JOHN SOLOMON OTTO
Even today, any mention of the Appalachian mountains conjures up images of "hillbillies," log cabins, "shootin’ arns," "feudin'," "moon-shine,” "revenooers," and dueling banjos in the popular mind. The southern "hillbilly" has become a stock character of popular culture, appearing in comic strips, television, fiction and movies. Despite his popularity, the "hillbilly" has little basis in fact, and the hillbilly stereotype is bitterly resented by the contemporary inhabitants of the Southern Appalachian mountains—a region which includes West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North
Carolina and northeastern Georgia.
The people of Southern Appalachia do not refer to themselves as "hillbillies." Nor do they call themselves "mountaineers," or, more politely, "highlanders" (Williams 49, 54). They simply refer to themselves as "just plain folks," which is precisely what most of them are—the descendants of the "plain folk" of the Old South.
Historian Frank Owsley first drew attention to the "plain folk"—the mass of southern white farmers who lived outside the plantation economy and who composed the bulk of the Old South’s population. The plain folk included the slaveholding farmers with fewer than twenty slaves as well as the more numerous slaveless farmers. Most plain folk farmers aspired "to acquire land and other property sufficient to give them and their children a sense of security and well-being" (Owsley 36).
To achieve this sense of security and well-being, plain folk practiced a "grazing and farm economy"
(Owsley 37). They grazed cattle and hogs on the unfenced public lands, or open-range, at no charge, a practice that was safeguarded by law until after the Civil War. In addition, they practiced "patch" farming—clearing temporary fields, or "patches," from the forests, planting corn until yields declined, abandoning the old fields and then clearing new fields from the remaining forest. Open-range grazing furnished meat for family consumption as well as surplus livestock for sale. Patch-farming of corn, in turn, offered food for families, fodder for livestock, and even cash—if the corn was distilled into liquor. Taken together, livestock-grazing and patch-farming allowed plain folk families to meet their subsistence and cash needs; and these agricultural practices provided the economic base for a distinctive lifestyle or folk culture outline of which one finds in travelogues, reminiscences and oral traditions. Plain folk lived in dispersed rural neighborhoods; occupied houses built of horizontal logs cut from surrounding forests; fashioned their own agricultural implements, household furnishings and even garments; patronized crossroad mills, stores and churches and periodically visited county seat towns to trade, vote and socialize (Otto, "Upland South"
74-76).
By 1860, the eve of the Civil War, the plain folk were found throughout the Old South from Delaware to
Texas, but they were especially prominent in the Appalachian mountains, where they were the vast majority of the inhabitants. Before the Civil War, these Appalachian plain folk attracted little attention in the outside world. Their lifestyle differed little from that of the plain folk who lived elsewhere in the Old
South (Otto, “Oral Traditional History" 26-27).
The Civil War and the postbellum cotton boom shattered the lifestyle of most southern plain folk. In an effort to protect cotton fields from wandering livestock, postbellum state legislatures enacted laws forcing plain folk to fence in their range cattle and hogs. Since these fence laws effectively ended the right to graze livestock on the open-range, the plain folk living in the cotton-producing regions turned to cotton growing as a livelihood. They borrowed money for cotton seed and fertilizers as well as for food and clothing to last them until harvest and market. If cotton prices were high, they paid off their debts and made a small profit.
If prices were low, they became debtors, often losing their farms in the process. Landless plain folk then joined the growing mass of tenant farmers and mill workers (McDonald and McWhiney 1115-18).
Although the postbellum cotton boom swept away many southern plain folk, cotton-growing proved unfeasible in the Appalachian mountains. The poor soils, rugged terrain and unpredictable frosts of the
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mountains limited the spread of cotton cultivation. The Appalachian mountains remained an enclave of plain folk farmers long after the Civil War (see U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Economic and Social
Problems" 9-10; Newton 144).
But during the late nineteenth century, a series of family feuds, including the infamous Hat field-McCoy vendetta, focused national attention on the previously little-known Appalachian mountains. The first "discoverers" of the mountains were journalists, but they were soon followed by missionaries, teachers and academics. These outsiders found a world of log cabins, split-rail fences, ox-drawn plows, homemade chairs, and spinning wheels—all the familiar attributes of plain folk life. Outside observers, nevertheless, believed they had entered a lost world, being transported back to the time of Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett and Abe Lincoln's boyhood. By the late 1890s, academic visitors were proclaiming the Appalachian mountains to be a "retarded frontier" still bearing the stamp of pioneer America. Entering the Appalachian mountains, one could hear traditional ballads, listen to folktales about witches and view "lost frontiersmen" plowing their corn fields and grazing their livestock on the open range (William Brown; Frost; Vincent).
