The Star Bar. My home away from home. BTW, Atlanta seems to be well represented on the SDMB. Do you think it’s cause we’re more intelligent, more curious or are we all just bored at work frequently?
50 relatives in a hospital car-park? I didn’t see that in the paper. When was this exactly, and which hospital?
Fun is all very well, but since nobody was talking about Irish travellers, your contribution is a little mystifying.
Yes, Virginia, there are hillbillies.
I live in Southwest Virginia on the Tennessee state line. In fact, our town is split right down the middle - one city, one name; two states. I see “hillbillies” every single day. There is “Gluehead”, a man who walks or drives a tractor down Gate City Highway with a baggie of airplane glue under his nose every day. He’s friendly. He won’t take his hand off the bag to wave, but he’ll nod his head as you pass. Then there’s “Crusong”, an older, redhaired man who looks astonishingly like the Lucky Charms guy. He’s a drunk with obvious mental illness(es). He walks to the beer store nearest his house (10-15 miles), buys a case, and hitches back to the hills. Folks in pickup trucks most often give him rides but make him ride in the bed due to the smell. I know for a fact that he eats roadkill because he will accept groundhogs, squirrels, etc. that people bring him. He lives in shacks or any pile of garbage he can obtain and reconstruct from the dump. Several times a year he burns up whatever structure he happens to be living in when his cooking fire gets out of hand. Recently I’ve noticed he has a border collie-type dog on a string with him most days and several stuffed animal toys on a string around his own neck. Also a very personable guy - it’s hard to get away from him if you run into him in a store or something, and he insists on buying my kids candy every time we see him. Those are a couple of the many we see around here on a daily basis.
As for moonshining being dead or a novelty, that’s completely wrong. I could get moonshine today, about as many gallons as you can haul. In this area it’s very common. It’s available flavored with fruits like peaches, cherries and grapes (which the old timers will tell you only takes away from the volume of liquor you’re getting - get the regular and add your own fruit; it’s cheaper). Several families make their living entirely by moonshining and “barking” or “mossing”. Digging ginseng is also pretty profitable.
As for incestuous relationships, I can also tell you that it does happen here (as it does everywhere, to some degree). Several families in the immediate area have older sisters who took over the mother/wife role after the father was left a widower. I majored in social work in college (temporarily) and my favorite professor had been a missionary and social worker in Appalachia. He confirmed many cases of incest between mothers/sons, fathers/daughters, brothers/sisters and cousins.
“American Hollow” was a pretty fair representation of some of the backwoods people who live in my area but IIRC it was about a family in Kentucky. We have the same types of “hollers” and same types of people living the same kinds of lives right here. My across-the-street neighbor who died last year could not read or write his own name but retired from a decent job, drove himself to the grocery store, and had a girlfriend he met at church after his wife died whom he visited almost daily. I have found that some of the roughest-looking people around here are definitely not the worst. Some of the nicest, most sincere people I know are hillbillies.
They’re not necessarily a Southern phenomenon, either. The kind of people Carolyn Chute wrote about in “The Beans of Egypt, Maine” do exist, as you’ll see if you ever go up into the north woods and notice the shacks with the broken machinery out front. By any other standard, they’re hillbillies.
hibernicus– it’s not Irish travellers, it’s Irish Travellers. 
Or, the Irish Travellers, to be more accurate.
The Irish Travellers are a migratory, tribal-like ethnic group found in in Eire (naturally). They have no fixed place of abode, & are generally quite poor.
irishgirl was comparing the Travellers to Hillbillies.
Both unfairly & inaccurately, I might add. Travellers are frequently involved in scams, fraud, phoney construction gigs, & other forms of crime. Hillbillies have a strong work ethic , & are said to be quite honest.
Travellers have been compared to the Gypsy Tribes of the European mainland. These two groups may have intermarried, giving some gypsy blood to the Travellers.
But they aren’t telling.
Thank you for the education, Bosda. I’ll be sure to use correct capitalisation next time I attempt to question racist slurs against the Travellers.
The “defence” was not obvious in the context of your post.
I assumed that you found irishgirl’s post puzzling.
I also believe that capitalizing the word “Travellers” in context is correct.
If you have other objections to my post based on any errors I have made, I am willing to discuss them reasonably.
