ETA: “Down South” is used, I believe, everywhere above the Mason-Dixon line for all you guys. Maybe Southerners have a different way of saying “South[er]” from them.
Give us a taste, at least… 
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq;21041650…Swale (landform) - Wikipedia…[/QUOTE]
Linky boo-boo. Fixed: Swale (landform) - Wikipedia
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I don’t think there’s any implication that living “down in the holler” makes you more of a yokel than if your place of residence was “up the crick” or “up in them hills”.
It’s just the general association of “holler” with the people who own the term as part of their vocabulary.
Look for the shy boy on the right playing slide guitar.
In my vernacular, a holler (or hollow) has at least one dead end, whereas a valley goes on through. The difference being that one might see a traveler or two move through a valley especially if there’s enough water at the bottom to hold a boat. But a holler might be a wrinkle in the land further up the side of a mountain. It could be a bowl or a narrow stretch, and it could end in a cliff or a gentle slope. But if you’re “up a holler” you’ve got no where to go, economically or geographically speaking.
The celeb in question is Johnny Depp, and he was talking about his mother, born in Floyd County, KY in 1935. Depp himself was born in Owensboro, KY, on the Ohio River in the much flatter western part of the state, almost certainly in a hospital, and far from anything I’d call a holler. Floyd County is in the heart of Appalachian KY and home to hollers aplenty. (I’ve seen references that she was born in the county seat of Prestonsburg, but in 1935 that’s probably just where the birth certificate was filed.)
In modern-day eastern Kentucky usage it can be used either purely descriptively or perjoratively. You might say someone lives back in a holler or tell them to drive “up the holler”, meaning away from the main road. (Oddly, you never hear “down the holler”–it’s mostly “out of the holler”.) But saying someone came “straight out of the holler” is certainly calling them unrefined, and “holler rat” is used the same way “hood rat” is elsewhere.
The holler where I grew up indeed dead ended at our property. Carden Holler, which is nearby, connects a state highway with U. S. 11-E. It ends near the Bristol Speedway, which is a major NASCAR stop. We could hear the races from our front porch (I assume my parents’ hearing isn’t good enough to pick it up anymore). I heard stories about moonshiners in the woods around Carden Holler as a kid. The end of our holler was where people came to buy fresh eggs; we had 5000 chickens until I was around 14.
Some one mentioned growing tobacco earlier. If my memory is working, everyone has an allotment that they could grow based on the size of the farm. If someone chose not to use their allotment, they could sell it. Eventually the government offered a buyout, which my parents took. After that they started just renting most of the farm out as pasture for neighbors’ cattle.
No, but having fewer sources of income means that whatever government checks the family receives (such as retirement or disability) would be a larger fraction of the total family income.
[hijack] I adore Justified, but don’t watch it to find out what the landscape looks like. Hollers don’t have sagebrush, goddammit, and if you’ve spent any time in Appalachia, you’ll know they got the landscape wrong–a pretty serious flaw for a show with themes so rooted in the land. It’s filmed in California, and even the start, Timothy Olyphant, acknowledges the discordance:
Other than that, the show’s freakin awesome.
[/hijack]
Do people in rural areas have a higher rate of disability? Cite, please.
So 15%. Not a lot.
The cite claims 11% for metropolitan and 17.4% for non-core micropolitan regions (ie, rural). Where did you get the 15% figure from?
Wow, 17.4%. Still not a lot.
You asked if rural Americans have a higher rate of disability compared to their urban cousins. The answer is yes.
I thought hillbilly is an example of reduplication: Bill rhymes with Hill and, of course, hillbilly sounds better than hillbill.
But sbunny8 claims that Southerners/Kentuckians rely on disability or retirement. That can’t possibly be true, versus the rest of the country.
That is not remotely what sbunny8 said. He/she specified certain areas of those regions, specifically ‘hollers’ and the communities that live there.
You seem very keen to hijack this thread: May I suggest you open another in Great Debates asking why people in poor, rural areas have higher rates of disability.
NO. Most families in KY, or elsewhere, do not receive disability or retirement.
Who here has claimed that?