The "lost frontiersman" stereotype of the, 1890s gave way to a less favorable stereotype in the early twentieth century. Following the defeat of Spain in 1898, the United States became a minor colonial power, shouldering the "white man's burden" in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Concern for "civilizing" the primitive people of the world, however, was not confined to the areas outside the continental United States.
American reformers soon turned their attention to the mountain folk of Appalachia, believing them to be as lost in ignorance and poverty as any foreign "people of color." After all, mountain folk feuded with their neighbors, believed in witches, raised broods of uneducated children and avoided hard work—except to raise corn for illegal moonshine whiskey (May 192-230; Klotter 842). In short, they were "hillbillies''. The word "hillbilly" first appeared in print in1900, when a New York Journal reporter defined the term: 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".
(qtd. in Green 204). The word “hillbilly” soon appeared in a spate of early twentieth-century mass media articles and novels, purportedly describing the lifestyle of the southern mountain folk (Green 204). And by the 1920s, the term "hillbilly" even circulated among the mountain folk themselves, serving as a jest or as an insult.
As an example, a mountain string band, journeying to New York City in 1925 to record fiddle dance tunes, was asked the name of their group by the record producer. In reply, one band member blurted out: "We're nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia. Call us anything." 'His record producer wrote down "The Hill-Billies" as the band's name. On their return trip from New York, the band members expressed misgivings about their new title. As one of the musicians later recalled: "Hillbilly was not only a funny word, it was a fighting word", (Green 213-14). The band's records, nonetheless, sold widely, and
"The Hill-Billies" even toured the vaudeville circuit. Dressed in overalls and straw hats and playing mountain music before urban audiences, "The Hill-Billies" did much to popularize the "hillbilly" stereotype
(Malone 43-44). In fact, "The Hill-Billies" achieved such success that mountain music and the word
"hillbilly" became inextricably interlinked. The mixed lot of fiddle dance tunes, traditional ballads and tin pan alley songs which southern whites recorded during the interwar years were popularly known as
"hillbilly music" (Malone 43-44).
"Hillbilly music" remained a disquieting term, however, and no one proudly proclaimed himself to be a
"hillbilly." As portrayed in the printed media, "hillbillies" were ill-kempt, ill-educated, and poverty-stricken farmers-cum-moonshiners who lived a static and unchanging life in the isolated Appalachian mountains
(Bradley; Smith 329-31). This "hillbilly" stereotype was not only demeaning, it was also inaccurate, since it ignored the profound changes that occurred in the lives of Appalachian mountain folk as a result of industrialization, overpopulation, migration and urbanization (Eller 37-38).
At the turn of the twentieth century, most Appalachian mountain folk were still rural agriculturalists. They grazed cattle and hogs in the un-fenced forests and grew corn in fields cleared from hillside forests, as their plain folk ancestors had done (for example, see Semple 600-3; Kephart 42-45, Morton 53-54; Haney 85-
87). Since every cow needed a minimum of fifteen acres of forest range in order to find sufficient
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forage during the year, a herd of only 100 cattle required as much as 1,500 acres of unfenced forest
(Milliard 136). And when the corn yields in a hillside field declined, farmers simply abandoned the old field and cleared new ground from the remaining forest (see U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Message"
25-26, 58). Thus, the continued success of mountain agriculture required an abundance of forest land.
After 1900, forest land was no longer abundant in the Appalachian mountains. Extractive industries such as coal mining and logging competed with farmers for the use of mountain land. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, private companies acquired vast tracts of public and private land. Whole valleys were given over to railways, coal mines and coal towns, while forested slopes were denuded to provide timbers for mines and lumber for coal towns (Eller 40-42; Caudill, Night Comes 98-88, 141-46;
Shackelford and Weinberg 133-55). By 1930, only 60% of the land in the Appalachia mountains was still owned by farmers.
