Are we about to put a hillbilly in the West Wing of The White House? It’s OK to call J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, a hillbilly because he already called himself one in his 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Sometimes the term hillbilly is considered a slur or cultural put-down. But other times it has endearing meanings that include strong family values, independent (stubborn) thinking and self-sufficiency.
The safest thing to say about the term hillbilly is that it contains two very differing meanings and uses. But where J.D. Vance fits into this picture is an unsolved puzzle.
Do you have a pre-conceived notion of what a hillbilly is? Does this question matter very much to you or, are you pre-occupied right now with a whole host of other set of “culture war” skirmishes and silliness?
Vance was indeed born and raised in the Appalachian region that is considered the homeland of hillbillies. He was born in northern Kentucky and raised in southern Ohio by a single mother who suffered from opioid addiction. (She is now recovered.)
Vance found extra support from a grandmother and he was taught the value of a good education. This led to acollege career and a law school degree from Yale that catapulted him into the venture capital world of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. That’s about as far as you can get away from hillbilly country. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2023, representing Ohio. His campaign was largely underwritten by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, also a big donor to Donald Trump.
Vance’s book made an appearance on the New York Times bestseller list and film director Ron Howard made a movie in 2020 starring Glenn Close as Vance’s mother. The movie was not much of a success and was quickly pulled from theaters and put in the Netflix streaming library.
His book, according to many critics, reinforces the stereotypes of hillbillies. One sample review says, “His memoir bashes the entire region with shocking ease and gives a false impression of what the people of Appalachia are really like. The book reaffirms negative stereotypes for anyone who might not be familiar and that’s really dangerous.”
Hillbilly History
So, maybe, we should leave Mr. J.D. Vance out of any discussion about what is — and what is not — a hillbilly. But his ascent to the current presidential election, nonetheless, provides a good opportunity to look at the origins, history, myths, misconceptions and various meanings behind the label.
Hillbilly is one of those dangerous stereotypes and labels we use to put people in convenient cultural boxes that makes us think it adds to our understanding when the opposite is usually true. Other such terms include redneck, elite, yuppie, yokel and even liberal and conservative.
Lots of people have had lots of fun tossing around the hillbilly label through the years. Most of us still remember the TV series, “The Beverly Hillbillies” that was a top show for nine seasons starting in 1962. The premise of the show was about Jed Clampett accidentally discovering oil in Tennessee and taking all his new riches and family to Beverly Hills, California where they struggled to fit in with all the alien urban rich folks.
The Clampetts were portrayed as “backwoods” and “backwards” with no formal education or gift of social graces. But in most episodes, it was the Clampetts that usually outsmarted their neighbors or otherwise unwittingly landed on a happy ending.
We also might remember the 1972 movie “Deliverance,” based on the James Dickey novel, where hillbillies were depicted as “dense” and “menacing.” Except for the innocent banjo-playing boy, they were cast as villains because they did not want the modern world encroaching on their heritage mountain landscape and lifestyle.
Most sources trace the term hillbilly to the Scot-Irish settlers who came to the Appalachia region in the early 1800s. In 17th century Scotland there had been settlements or “clans” of people who lived mostly apart from others and were known as “hill-folk.” The use of “billie” may have come from Scotland and northern Ireland where followers of King William III were referred to as “Williamites” or “Billies.” In some Scot dialects, “billie” was used as a synonym for “friend.”
Ugly stereotype
The term “hillbilly” reached wider use for the Scot-Irish and other mostly Protestant settlers of the Appalachian region where the new settlers preferred to remain distant from the eastern, flatland colonialists. At first the term was used in a neutral fashion among fellow mountain dwellers.
But outsiders began to ascribe negative connotations to the term and a more negative stereotype was slowing built — the one J.D. Vance writes about in his book, but in very unclear terms.
An article written in the April 23, 1900 issue of the New York Journal reported that “a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”
From there, and similar sources, the hillbilly stereotype was exaggerated to also include that they eat lots of possum and grits; let their children go barefoot and wear tattered clothes; and, (that) they inter-marry within their own bloodlines and like being poor and left alone.
Obviously this caricature is as offensive as the ones that were once applied to Black people for being lazy, shiftless and unsanitary.
