Despite the examples of the upstate New York string bands, by the mid-1930s, the vast majority of country music performers and supporters sought a new image that did not carry the increasingly negative connotations of the term hillbilly and the image of the mountaineer. Once again, the Beverly Hill Bil-lies represented a broader trend, the general shift in country music from hill-billy and mountain to cowboy and western attire, songs, and personae. The introduction of cowboy imagery into country music was not a wholly new development. Eck Robertson, the first “Old-Time” fiddler commercially recorded, hailed from West Texas and dressed in cowboy attire for his audi-tion, and a number of musicians in the 1920s, including Carson J. Robinson, Carl T. Sprague, and above all, Jimmie Rodgers, gained prominence singing cowboy songs and wearing exaggerated cowboy costumes. But not until the 1930s and the tremendous success of “Oklahoma’s ‘Singing Cowboy,’” Gene Autry, who moved from the National Barn Dance to an enormously success-ful career in Hollywood, did the cowboy persona envelop country music.
Cowboy hats and boots became standard uniforms for country music per-formers throughout the United States and Canada, and “Red River Dave,”
“the Lonesome Cowboy,” “the Girls of the Golden West,” and countless oth-ers filled the radio airwaves, record stores, and mail order catalogs. The rise in Texas and elsewhere of “Western Swing” music with its mixture of blues, jazz, and traditional fiddle tunes, the growing importance of the Southwest as a seedbed for musicians and radio programming, and the increasing focus on the region by record companies such as Decca and Okeh, all reflected a steady move away from a mountain image and musical style.42
Several related factors underlay the abandonment of the “hillbilly” look and the widespread adoption of cowboy imagery in the mid- to late 1930s: ten-gallon hats, chaps, and pointed boots offered far greater romantic possibilities than did the traditional mountaineer costume; the string band and plaintive mountain ballad style sounded increasingly old fashioned and even alien to
modern audiences and performers; and in the searing psychological and eco-nomic environment of the Great Depression, the cowboy persona offered (in the words of country music historian Bill Malone) “a reassuring symbol of in-dependence and mastery” that doubtless provided great comfort to many Americans struggling with financial hardship and personal and societal loss of faith.43In the early twentieth century, the mythic mountaineer represented these same qualities of individuality, independence, and stalwartness. But by the mid-1930s, these more positive readings were being superseded by a grow-ing derision toward, and increasgrow-ingly negative image of, the southern moun-tains and mountaineers. A national audience, exposed on a regular basis to stories of violent coal strikes in Kentucky and West Virginia, social depravity and “aberrant” religious practices such as snake handling and speaking-in-tongues, and a steady diet of increasingly degenerate hillbilly portrayals, could no longer sustain a romantic and nostalgic sense of the mountains and mountaineers. News reports on New Deal aid and construction programs aimed at southern mountaineers administered by the Resettlement Admin-istration, the Farm Security AdminAdmin-istration, and the Tennessee Valley Au-thority also highlighted the region’s wretched living conditions and portrayed the southern mountains as a particularly depressed area within what Presi-dent Franklin Roosevelt called “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem”—the thirteen southern states. As audiences increasingly perceived the mountains as a cultural site of backwardness and degradation, country musicians and lis-teners nationwide turned to an image that had been more consistently hero-ically constructed by the popular media. As country music historian Douglas Green observes succinctly, “no youngster in the thirties and forties ever wanted to grow up to be a hillbilly, but thousands wanted to be cowboys.” President Franklin Roosevelt himself tapped into these same attitudes when he an-nounced that “Home on the Range” was his favorite song.44
The cultural divide between hillbilly and cowboy was easily crossed cause country music iconography had always occupied a middle ground be-tween mountains and plains—a liminality perfectly illustrated by the almost imperceptibly curved landscape on the cover of the 1940 songbook “Home &
Hill Country Ballads” (fig. 3.9). By the mid-1930s, then, country singers still sang about cabins in the mountains, but they now referred to the Rockies not the Cumberlands, and the Kentucky Ramblers of the National Barn Dance became the Prairie Ramblers and backed up Patsy Montana (born Ruby Blevins in Hot Springs, Arkansas). Whereas the 1930 to 1934 issues of the WLS Family Album played up the mountain origins of the Cumberland Ridge Runners and Bradley Kincaid, by 1936, the program was dominated by publicity stills of cowboy groups such as Patsy Montana, Tumble Weed, and Dollie and Millie, “the Girls of the Golden West.” Kentucky fiddler Clifford
Gross’s career perfectly encapsulated this trend. In 1931, he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and formed a string band called “The Kentucky Hillbillies.”