This loss of agricultural land was exacerbated by overpopulation. Southern Appalachia had one of the highest birth rates in the United States, for mountain families needed children to aid in farm work. Larger families, of course, increased the population pressure on the land (Barron 211-12). Traditional "patch" farming could no longer support the burgeoning rural population. During the early twentieth century, many mountain families migrated to Texas and Oklahoma, hoping to continue their agricultural way of life as cotton tenant farmers. Others abandoned farming altogether, settling in the coal towns and logging camps of Southern Appalachia (Combs 43-44; Caudill, Night Comes 193-209; Shackelford and Weinberg 193-
209).
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, some migrants returned to the mountains to subsist on tiny hillside farms. Unemployed workers from the coal mines and saw mills also joined the ranks of mountain farmers. About 400,000 farms were to be found in the Appalachian mountains during the 1930s; half of them were less than fifty acres in size, and one-fourth were smaller than twenty acres. This meant that thousands of families were "trying to make a living on from three to 10 acres of poor land (Taylor 13).
During the depths of the Depression, much of Southern Appalachia was occupied by marginal farmers who made little money and whose working efforts were exerted in merely subsisting from year to year
(Williams 49-50).
Depression-era newspapers rarely reported on the plight of marginal mountain farmers, but most papers featured the antics of cartoon "hill-billies" in daily comic strips, In 1934, Al Capp launched the "Li'l Abner" strip, which was set in the Kentucky mountains and which featured a comic "hillbilly" family—the
Yokums. Though "Li'1 Abner" proved so popular that it inspired an RKO movie in 1940, it was the
"Barney Google" comic strip which introduced the archetypal cartoon "hillbilly" "Snuffy Smith." In the same year that Al Capp began his "Li'l Abner" strip, cartoonist Billy De Beck led his comic hero, "Barney
Google, deep into the Kentucky mountains. There Google met the disreputable "Snuffy Smith" and his wife, Lowizie. She did all the plowing and housework, while "Snuffy" stole chickens, made "moonshine" whiskey, tangled with "revenooers," and slept off the effects of too much "corn squeezins." By the late
1930s, "Snuffy Smith" was so well received by the American public that he crowded "Barney Google" out of his own strip (Horn 99-100, 150-51). In conjunction with "Li'l Abner," the "Snuffy Smith" comic strip portrayed "hillbillies" as the shiftless denizens of the Appalachian mountains, "Hillbillies" were poor, because they were lazy like "Snuffy Smith and not because they were the victims of complex demographic and economic circumstances.
Before World War Two, the "hillbillies" had been safely ensconced in their Appalachian mountain homes.
But during the war, a booming national economy precipitated a massive wave of out-migration from Southern Appalachia. Between 1940 and 1960, over two million people left Appalachia to seek jobs in the industrial cities of the North. Among the migrants were hundreds of thousands of marginal farmers who abandoned their tiny hillside farms in search of a better life" (Brown and Hillery 54-78).
Arriving in northern cities, the mountain migrants received a cool welcome. Journalists warned of an
"invasion of the hillbillies." Urban Americans, expecting an influx of "Snuffy Smiths," shunned the mountain folks who settled in slum neighborhoods that were dubbed "hillbilly ghettos." Living in an impersonal urban world, where one rarely knew one's neighbors, the mountain migrants turned to storefront
Pentecostal churches and to the "hillbilly bars" for solace. (Votaw; Flynt 136-40).
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In their own taverns, the mountain migrants listened to musicians performing songs which outsiders dismissed as "hillbilly music." Aware of the negative connotations of "hillbilly music,"' mountain musicians began referring to their repertoire of dance tunes, ballads and topical songs as "country music."
To escape the "Snuffy Smith-hillbilly" image, mountain musicians adopted the dress and style of Texas
"honky-tonk" performers such as Ernest Tubb. Despite the incongruity, Kentucky and West Virginia musicians donned Stetson hats, western shirts and cowboy boots when performing before migrant audiences. And finally, mountain musicians incorporated the latest Nashville "country" hits into their repertoires, particularly the mournful ballad "Detroit City," which became an anthem for "urban hillbillies" working in northern factories (Wilgus 170-73; Malone 166, 216-17; Tribe 46-47):
Home folks think I'm big in Detroit City,
From the letters that I write they think I'm fine:
By day I make the cars and by night I make the bars, if only they could read between the lines.