Since we’re on the subject of obnoxious minorities, what about the niggers? The inner cities are full of them; they breed like jackrabbits and fill up those fleabag apartments and Section 8 places as soon as they get built. I heard they’ll put a cap in your ass to steal the Timex watch off your wrist. And the drugs they take - damn, if they were smart enough to file for them, you know the name on the crack pipe patent would be Roosevelt Jefferson or something like that.
Somebody said there’s a seed of truth in every stereotype - I’ll second that one! You can’t drive a block in Oakland or Detroit without passing a fried chicken place. Want to know the fastest way to go broke? Invest in a contraception clinic in the ghetto.
You know the worst part? When some uppity coon starts making noise about discrimination. That’s what I like about white trash - you can run them into the ground and nobody, not even they themselves, will stand up for them. For gosh sakes, don’t these burr-heads know that we of the gentler classes need to have someone to look down on? They should be happy to fulfill such an important social function!
But hey, I don’t want anyone thinking the jigs are all bad - the ones I know are all hardworking, honest, and upright. It’s the ones you’ve never met that you have to keep your eyes on.
Thank you, City Gent. I hope your post is not lost on those who need to read it most.
Y’know, I was scrolling through here for the first time in about three days and I was thinking that there seems to be some confusion between the concepts of isolated communities of people with little money and few educational opportunities (which I would identify as hillbillies) and people on the lower rungs of the social and economic scales as judged (and stereotyped) by those “above” them.
I think City Gent’s post has made my observations superfluous.
Your neighbor had the daughter when she was 10, then?
City Gent:
The issue your parody raises has already been put on the table. It’s a stereotype rooted in class values that are strongly tied to economics. The way the discourse on the subject of poor rural whites always runs, the analogy to racism is inevitable, and damning.
However, let me complicate the issue by pointing out that a good part of the reason they’re considered fair game is precisely because they are assumed to be racists themselves. Often even the most rah-rah brothers-under-the-skin films and literature have to have some slow-talking toothless rustic as a straw man to take the fall. Case in point: To Kill a Mockingbird. The poor white is also the scapegoat for society’s religious and cultural intollerance. As scapegoats, they’re fair game for religious and cultural intollerance.
I don’t think that’s going to change. If we can’t set up some cracker as the bad guy, to whom do we pass the blame? Ourselves? Sometimes. Many well-meaning liberals practice public self-flagelation. But this is often like the preacher who teaches that we are all sinners, while smugly presuming to be less of one than thou. We are myth-makers and personifiers, whether spiritual of secular. If we believe in good and evil, we must have angels and devils. We must invest our abstractions into symbols. The enlightened white man is Atticus Finch. He’s clean, gentle, well gromed and well spoken, and he wears shoes. His opposite is the uncouth, knuckle-draging, inhuman Bob Ewell, whose brutish english speaks of his moral decrepitude.
Or maybe you’d like to give Harper Lee more credit than that, and believe that she would say the hillbilly is better represented by Boo Radley, the recluse in whom she invests so much fascination and revulsion. Fascination and revulsion describes the way most people feel about hillbillies, and just as Scout concludes that the Boo Radleys of the world should be allowed to be who they are, perhaps we can say the same for hillbillies. I like that reading, and what’s more I’d like to think that we could read our fellow posters as kindly – that they view others with fascination, repulsion, though ultimately with compassion, and are not merely crass dehumanizers. But honestly, I don’t expect that reading to play in the sticks.
Johnny Angel: Actually I’ll disagree with your take on To Kill a Mockingbird in a different way than you did . Boo Radley was very obviously of “gentle upbringing” - i.e. his parents were respected townfolk. So I don’t think he could be characterized as a hillbilly.
The people who could be so categorized in that novel, aside from the vile Bob Ewell, are some of Scout’s classmates and their parents. Particularly the Cunninghams, who in the end become some of the most stubborn supporters of Atticus Finch’s doomed struggle ( if perhaps for the wrong reason ). Harper Lee draws a clear distinction between the dirt poor and scum like Ewell. She even allows a brief moment of sympathy for the plight of the badly compromised Ewell daughter, even as she paints her as very complicit in the eventual death of an innocent man.
Although I agree with your general point , I don’t think your particular choice of example is a good one. One of the great strengths of To Kill a Mockingbird is that it doesn’t always draw the obvious conclusions about people.
