A Mirror Wise-Cracked

That’s the fellow — the classic American hillbilly, the dark one with the black pelt and dangerous ways. He is found on ashtrays, plates, trivets, placemats, plaques, figurines, cigarette lighters, cups — in plastic, tin, ceramic, copper, plaster of paris, wood, and coconut shell — in a thousand knick-knacky venues across this hugely rural continent.

Our richly symbolic American country cousin provokes a range of responses, from an odd kind of comfort to a real kind of terror. When he looks like an ultimately harmless cartoon, we indulge him, even emulate him in public displays and pageantry. But put the hillbilly in the movie Deliverance, and he can fill us with horror. In both roles — in safe cartoons and in representational depictions meant to scare us — he’s the same hillbilly serving different purposes.

The hillbilly mirrors us, and like most mirrors he can flatter, frighten, and humiliate. As a rough-and-ready frontiersman, he complements our notion of the independent, fearless American man. Put him in the same woods, but make him repulsively savage, a monster of nature, and he turns quickly dangerous, becomes the Whang Doodle of dread who lives “in the darkest corners of our consciousness alongside cancer and cannibalism,” as one of my students once put it.

The hillbilly shows rank disregard for all propriety. He drinks hard liquor — and not at cocktail parties. He’s bone lazy but remains virile. He nearly always possesses the potential for physical violence — especially involving dogs and guns. He’s gullible when skepticism would be wiser, and he’s stupid when smart would be safer. He reminds us of filth, of disgusting bodily functions. Why else is he so frequently pictured with outhouses? That particular prop links the hillbilly to what William Willeford (author of The Fool and His Scepter) calls our “developmental past,” an uncomfortable history we have tried to forget, our conflicted memory of the pain and heartache of living in the dirt on the frontier. The hillbilly’s outhouse is a pig’s bladder at the American garden party, an abstract and ironically glorified memorial to the democracy of human hygiene, a symbol of the plain fleshly equality of all people. When the hillbilly is depicted as sexually loose — another category of symbolic filth — his easily available Moonbeam McSwine is a fantasy of that same democracy.

Some groups in American society take to the hillbilly more readily than others. After all, who buys the tourist items, the wall hangings, and the yard art? (That is, who besides me?) Who buys these icons of negative identity, these decorative snapshots of the subconscious? Not the upwardly sashaying urban class, the managers, the professionals, the office warriors. Hillbilly souvenirs do not find a home in condos but in countryside abodes where ground sense is acknowledged and accommodated. Stuck-working people buy them, the purely salaried buy them, and they get the joke. The hillbilly takes his durn ease right in the middle of all these working people. He gives the horse-laugh to middle-class respectability. He’s absurdly and delightfully free. He seems never to suffer. He thrives in filth, is impervious to weather and to dominant economics.

The hillbilly is often used as a negative object lesson, a keep-away sign on the far edge of our own possibilities. A common context for the word “hillbilly” in the mainstream culture is:

A dim-witted hillbilly inadvertently gets ____ed. — TV Guide.

Fill in that blank with one of many sitcom plots on American television, from I Love Lucy to Father Knows Best to The Andy Griffith Show to The Doris Day Show to Lobo (whose “dim-witted hillbilly” gets involved in an armored-car robbery.) The assumption in this context is that the word hillbilly names something different from us.

Consider the group “. . . monsters, hillbillies, psychotics, and drunken brutes” named by Dr. Lee Salt in a TV Guide article. Salt, a psychiatric caseworker, was describing the “make-believe” men who — most other men want to assume — commit the crime of incest. Salt’s point: We in our suburbs are not so immune to our own natures, which may not be what we think. Our secret dread is that the dark, drunken hillbilly is no Other, but us.

Most popular-culture hillbillies induce no such teetering ambiguity. In 1977 historian John Higham said that hateful American xenophobia thrived longest “among the hicks and hillbillies”; in 1984 novelist Elmore Leonard joked that Albanians were the hillbillies of Europe; in 1985 the political cartoonist Herblock skewered the anti-family planning triumvirate of Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, and Jack Kemp as hillbillies; in 1989 the Texas Monthly explained away a neo-Nazi, KKK-allied skinhead in Dallas as “one tough hillbilly” with roots in Tennessee, not in Texas. Human beings with something to lose — which means most of us — usually move in the direction of ego comfort, which means putting psychic distance between us and hillbilly land.