Refrain: I want to go home, I want to go home.
Oh, how I want to go home.
(Bobby Bare)
Although some migrants returned to their mountain homes, most remained in the industrial cities, where they came under the scrutiny of social workers and reformers. Michael Harrington among others directed national attention to the "urban hillbillies" and their kinsmen in the Appalachian mountains. In 1962,
Harrington published his influential book, The Other America, wherein he recommended massive federal aid to cure the poverty of Appalachia and thus stem the migration of mountain folk to the northern cities
(Harrington 40-43, 90).
Thanks to the renewed interest in Southern Appalachia, Congress passed the Appalachian Development
Act in 1965, authorizing expenditures of 810 million dollars for highway development but only 250 million dollars for human and environmental development. Although urban areas in the mountains benefited from federal highway construction, the Appalachian Development Act did little to alleviate rural poverty. The much publicized "war on poverty" slowed but failed to halt the out-migration from Southern Appalachia.
Rural families continued to abandon their hillside farms and move to the urban North in search of jobs
(Flynt 142-44; De Jong).
As American taxpayers were funding the "war on poverty" during the 1960s, they viewed Appalachian mountain folk in a long-running television comedy that was purportedly set in western North Carolina. The
"Andy Griffith Show" (1960-68) featured such fictional Appalachian folks as Briscoe Darling and Ernest T.
Bass (Terrace 1:55-56). Briscoe Darling and his family were the personification of the positive "lost frontiersman stereotype. The Darlings were superstitious but upright and honorable They farmed, lived in a log house and played traditional dance tunes and ballads, as the "plain folk" had once done. Ernest T. Bass, on the other hand, was the very embodiment of the negative "hillbilly" stereotype. He was poor, lazy and filthy. Bass searched vainly for a woman to share his squalid life; and when frustrated, he howled in the streets, broke windows and disrupted the peaceful life of Mayberry.
"Hillbillies" also figured prominently in James Dickey's best selling novel of 1970, Deliverance , which was released as a movie in 1972. In Deliverance , four suburban businessmen planned a canoe trip down the
Cahulawassee River, a scenic Georgia mountain stream. Arriving at the headwaters of the Cahulawassee, one of the businessmen met a deformed "hillbilly" banjo-picker who bested him in the now-famous
"dueling banjos" scene. During their canoe trip downriver, the suburban men ran afoul of two mountain men. Unlike Snuffy Smith and Ernest T. Bass, who were dissolute but harmless, these were "murderous hillbilly" sodomites who sexually abused two of the businessmen. Killing their depraved "hillbilly" assailants, three of the businessmen survived the harrowing canoe trip and were delivered back to their suburban homes. At novel's end, the Cahulawassee River is dammed, the valley is flooded, and the resultant lake is ringed with marinas and vacation homes (Dickey).
Despite its highly biased portrayal of mountain folk, Deliverance , contained an element of truth: outsiders were transforming the Appalachian landscape to suit their own needs. Appalachian streams were dammed
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to generate electricity for urban centers; valleys were flooded to create lakes for suburban vacationers; and finally, hillside farms were incorporated into the growing public forests. In 1930, the U.S. Forest Service managed only two million acres of public forest in Southern Appalachia. By 1970, there were more than fourteen million acres of Government forest in the Appalachian mountains (Caudill 49-50; Gibbard 115;
Carawan xi).
Valleys and hillsides which had once supported thousands of agricultural families were now the homes of forest rangers and weekend tourists.
Today, the Appalachian mountains are dominated by public forests and tourist parks. Agriculture is largely confined to the broad valleys where the terrain permits intensive commercial agriculture based on livestock, grains and tobacco. The traditional practices of open-range grazing and "patch" farming which date hack to the days of the plain folk have virtually disappeared, Modern Appalachia scarcely resembles the rural, agricultural landscape that gave birth to the "hillbilly" stereotype in the early I900s. But in spite of the great change Appalachia has undergone, the 'hillbilly" stereotype lives on in the "Snuffy Smith" comic strip, the syndicated ''Andy Griffith Show" and late-night showings of the movie "Deliverance." Appalachian mountain folk, who range from commercial farmers to blue-collar workers to white-collar businessman, share one common attribute: they resent being called "hillbillies." They continue to regard themselves as
“just plain folks.”
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