor, incestuous relationships, etc., then yeah, they’re all over the U.S. Rural poverty is just as bad a thing as urban proverty. It just takes on a different form.
Mrs. Rastahomie’s family lives in the Ozarks. Driving around her home town one encounters plenty of good ol’ boys and rednecks, but there are a few people who live in houses with no utilities, have outhouses, and eat whatever they can shoot. It’s an ugly little secret that the tourism board would rather not tell you about.
Moonshining? Hell yeah, there’s moonshining. There’s also meth labs and anti-government wackos who shoot up abortion clinics and then live in the woods until they get caught or die.
Yes, there are hillbillies. Their reality is a lot more unpleasant than their stereotype, but they do exist.
As someone who lives just a few miles from an area populated with mostly “hillbillies”, let me add my affirmative answer.
There are plenty of people in this country who fit the stereotype description of a hillbilly. These are individuals who had no use for “book learning” when there were crops to bring in, babies to take care of and kids to feed. My own grandmother only had a third grade education because there was work at home she was needed for.
Moonshining is still very popular. There’s really not any hiding from the “revenooers” since prohibition ended but it is still made in many places. In fact, I had some last summer.
In fact, and this is no insult to the OP, I find it amazing that someone didn’t know people “like this” exist(ed). Strange.
On one trip through Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, I found myself cruising along steep hill roads (with no guard rails!) looking down into shallow river valleys and seeing these little bitty communities of dirt roads, houses built on steep hillsides, nestled back in the woods, very little flat land, most with chimneys and stove pipes poking out of their tops and dirt paths going everywhere and no way to get to them from my road.
They looked quaint, but pretty darn isolated and every house was of wood, there were no new cars, no street lights, maybe a store or two, maybe a bar, and no place had anything like a lawn. I don’t think strangers would be real welcome in such places.
The Hillbilly tale/legend of inbreeding is true, due to isolation and lack of selection. A lot of kids experimented with sex with brothers, sisters and cousins and a few storks came around with bundles. Loretta Lynn was married to her much older husband at, what, 14? They married young in those communities.
A friend of mine told me once that he went ‘way back up in the hills’ to check on some property he inherited in some little ‘holler’ town in the Ozarks and felt like he drove into a Li’l Abner Comic strip. (Snuffy Smith comes from that and so does the soft drink Mountain Dew.) He used his jeep to get up those rutted, bad roads and said while the guys looked at him with a lot of suspicion and were not to happy to see him, there were a lot of fairly pretty young women and girls with jet black hair who showed a whole lot of interest in him. Said even the under aged ones weren’t exactly shy about making their intentions known.
He said there were a lot of young girls there who had that hard, angular, thin lipped, waspish ‘mean mountain look’ that led him to believe that whoever married one of them might learn the true meaning of the word ‘bitch.’
He also said that it’s not too good of an idea to go up there playing rap music on the CD player. There were no Blacks around anywhere. He did not get the feeling that the people were, like, KKK members or fanatics, but they just simply had no use for black people or probably any one of any color but white. He came back with a gallon of smooth, crystal clear moonshine, and still hasn’t decided if he’s going to but his 20 acres of wild woods up for sale or not.
See, here an acre of land goes at $16000. Up there, it sells for $2000.
He still talks about some of those raven haired pretty mountain girls he met. Not too seriously though, 'cause he saw some of their mothers and said lean and mean looking seems to go right to the bone and the older men reminded him of Deliverance.
What kind of dialects do hillbillies speak? I remember reading somewhere that in the 1930s, Tenessee Valley Authority surveyors came across communities speaking a version of English that had otherwise died out sometime in the 17th century.
Oh yeah, there are hillbillies everywhere. I am in Iowa, and I live next to the Jed Clampett family. Even though this is a relatively middle-class suburb, they live like trailer trash. They managed to afford this home instead of their former residence, a trailer, by lucking into one of the biggest moneymaking scams ever, the home insulation business. Sitting they own 7 rusty cars, in their yard are 5 snowmobiles (2 of them work), 3 boats on trailers, and a riding lawn mower. But with all that crap, they have no lawn left to mow, except a few tiny square feet around the trailers and cars rusting in the yard. They recently did a home renovation project and they buried all the concrete rubble in the yard. They’ve been doing home renovation projects continously for 5 years, and they’ve never finished a single one of them. There are big piles of wood and fencing sitting all over their yard, piles of worn used tires, etc. Somewhere in there, there’s probably a moonshine still. The daughter got knocked up, the son got a 17 year old girl pregnant, it’s a white trash factory over there
If I owned this house I’m living in, I’d have called the city inspectors years ago. They’d come out and flatten the hillbilly house with a bulldozer as a public nuisance.