- Tamerlane
What was the name of the character who drank cola out of the whiskey bottle? It seems to me that he’d be classed as a hillbilly, too, and he sure wasn’t racist. For that matter, the judge and prosecutor were certainly upper-class, and they were portrayed as probably being racist.
I’m arriving late to this thread, but I can back up evilbeth’s observations. I’ve lived all over East Tennessee for the last 40 years and I know these people well. Funny thing, though: one rarely hears the term “hillbilly.” We generally say “mountain folks” around Knoxville. And on the subject of moonshine…in my drinking days I was quite familiar with it. Some is good, some is not so good…but the good stuff is dee-fucking-lightful, believe me!
Peace,
TN*hippiebilly
**
**
Yes, her daughter became a mother when eleven.
Both children legitimate of course, 'ern’t city folk.
Johnny Angel, I appreciate your well-reasoned response. I chose to use parody to put light on the issue because it seemed appropriate given the tone of many of the previous posts.
What interests me, and I think you have hit on this, is that the increase in tolerance of formerly oppressed groups in America has not been a repudiation of the whole concept of stereotyping and prejudice, but rather only a decrease in popularity of certain stereotypes that have been especially destructive, e.g. the watermelon-chomping, tap-dancing black.
That is a depressing observation, and I agree with it wholeheartedly.
Nor should it. I think I have made the point that the same thinking suddenly changes from acceptable to unacceptable when the word “hillbilly” is replaced by the word “nigger”. Therefore, ascribing benign intentions to the previous posts is tantamount to ascribing benign intentions to, for instance, minstrel shows, which in perspective are indeed crassly dehumanizing, even if the audience may not have been dedicated white supremacists.
The point of my parody was not necessarily “Hey, it’s OK to make fun of hillbillies but not blacks; no fair!” but rather to raise the question of why one kind of prejudice is acceptable but not another. I don’t have an answer for that question, but my own view is that society is too squeamish about stereotypes of blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, American Indians, etc., and not squeamish enough about prejudice itself. What frightens me is that the evidently innate need for people to demonize entire groups is not going away, it’s simply adapting to changing societal norms.
Since you seem to have given this issue some thought, I’d be interested in your take on Italian-American stereotyping, maybe in another thread. I see many parallels with poor-white stereotyping: a group that has always been looked down on, but with the recently exalted importance of tolerance, the perceived intolerance and cultural backwardness of Italian-Americans makes them another easy target.
On the subject of what a hillbilly is, exactly: In my experience, which includes living on the edge of Appalachia in Ohio for many years and frequent trips to southern West Virginia to visit relatives, it’s not correct to assume that everyone who lives in Appalachia and speaks with “that accent” is a hillbilly. If you ask people who live in the bottomlands what a hillbilly is, they’ll point uphill, referring to a distinct subculture that has inhabited Appalachia since the early 1800s, living very close to the land, usually by hunting, gathering, and fishing, because the land is too poor to farm. They are typically mistrustful of the outside world although not averse to using the government to protect their way of life. They have sets of beliefs and superstitions that are very peculiar to outsiders, who are generally unwelcome.
For example, most people think the coal miners of West Virginia are hillbillies, but this is generally not true. The coal miners migrated to the area in search of work, and when they arrived they found the hill culture already ensconced. If anything, there was animosity between the miners and the indigenous folk, because the encroachment on hunting grounds was resented.
Of course, like every other subculture that doesn’t fit into the corporate- and media-endorsed bounds of acceptability, it has been dying out for the past 50 years. There are probably very few genuine hillbillies left. Maybe this answers the OP.
City Gent, thank you for helping to redeem this most disheartening thread.
I considered posting along similar lines myself, but to be honest I didn’t have the balls…
Sadly if your conclusion is correct, people will at best have learned the lesson “can’t get away with openly voicing prejudice against hillbillies anymore”, and not “prejudice isn’t okay”.
Sorry, City Gent, but I will not let you off the hook as easily as some of the other posters. You are decrying hypersensitivity to stereotypes out of one side of your mouth and perpetuating that very offense out of the other.
Yes hillbillies are stereotyped, yes that is wrong, but is the solution to send out another squad of thought police? We hillbillies can either choose to walk around with a big chip on our collective shoulder (which in my experience tends to be very off-putting), or we can try to eradicate the negative images by proving their assumptions wrong. Education and gentle reproach will win more converts than a harangue any day.