In the countryside, denials of the hillbilly identity can become heated, probably because so many people understand the power of the image as class marker, and “hillbilly” becomes a fighting word: “We are afraid that, once again, we will be portrayed as a bunch of hillbillies.” — Johnny Fullen, mayor of Matewan, West Virginia, worrying about John Sayles’s movie, Matewan (1987).

Meanwhile, others from the country and from the city assume parts of the hillbilly identity and find it profitable, especially in Nashville. According to Minnie Pearl, Nashville’s business community dismissed the Grand Ole Opry as just “a bunch of hillbillies” until they realized in the 1950s that country music could make big bucks for them, too. Steve Earle, Buck Owens, Ronnie Milsap, Dwight Yoakam, and Marty Brown have all embraced the word and found a surge in their personal freedom and their personal fortunes as a result.

Dwight Yoakam, born in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, plays the smartalecky country hell raiser, prancing in “strategically ripped jeans and dirty-dancing his guitar.” He titled his 1987 breakthrough album “Hillbilly Deluxe.”

“That’s one smart Hillbilly,” said Ken Tucker in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Judds were fetchingly humble while accepting Nashville’s Horizon Award in 1984, calling themselves just “two redheaded hillbillies” as they strolled off with the industry’s heart. Recently Marty Stuart grabbed the word, despite his Tina Turner hairstyle. Stuart was born in Mississippi, cut his musical teeth in fundamentalist tent revivals, learned his licks from country legend Lester Flatt, was married for a time to the daughter of Johnny Cash, and self-consciously talks about “the importance of passing wisdom to each new generation of juvenile hillbillies” like a country-culture Moses.

“Hillbilly” as positive identity is not based purely on geographic location. Non-Southern rocker John Mellencamp, born and raised in the Midwest, explained to an interviewer: “I hated Seymour [Indiana]. The first time I came to New York I was embarrassed that I was from that town because the first thing everybody said to me is, ‘What kind of accent is that?’ . . . Let’s face it, I’m a hillbilly and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Nothing to do but let it fill the wellspring.

Politicians in Kentucky and Tennessee and other states far removed have embraced some part of the identity — usually the dirt sense without the danger — for generations, from Andrew Jackson and David Crockett to Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore Sr., and Ned Ray McWherter. Playing dumb but showing smart was just good sense in a politician, a purely symbolic but useful leveling of power in the eyes of voters so that power could continue to be unlevel.

The political expediency of playing the hillbilly is common, too, in places not even remotely associated with Appalachia or the Ozarks. In Montana in 1989, freshman Republican Senator Conrad Burans was said to be turning Big Sky Country red with embarrassment by playing the egregious rube in Washington.

 

An extravagant and institutionalized example of hillbilly role-playing is found among the Shriners. The Grand and Glorious Order of the Hillbilly Degree was launched in 1969 as a “side-line degree” by Shriner Jim Harris of the El Hasa Shrine Temple in Ashland. Kentucky. He wrote out the requirements and the ritual based on hillbilly jokes remembered from his boyhood in West Virginia and from living in the Kentucky hills. By 1970 the Grand and Glorious Hillbillies from Ashland were parading in their officially sanctioned hillbilly garb and driving moonshine-still-equipped jalopies at the Imperial Shrine Convention in Miami, Florida. Immediately, Shriners at the Hejaz Temple in South Carolina saw the fun of it all and installed the Hillbilly Degree in their local temple. Clans quickly followed in several West Virginia towns and in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Roanoke as well as towns in many other states far outside the south. By 1981, 60 hillbilly clans rollicked in Shriner parades — two clans were in Canada — and by 1992 the number had grown to 137 separate units.

