Good ol’ boys are exactly that…good. Maybe they have mullets and gun collections and Nascar t-shirts. Maybe they don’t have the most social graces, and sometimes they have no tact at all, but they’re nice folks who would do anything they possibly could to help you out. Even when they say something that upsets someone or sounds offensive, they honestly don’t mean a bit of harm by it and would be genuinely distressed at upsetting you.
Hillbillies are folks who live up in the hills/mountains. They’re not usually savvy to the way things are done in large cities. But that’s all right, because folks from the city generally aren’t savvy to the way things are done in the mountains. It doesn’t mean either group is deficient in any way, just that they live in very different cultures.
Rednecks are a little harder to pick out of a crowd. Some of them have mullets and gun racks and Nascar shirts, so you might mistake them for good ol’ boys at a distance. Some of them have very fashionable haircuts, $500 suits, and firearms collections, and you might mistake them for high-class folks at a distance. Rednecks are obstinate and often willfully ignorant, and insist that if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for everyone else in the world, too. This goes for food, language, cultural norms, dressing habits, and personal hygiene. This attitude is often accompanied by distressingly low standards in the above areas.
Briars is a term I’ve never even heard before this thread, so I’m not even going there.
IMO, a “bubba” is a “redneck”; “Bubba” being a stereotypical name of a person of that socio-economic class. For example, “Bubba Smith” (“Bubba” is probably a nickname).
“Out here in the fields
I shoot at my meals
Drivin’ my pick-up shore is livin’!”
– Bubba O’Reilly*, The Who-all
Generally rednecks are people who epitomize all the southern stereotypes, know that they do, and revel in that fact, a redneck does not have to live in the south, though plenty of them do. I am what you would call a “hillbilly” and I don’t care who knows. A hillbilly is one who lives in a very rural area of the south and enjoys the peace and quite and the simple life, it does not mean that we are not educated, most aren’t, but not for lack of trying. As for the rest of those who reside in some of the more populated areas of the south but don’t qualify as rednecks, those are just what we call southerners. I have no clue what a briar is.
Sorry for the second post, but as for being naive that can swing both ways. Having been born and raised in Michigan, and only moving to the south around nine years ago I’ve seen just as many “city-folk” come to the south and have no clue about so many common things to this area, and in the same way I’ve seen “hillbillies” go north and be just as lost. I personally resent the idea that simply living here makes us somehow ignorant of the world. Southern does not equate stupidity, it’s a stereotype of the worst kind (one that’s still widely believed) and it pisses me off. It seems like people believe we’re all harmless simple folk that you just want to pat on the head.
What’s this “US” stuff? You came down here from Michigan. You are still a damn Yankee.
Ok, kidding aside, I have never heard of a briar, either, but the description makes sense. Another thing about good ole boys - while they will loan you their truck, they would prefer the man of the family to do the driving, and the woman “not to worry her purty little head about such matters.”
Andy Griffith was an (somewhat) enlightened good ole boy, as is Jimmy Carter.
That guy who lived up in the hills and had the hots for Aunt Bea was a Hillbilly.
The Mayor of Mayberry was a good ole boy.
Barney was just high strung and doesn’t enter into the equation.
Rednecks can be found at tractor pulls and Monster Turck rallies.
Yes “us” I may have been born there, but my parents were both born here. I spent every summer vacation here in Arkansas with relatives, and have always been more suited to country life. As the saying goes around these parts; “Inside every Yankee, there’s a decent southerner just waiting to be discovered.”
Redneck has conveyed the idea of perpetuating the stereotypes of (poor, rural) Southerners from its earliest usage. (One early citation in the OED mentions hill-billies coming from the hills and red-necks coming from the swamps.) The name, of course, refers to white agricultural workers who would get sunburned necks as they bent over their crops and originally was roughly equivalent to (dumb) hick. It does not seem to have taken on the additional connotations of hostility and brutality until the 1930s, when some writers used it to characterize people who were xenophobic, anti-modern, and some other traits. Once the Civil Rights movement became a national movement, of course, it was frequently used to characterize the best recruiting pool for the KKK and picked up more negative baggage that has let it be extended to other people in the last 20 years. (Nothwithstanding the “rehabilitation” efforts of Jeff Foxsworthy and the *You might be a redneck if. . . * books.)
No, no, you guys have got the wrong idea about rednecks. They can be assholes, but not necessarily. The assholes just stand out more than the others. They can also be raucous but good natured “country” types, what you’d think of as a good ol’ boy, occasionally very clever and with a self-deprecating sense of humor about their redneckhood (I went to college with a few of these guys). It’s sort of an an all inclusive term. Good example: I was in a small town eating with my family at a diner. When we left, my aunt asked me to drive her car, and I accidentally set off the car alarm. While I was trying to shut it off, this guy in a John Deere baseball hat leaned in his truck and started intermittently honking his horn. When I finally got it shut off, he stopped, grinned at me and said “I thought we was havin’ a honkin’ contest!”
What about the neighborhood where I lived in Ocoee, Florida? Middle/upper middle class. Big houses with pools on beautifully landscaped lots. No vehicles up on blocks, no weed-strewn yards, no Confederate flags or veneration of Dale Earnhardt. Still, though, the majority of residents hailed from other Southern states, there was a large pickup truck with a shiny metal saddle box in the majority of driveways, everybody had their toys (fishing boats, dirt bikes, guns, etc), a disproportionately large number worked in the building and mechanical trades, and they were generally into the huntin’ and fishin’ scene.
elm, I lived in a neighborhood like that in Sarasota, minus the big houses, lots, and pools. Regular-sized houses and lots, every driveway had a pickup and most showed signed of being in the mechnical trade in their yard somewhere (but no cars on blocks). I have no idea what their personalities were like since no one was ever home.
Someone who calls themselves a redneck is signifying they are socially conservative (usually), outdoorsy (huntin’ and fishin’), non-pretentious (working-class or from working-class roots), and most importantly PROUD. “Redneck” is akin to an ethnicity for the self-identifiers. Check for the rebel flag on their truck.
There is similarity here with “ghettofabulous”. If I go to the nearby WalMart in house slippers and rollers in my hair, I–as a black woman–would be acting out my “ghettofabulousness”. If I do the same thing as a white woman, I would be staying true to my “redneck” ways. But note that it, like “ghettofabulous” connotes only harmless non-conformity. Criminal behavior is “poor white trash” --not “redneck”.
Someone who disparagingly refers to someone else as a redneck is saying that person is racist/prejudiced/xenophobic, loud and uncouth, and poorly educated.
It sounds like “briar” is extremely regional–Cincinnati-born and raised here, just sixty or so miles down the road from Dayton, and I’ve never heard it before in my life.
The term redneck originated in West Virginia as a result of the struggle to unionize the mining industry. The men wore red bandanas around their necks as an identifier. cite
To me, redneck means a lack of sophistication, a la Jeff Foxworthy. Hillbilly is a term that specifically applies to Appalachia. I never heard the term briar.
My grandfather was from Southern Ohio (rural, not near Dayton or Cincinnati) and always identified his relatives as Hillbillies (which I’ve only recently learned = from Appalachia). I’ve never heard the word “Briar”.