The band soon broke up but Gross found quick success, joining the very pop-ular Light Crust Doughboys in 1933. In 1939, Gross returned to Louisville, Kentucky, and formed yet another band, but realizing the overwhelming trend in country music, he called his new group “Clifford Gross’s Texas Cow-boys.”45
Despite the predominance by the end of the 1930s of cowboy costumes, imagery, and themes throughout country music, the term “hillbilly” remained into the 1950s the standard, if never wholly satisfactory, label for the genre.
Decca’s 1940 catalog cover prominently featured the term, although all the per-formers appear in coats and ties or cowboy hats and bandannas (including Clayton McMichen, an original member of the Skillet Lickers string band) (fig. 3.10). Influential country bands continued to use “hillbilly” in their names, including the Colorado Hillbillies and Wilbur Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel’s Hill-billy Boys, formed in Dallas in 1935 to promote both O’Daniel’s “HillHill-billy Flour” and his high political aspirations. Radio-station-sponsored periodicals and country music fan magazines also widely used the term. Well into the post-war era, “fanzines” such as Hillbilly & Western Hoedown (Cincinnati, 1953–
1966) and Hillbilly and Cowboy Hit Parade (1957–1961) continued to incorpo-rate “hillbilly” not only in their titles but also throughout the publication
(of-Figure 3.9
The liminal landscape of country music.
“Home & Hill Country Ballads.” Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, FL-337.
ten mixed interchangeably with “cowboy,” “western,” “country,” “country and western,” and even “folk”). And at least some subscribers continued to embrace the term as well, using it to refer to both “hillbilly music” and to themselves as listeners. As one reader wrote, “[w]e enjoy it [Hillbilly & Western Hoedown] so much as it is the kind of magazine we hillbillys all enjoy.” Proclaiming oneself a “hillbilly,” therefore, as Bill Malone recalls from his youth in East Texas, was not labeling oneself a mountaineer but was instead an inclusive and positive (if often defensive) statement of one’s musical taste and traditionally rural socio-cultural status.46
Since commercial country music’s inception, “hillbilly” had always in-cluded denigrating connotations as part of a wide range of possible interpre-tations. Nonetheless, before the mid- to late 1930s, the novelty and relatively limited impact of the music on the whole of mass culture, the way the term and image fit easily into a grassroots comedic tradition, and, most significant, the absence of a standardized hillbilly icon combined to make the term ac-ceptable to many musicians and fans alike. Promoters, musicians, and lis-teners all strove to disassociate the term from its negative stereotype and even from any connections to the southern mountains or southern mountain cul-ture. “Bob Miller’s Famous Hill-Billy Heart Throbs” 1934 songbook, for
ex-Figure 3.10 The persistence of “Hillbilly” into the cowboy era of country music. Decca Hill Billy Records catalog, May 2, 1940. Peter Tamony Collection, 1890–1985, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, Missouri.
ample, includes “Snow Capped Hills of Maine,” “Sleepy Rio Grande,” and
“Harvest Time in Old New England” but not a single song featuring Ap-palachia or the Ozarks.47
Over the following decade, these circumstances changed dramatically.
Country music became an increasingly powerful nationwide popular culture industry, particularly after the “breakout” years of World War II. Southern mi-grants seeking defense work in the industrial North and West and servicemen and women in military bases around the country introduced the music to thousands of new listeners and created a growing market in cities as disparate as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Baltimore for live performances, records, and jukebox selections. The traditional string band style and instrumentation was increasingly supplanted by electric guitars and drums. And the word and im-age of “hillbilly” became associated unequivocally with instantly recogniza-ble cartoon figures. The popular press continued to belittle the music and its audience in articles such as “Hillbilly Boom,” “Hillbilly Heaven,” “Whoop-and-Holler Opera,” and “Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly Tunes,” but these mainstream accounts now drew heavily on the newly crystallized com-ical image of backward mountain folk. For example, describing phonograph company agents’ initial efforts in the 1920s to discover local talent, one author gibed: “They found it in the raw: barefoot fiddlers who couldn’t read a note but who could raise a voice on endless tunes, especially with the aid of corn liquor.” The cover illustration of the article “Hillbilly Heaven” featured dozens of cartoon hillbillies running with kerosene lamps from hilltop cab-ins or driving wheezing jalopies to a country barn labeled “Grand Ole Opry.”
And as late as the 1950s, some record companies continued to use drawings of barefoot, corncob pipe-smoking hillbillies to advertise their musicians (figs.