Even with all the ugly stereotyping, not everyone runs away from the hillbilly label. There are annual “hillbilly festivals” across parts of the Appalachian region which offer a weird mix of people dressing in stereotypical costumes of bare feet, corncob pipes and raggedy cloths while sampling delicious mountain foods like home-baked fruit pies, biscuits and gravy, fried chicken and smoked meats. Most of the festivals feature “mountain music” like bluegrass or old-time Irish-Scot folk melodies and step dancing or clogging. They are must-stops for local political candidates and elected officials.
Modern hillbilly descendants — maybe very similar to J.D. Vance — are also college graduates who are helping to transform an industrial base of new technologies, environmental restoration, automobile manufacturing, data center development and historical preservation in the eight-state Appalachian and Ozark region of middle America.
Maybe today’s hillbillies don’t need anyone to write an elegy for them as much as they might just like everyone to leave them alone.
Redneck or hillbilly?
Sometimes the label “hillbilly” is interchanged with the term “redneck,” another stereotype with dual meanings. Lots of people think the original meaning of redneck referred to someone who did all his work outside like a farmer or laborer whose neck got sunburned around the top of his t-shirt. Those kinds of rednecks lacked enough formal education to earn an inside or office job.
But there is a specific history of rednecks in Appalachia where coal miner protesters wore red bandanas and called themselves “rednecks.” There was a violent labor upheaval in 1921 during the Blair Mountain Strike in Logan County, West Virginia where 10,000 redneck labor sympathizers fought against 3,000 lawmen, mine owners and strikebreakers before being overrun by reinforcements from the West Virginia National Guard.
It is still considered the largest labor union uprising in American history. But it added to the stereotype in other parts of the country about how violent the rednecks and hillbillies were. It didn’t help that most newspapers at the time were anti-union.
Hee Haw
It’s amazing to recount that it was only 40 years later that the laugh-filled Beverly Hillbillies debuted on American network television. But these were also the years when “hillbilly music” was featured every Saturday night at the Grand Ole Opry and years after the Hollywood matinee films about “Ma and Pa Kettle” had also been a hit. The popular newspaper comic strip L’il Abner, full of hillbilly characters from Dogpatch, USA by Al Capp was published from 1934 to 1977.
One of the longest-running TV variety shows was “Hee Haw,” which featured hillbilly music, comedy, characters and commercials from 1969 to 1993. The main set of the show featured hay bales, roaming chickens, jugs of moonshine whiskey and characters dressed in bib overalls and patchwork skirts. How harmless could you get?
“Hillbilly music” had been a convenient catchall phrase used in the earliest days of recorded music beginning in the 1920s. Roaming field archivists used the hillbilly label to include original Scot-Irish folk songs and fiddle tunes along with the emerging original music of A.P. Carter and the Carter Family, The Skillet Lickers (1924-1931), Pop Stoneman, Charlie Poole, Jimmie Rodgers and Uncle Dave Macon, among many others.
A few decades later, though more loosely assembled, hillbilly music also included Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash and rockabilly, a coal miner’s daughter named Loretta Lynn and the young girl with a coat of many colors and patches, Dolly Parton.
Somewhere along the line, hillbilly music became a multi-billion dollar industry. Dolly Parton now owns her own amusement park, Dollywood, in Pigeon Fork, Tennessee.
Addendums
Just to try to keep some things straight about hillbillies, Vance might not be the first hillbilly descendent to get near The White House. Some may consider Andrew Jackson, who served as president from 1829 to 1837 as our first hillbilly president. That is because he was of Scot-Irish descent from South Carolina. But Jackson was known more as a rogue populist, ruthless military general and anti-Native America demagogue. And none of those are considered hillbilly traits.
What’s got us most bewildered is the fact that both current vice president candidates, Vance and Democrat Tim Walz claim that the soda Mountain Dew is their favorite beverage. What’s weird about this is that Mountain Dew was invented in 1932 by two Tennessee hillbilly brothers, Barney and Ally Hartman.
Go figure.
— Rollie Atkinson
8-16-2024
Discussion about this post
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Love it! 😂How in the world did you research to the point that you know that both Tim Walz and J.D. Vance love Mountain Dew? 😆 And, then, you went a little further to discover that the creators of Mountain Dew were Hillbillies! You are detail driven! 👍🏼
Ad hominem comments and attack are easy to create and work well in propaganda, but reveal more about the speaker than the subject.
Thanks for another thoughtful essay.
Rednecks…. https://youtu.be/cu8xQ8o7uIY?si=cSEkoBfGoEAHKl9Y