In no time, the Grand and Glorious Order had a newsletter, Hillbilly News, and a copyrighted mascot. They launched the first annual Hillbilly Days festival and street parade in Pikeville, Kentucky, in 1977. Middle-class men, upstanding citizens, professionals of one sort or another, dressed as hillbillies and drove comically disreputable jalopies down the main drag, occasionally being as vulgar as imagination allowed. Such goings-on horrified some. To others, the hillbilly display celebrated self-affirmation and regional pride. The Pikeville Shriners sent out an invitation to their sixth annual Hillbilly Days in 1982: “Come all of you including Jack Grace from California and Paul McCutcheon from New Mexico. Meet some genuine mountain people here deep in the Appalachian mountains. We were born and bred hillbillies before we ever heard of a Shriner or Mason. We are civilized, good, common, help-your-neighbor kind of people.”

That same year, the Grand and Glorious Order caused a ruckus in Cincinnati. The Ohio Shriners planned a convention and street parade and invited all the guys who came to nearby Pikeville’s celebration. But Cincinnati-based Appalachian activists objected. Hillbilly Days, they said, implicitly and explicitly ridiculed and humiliated new arrivals to the big city from the mountains of Kentucky. The behavior of the Shriners would be considered “insulting and distasteful” to as many as 250,000 residents of Greater Cincinnati, Mayor David Mann was told. Mann had already agreed to stand on Fountain Square and officially welcome the Shriner hillbillies to the city and then review their parade, but under pressure he withdrew. The irony is clear: The offending group, thoroughly middle class and influential in their own home towns, adopt the hillbilly as a cheeky affirmation of regional identity in the larger American context — their own assertion of equality. Yet they wound the self-esteem of their co-regionists who are relatively powerless in the city setting and thus vulnerable to policymakers who act on stereotype. For the first group, the mirror flatters and energizes; for the second, the mirror mocks and diminishes.

The Shriners, by playing the country fool in public, raise big money for crippled and burned children. Their satisfaction, however, is not solely philanthropic. They are also giving vent to a common human urge to kick over authority — what Willeford calls the urge to eat sausages in the cathedral. If you’re a member of the church, you can afford the pretense of being symbolically what you are saved from being in actuality.

 

Octogenarian Estill Drew lives in wooded Hamilton County in southern Illinois. Estill, along with his septuagenarian brother Dale, has made a series of Super-8 mm home movies featuring hillbillies and the standard breakdowns of propriety — moonshining, drunkenness, failure to support the family, outhouse high jinx, and even murder. Estill’s We Live by the Code of the Hills, the movie that got him on Donahue and on the CBS Evening News in 1984, is partly a plotted story-film: A revenue agent stalks a moonshiner, is killed, and goes to heaven, where he is entertained by a circle of winged angels (one of whom looks pregnant). The film is also a variety show including vaudeville bits by Estill himself with a ventriloquist’s dummy, scenes of pie auctions, barn dances, hay rides, and church services — all portrayed by Hamilton County people playing themselves, sometimes intentionally trying to act funny while being funny in the best human sense.

Brother Dale always gets the dangerous hillbilly role. In We Live by the Code of the Hills and Our Country Cousin, Dale hams it up as a drunken, no-account moonshiner. In actuality, Dale Drew, like some Shriners, is a shy, self-effacing, religious, Pat-Robertson-for-president teetotaler. He enacts a hillbilly character as an example of the worst he might fall to if he were to lose what he has. His hillbilly is a mirror image warped into caricature like the reflection in a funhouse mirror, outlandish but nevertheless recognizable.

 

I grew up in the Texas Panhandle. Everybody there scraped the soil to survive or depended on people who scraped the soil. Visible class divisions were rare. Some farmers made a lot of money when irrigation came in. Some didn’t. You could hardly tell one from the other. Everyone worked hard. My father farmed and managed another man’s three thousand acres of dry-land wheat. We lived in his houses on his land, grew gardens, raised chickens, milked cows. My mother’s family, greats and grands, were around us everywhere. They’d gather, 75 strong, for a major dustup at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, and there’d be fiddles and guitars and, in a spot where the women and children couldn’t see it, some drinking.

