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REVIEWS
| Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. By Anthony Harkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. x plus 324 pp.).
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| The hillbilly is a figure of both great longevity and widespread recognition in American culture, as Anthony Harkins's well-researched and effectively documented study shows. In the first comprehensive history of the hillbilly, Harkins traces this figure back to precursors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: literary sources, such as the stock character of the "rural rube," as well as Simon Suggs, Sut Lovingood, and Southwest humor; legends that grew up around historical figures Daniel Boone and, especially, Davy Crockett; the image of the feuding, moonshining Mountaineer propagated by journalists in the later nineteenth century. The hillbilly himself emerges around the turn of the twentieth century in both newspapers and in humorous pamphlets as an amalgam of the rustic yokel, the "poor white," and the mountaineer, and by the early 1910s the hillbilly had already become a stock character in motion pictures. |
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As Harkins demonstrates, the hillbilly is of interest because the figure has always been an ambiguous combination of admiral traits like freedom and independence with negative ones such as poverty and uncouthness, as this definition quoted from the New York Journal of 1900 illustrates: "a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, 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." Later elaborations will develop both sides of this picture, connecting the hillbilly to pioneer roots and pre-modern authenticity on the one hand, and to laziness, profligate and deviant sexuality, and violence on the other. Harkins traces the hillbilly through incarnations in country music, sound films, comic strips, and television. While there are some changes, the figure remains remarkably consistent even into the twenty-first century, with the proposed reality show, The Real Beverly Hillbillies. |
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