3.11, 3.12).48
In the postwar years, country musicians and promoters, seeking to mar-ket their music to mainstream audiences and to be treated with respect by the recording and broadcasting industries, worked aggressively to repudiate the hillbilly label. Country songwriter Johnny Bond recalled that all his fellow musicians “agreed that the term [hillbilly] was an uncomplimentary put-down.” Ernest Tubb, one of the leading country performers of the 1940s and perhaps the most influential musically, also fought hard to replace the hill-billy label, precisely because of its stereotyped connotations. He convinced his record label, Decca, to drop the name for the more amenable “country and western” (in 1948) and encouraged Judge Hay to stop using the term backstage and on the air at the Grand Ole Opry. As he explained to Hay: “a lot of people don’t understand what hillbilly means; they think of somebody . . . out there in the hills, barefooted, with a long beard and making moon-shine—they call them hillbilly. It looks like they think of our music as an
in-Figures 3.11, 3.12 Hillbilly iconography in postwar country music publicity.
Advertisements for Mercury Records and London Records, Billboard, March 19, 1949, 39; June 3, 1950, 33.
ferior type of music.” Grand Ole Opry star Roy Acuff took a similar tack, telling a reporter “We’re not so wealthy or wise . . . but we’re not ignorant and shouldn’t be ridiculed.” He also refused to participate in the 1940 Hollywood film Grand Ole Opry if the studio “put in a ‘Snuffy Smith—sloshwocker’
background”—a condition the studio eventually accepted. Acuff, Tubb, and other musicians were joined in this struggle by “Uncle Art” Satherly, the long time talent scout for Okeh and later Columbia Records, who discovered and recorded dozens of country music performers. A life-long champion of rural Americans and their culture, Satherly wrote late in life of his objection to the words “Hill Billy” and complained about being “stamped with the name Hill Billy Satherly” by others in the record industry who accused him of record-ing “trash.” To Satherly, the term directly clashed with his sense of the dignity of the American farmer and his highly romanticized vision of rural people as “country folk . . . [the] tillers of the soil . . . our mainstay.”49
Pressure from performers such as Tubb and Acuff and producers such as Satherly finally forced record companies and industry and popular press ac-counts to drop the term “hillbilly” in favor of the more positive and inclusive
“country music.” The new terminology was not universally adopted for over two decades, though; post–World War II hillbilly-titled songs including “Hill-billy Heaven” and “Hill“Hill-billy Fever” became hits, and country comedians in-cluding Homer and Jethro (Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns) made lucra-tive careers out of using hillbilly costumes and humor to satirize city ways.50 Nonetheless, by the 1960s, the efforts to eradicate the term “hillbilly” from the field of country music had largely succeeded, and only international hill-billy music fan club journals and newsletters continued to use the term.51 The word appeared only occasionally by itself or linked to the new music of rock and roll, as in “rockabilly” music or in Elvis Presley’s early nickname,
“the Hillbilly cat.” Certainly, Presley and other 1950s rockabilly singers in-cluding Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins shared with Fiddlin’ John Carson, the Skillet Lickers, and the Hill Billies the same southern working-class back-ground, raucous performance style, and mixture of sincerity and humor in their music. And the term has made a comeback since the 1980s, defiantly embraced by self-defined “traditional” musicians such as Dwight Yoakam, Marty Stuart, and even BR 5-49 in order to differentiate their unadulterated
“roots country” from the easy listening “Nashville Sound” of the 1970s or the
“stadium country” of Garth Brooks and Brooks and Dunn. The label has thus come full circle; once used to denigrate base and commercial pabulum and distinguish it from “authentic” folk music, “hillbilly” now signifies this very authenticity.
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In the November 1934 issue of Esquire magazine, amid advertisements fea-turing dapper young men in evening wear and columns on the latest New York theater offerings, three barefoot and disheveled men with oversized beards and hats slouched on a rustic cabin porch behind an unkempt front yard, whiskey jugs at their sides. “Wonder if Maw’s had her baby yet—I’m get-tin’ mighty hongry,” one ponders as they languidly await the news (fig. 4.1).
Thus began Paul Webb’s cartoon series, eventually entitled The Mountain Boys, that ran monthly in Esquire until the late 1940s and sporadically there-after until March 1958. The Mountain Boys was one of three cartoons/comic strips focused on hillbilly characters that debuted that same year. Webb’s work, Billy DeBeck’s transformation of his ongoing comic strip Barney Google, and Al Capp’s new syndicated feature Li’l Abner were not only the first serialized cartoon images primarily depicting southern mountain folk but also some of the first featuring southern characters. Emerging within months of one another, all were an outgrowth of the same general mood of economic distress and decades-long expansion in both academic and popu-lar interest in the rural folk in general, and mountaineers in particupopu-lar, that fueled the national fascination with “hillbilly music.”1
As did other media’s use of the image, hillbilly comics and cartoons mir-rored the complex mix of emotions and attitudes of Depression-era audi-ences. They reflected the widespread public fear of systemic economic and social collapse and daily reporting on the plight of the rural South. Yet these