I witnessed my first hillbilly foolshow in a west Texas “Womanless Wedding.” I sat with my mother and my grandmother and several of my aunts (including two of my grandmother’s sisters) in the auditorium of the local high school and watched while my uncles and cousins and cousins-in-law conducted a raucous burlesque wedding, some of them taking the men’s parts — the groom, the two fathers, the parson, numerous idiot kinfolk — but many of them starring as the women — the bride, the two mothers, the tarted-up sisters and aunts. One man came as a giant girl baby in a wheelbarrow.

Even a 10-year-old could get the plot. It dealt with a shotgun wedding between two clans, hillbillies of the classic cartoon type. The bride, played by the biggest, most macho tub-belly in Silverton, was visibly, extravagantly pregnant. The groom, one of the smallest men in town, was forced to the altar by the bride’s pappy, who was toting a rifle and swigging from a moonshine jug. The parson was a mis-namer and a mis-stater, a monumentally dumb hick. The ceremony was full of interruptions and general vulgar high jinx — simulated drunkenness, belching, hiking of dresses and showing of underwear, the poking of long rifles up other people’s butts. The centerpiece of the evening was unembarrassed pregnancy out of wedlock. It was the sort of village hoohaw that Huck Finn might have stumbled onto.

These antics put us on the floor. We were country people who saw ourselves as ordinary, mainstream, middle-class, 1950s Americans who never would have laughed at such things in our real, day-to-day lives. But these hillbilly clowns helped us to release our dread. The foolshow allowed us to make sport of what frightened us. Our uncles and cousins performed a protective magic by acting out the very antithesis of what we believed ourselves to be.

In our world, when a pregnancy occurred outside of marriage, it was too shameful to speak of in the open. Drunks were werewolves who tore apart their own families. Country tatters were real; severe poverty was a recent memory for too many people, and it was no laughing matter, either. Sons got bailed out of jail. Families sometimes had to take extra people into an already crowded house but would fight for you, if it came to that. Fathers yelled at their daughters and saw them married anyway to ducktails with loud pipes. Nobody made fun of such things because we were all too vulnerable — except in the foolshow of the Womanless Wedding. It was our safe mirror for seeing what we could not look at otherwise.

 

Many hillbillies in the mass media are there to make the normative middle-class urban spectator feel better about the system of money and power that has him or her in its grasp. Someone is always beneath us, lending proof that the twig on which we stand is really the rung of a ladder leading upward to something we must defend with our lives.

Everyone can feel reassured about his or her own standing and about the rightness of lining up on such a scale as long as someone else is standing underneath. To someone in Connecticut, it’s someone else in Maine. To someone in Austin, it’s someone else in the Panhandle. To someone in Salt Lake City, it’s someone else in southern Utah. To someone in Gainesville, it’s someone else in the Everglades. In Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine, it’s someone across the street.

Hillbillies live even in China. In November 1984, the official Chinese news agency denounced the peasants of Guizhou Province for their “shocking backwardness” and “narrowmindedness.” The Japanese have the “hairy Ainus,” middle Europe has the mountain-dwelling Slovaks, the Iranians and the Iraqis have the mountain Kurds.

So, hillbilly means rough, rural, poor but fruitful, blatantly anti-urban, and often dangerous, but not necessarily hailing from the Southern Appalachians or even from any mountains. The hard scrabble of rural Arkansas or of rural Arizona, for that matter, can breed hillbillies just as well, and has (Thelma and Louise and Raising Arizona). It’s the hilly sides of the American economy, the parts out of the mainstream, that I’m interested in, and the conflicted urban memory of necessary frontier rudeness that produces the rural fool who up-ends our complacent assumptions about ourselves.

Such characterizations, whether applied by urban outsiders or worn as self-defining and defiant badges by the rural folks themselves, fill a common need for economic reassurance through the spectacle of want. Buried within that reassurance is an appalling ambiguity for an urban audience: the sense that these people survive and even thrive despite our low opinion of their worth, and they survive and thrive on their own terms.

 

Special thanks to Sarah Nawrocki and Pam Upton at University of North Carolina Press.