Being that this is GQ and not MPSIMS or the Pit, I think we’d all do with remembering that hillbilly does not = lazy and stupid. Uneducated and stupid are not the same thing. Poor and lazy are not the same thing.
The work ethic of most of the hillbillies I have ever known (and I have known quite a few) rivals that of people who live with every convenience. These people work hard because they have to. If they don’t get up at sunrise and work all day long to take care of crops, they don’t eat. They understand that a hard day’s work doesn’t end at 5pm or when the boss leaves for the day–it ends when it’s too dark out to do anymore work.
Most hillbillies are not “trailer trash”. Most don’t even live in trailers–they live in houses that were built by hand. Houses that there fathers and grandfathers built, that have been built onto over the years to accomodate growing families.
You’re getting your stereotypes confused.
My twenty-one year old neighbor was a grandmother and I take offense to your question.
The previous owner of our farm had an all copper job in the kitchen and I take offense to your question.
The family who bought the lower forty acres had an eleven year old who well suffered transistion to womanhood and I take offense to your question.
Try http://www.lilabner.com , pervey.
Similar stories are commonly passed around, but they aren’t really accurate. In very isolated areas - and there are plenty of valleys in the Appalachians that qualify - dialects have been discovered which still contain certain aspects of English that otherwise disappeared in the 18th or 19th centuries. The people there do not, however, speak a “perfectly preserved” dialect from some earlier time. Language changes, in isolated groups as well as in every other society. The speakers of these isolated dialects have kept some aspects of their ancestors’ speech, discarded others, and invented some of their own - as speakers of every dialect of every language have done since the dawn of speech.
Greater communication, in the form of better roads as well as television and radio, have begun to eat away at these isolated mountain dialects, but there still exist communities too poor and isolated to have been absorbed into a Standard American English dialect.
oh boy, you think you have fun with hillbillies?
try irish Travellers.
you seen brad pitt in “snatch”?
like that.
i’m a medical student in dublin, and i see the victims of inter-clan knife fights all the time. and when one of them is in hospital 50 relatives move into the car-park and set up camp. oh yeah and they are an indigenous ethnic minority, so don’t call them names or you will get sued…
I think moonshiners still hide from “revenooers” not because of Prohibition but because of taxation. IOW, IIRC it’s perfectly legal to brew your own beer at home or to distill your own wine, but to distill your own hard liquor is illegal. The Man can’t tax it if you make it yourself.
Maybe a lawyer will be along in a minute to correct me.
The hillbillies (specifically speaking of Appalachian populations, with a branch over in the Ozarks) have their niche in the social ecology of this country. They are not to be confused with rednecks. They include Melungeons and Blue Fugaces. Their dialects and culture are different from lowland rednecks.
They are treated as the lowest form of white man in the nation. When I was growing up in Cleveland, I noticed that the Black population considered themselves superior to Hillbillies in the social pecking order. There were a number of them who had migrated there from West Virginia and lived in the ghetto because no white neighborhood would accept them. The hilly regions of southeast Ohio have some of their characteristics. As a teenager I lost my virginity to a skinny girl from there I picked up hitchhiking on the road outside Columbus. Instant clap and crabs.
In the 1960s I remember Bobby Kennedy visited Appalachia and was appalled at the poverty and living conditions there: the low life expectancy, lack of health care and sanitation. He said: No one in America should have to live like this, and he started a campaign to improve their situation. I think they may have been included in Martin Luther King’s Poor Peoples’ Campaign shortly before he and RFK were assassinated.
One of RFK’s daughters (Rory, I think) did an HBO documentary about a year or so ago on a rural family (no time to look for cites, but I’ll try to find something later).
I think they had a still, and IIRC, they had a satellite dish but no indoor plumbing. Part of the show focused on a son who was in jail, there was a daughter married to an abusive jerk, and I think the father had cancer (from coal mines, maybe).
She and her husband lived with this family for a year to make the film.
Gotta run, but I will find something more later.
The name of the HBO show was American Hollow. I recommend everyone watch it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-rv/photo/galleries/hollow/intro.htm
For the record, “hillbilly” is a pejorative.
If you want a glimpse into a whole 'nother world you should check out two documentary videos on the life of Jesco “Jesse” Green who makes his home in the mountains of West Virginny. Jesco is a self described “mountain dancer” who is carrying on in his father’s footsteps after Green Sr. was killed in a feud. Listen in awe as Jesco describes huffing gas, multiple personalities and threatens to kill his wife for failing to cook his eggs properly. The second video follows Jesco as he travels to Hollywood to appear in a segment of the Rosanne show and has his jailhouse swastica tattoos covered up on Sunset Strip. Both videos are fascinating and highly recommended. People like this really exist. I believe the videos are called Outlaw Dancer but they might be called Dancing Outlaw. Happy hunting.
Another WV hillbilly who has enjoyed the spotlight of notereity is Hasil Adkins, a one man band who has been releasing music for at least 20 years and maybe more. In order to get him to play a concert in Atlanta someone from the club had to drive to WV and bring him back with careful instructions to keep him off the hard liquor. Before he would play he threw a tantrum, demanded vodka and then proceeded to trash the stage. He’s the real deal, none of that fake white trash Southern Culture On the Skids schtick the kids are so crazy for.
Yeah, the term “hillbilly” is pejorative, as ElDestructo points out. However, most mountain folk take a perverse pride in the appellation. (And, for that matter, in the Appalachian.)
tomndebb has it right. The hillbilly stereotype, like all stereotypes, holds within it a grain of truth. You can always find individuals who seem to fulfill the stereotype. And yes, there are still plenty of folks in the hills who, while they may not go barefoot and smoke corncob pipes, still live up to (or down to) the negative media images.
We’ve broached this topic in other threads, but “hillbillies” seem to be one of the last groups that Hollywood doesn’t mind stereotyping. Amos 'n Andy was driven from the airwaves years ago, but The Beverly Hillbillies and The Real McCoys roll merrily along in syndication. Mountain folk are not an overly-sensitive bunch, I guess. Heck, they even join in and promote the stereotype, all in good fun.
The stereotype has a long history. It was probably cemented in the national consciousness by the sensationalized press coverage of the Hatfield-McCoy feud in the 1870’s. The Northern press reporting on the feud delighted in lurid tales of the mountain culture of West Virginia and Kentucky, and in large measure created the hillbilly stereotypes which have been handed down in the popular culture in one form or another to this day. Even at the time, the stereotypes were exaggerations, as repoters played fast and loose with the facts to sell newspapers.
The stereotype got picked up in later literature and popular culture, from Li’l Abner, to Snuffy Smith to the aforementioned Beverly Hillbillies and Real McCoys. Southerners themselves have always been partial to self-deprecating humor that helped to perpetuate the stereotype. Hillbilly stereotypes were exploited to humorous effect by Bluegrass and country musicians, reinforcing the image. Hollywood, of course, jumped on the bandwagon with both feet.
For the most part, hillbillies themselves don’t bother to take offense. They just laugh along with the jokes.
Still, the stereotype does have some harmful effects. People hear a mountain accent and, based upon the stereotype, they make a lot of assumptions about the intelligence of the speaker. I have experienced that myself, on many occasions. I don’t get too worked up about it, though. I just do my best to prove those assumptions wrong.
As for moonshine, yes, it is still being made, but it’s really more of a novelty these days. Moonshine was big in the 20’s because of Prohibition. It lingered afterward for some time because even after Prohibition ended on a national level, most Southern counties remained “dry.” Nowadays, you can at least buy beer in most Southern counties, and liquor in many. So there’s little profit in moonshine these days, and only a few scattered holdouts still bother to make it.
Nope, the real money for hillbillies these days is in growing marijuana or in running crystal meth labs. The moonshiner culture basically has shifted its focus from one illicit substance to another (or others).
This is off the subject, but Atlanta has at least the remnants of a “hillbilly ghetto” as well.
The community of Cabbagetown grew up around the Atlanta Bag Mill, which attracted its workers from among the poor mountaineers of north Georgia. Though the bag mill closed many years ago, the hillbilly ghetto around it lingered on. There are different stories about how the place got its name but the one with the ring of truth says that you could walk down the street and smell the cabbage cooking.
The Cabbagetown community, by the way, is arguably the true birthplace of the country music industry (sorry, Nashville). Cabbagetown was a place where previously isolated mountaineers were brought together and had a chance to exchange musical ideas. When Atlanta radio station WSB opened in the 20’s (with a strong signal that could be heard through much of the nation), a mountaineer living in Cabbagetown dropped by the studio to play a few fiddle tunes. Before long, Fiddlin’ John Carson had a recording contract and a national audience, and the country music industry was born. Other acts with their roots in north Georgia soon followed, including Carson’s daughter, Moonshine Kate, and Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. The success of these recording acts paved the way for country music.
Today, Cabbagetown is being gentrified, more or less. The old bag mill has been converted to condos, and even the shotgun shacks of Cabbagetown are being rennovated. Still, more than a few “city hillbillies” remain.
Sorry for the hijack.