High Mountains Rising (23 page)

Stepping back and considering this theory, two points stand out. First, this theory argues that the sense of distinctiveness began
within
the region and not, as Shapiro argues, from outside the region. Second, this theory draws on detailed records for one locale in Appalachia (a micro-level approach), as opposed to a broader use of records covering the entire mountain region (a macro-level approach). One theory or approach is not necessarily better than the other. Similarly, one historian's answer is not necessarily “right” and the other's “wrong.” The issue of stereotypes and Appalachia is so complex that one should expect that it would take many different approaches to understand the subject. When wrestling with questions and theories, one must use one's own brain critically and analytically to come to an informed conclusion. Doing so will avoid the lazy thinking that gave rise to the stereotypes in the first place.

To understand the stereotype's origins is hard enough, but to understand the persistence and popularity of these stereotypes may be even more
difficult. Consider the following ideas as tools to dissect the images of Appalachia that pervade American culture. Keep in mind that for any given situation, several forces probably are at work concurrently.

First, the image of Appalachia can mean just about anything. The image of the hillbilly, for example, has remained largely unchanged over the past 150 years, which is remarkable given the political, economic, social, and cultural changes in the United States over that same time period. Anthony Harkins attributes the image's amazing staying power to its ability to evolve in response to the changes in American society. “The key to the ‘hillbilly's' ubiquity and endurance . . . has been the fundamental ambiguity of the meaning of this term and image. In its many manifestations, ‘hillbilly' has been used both in national media representations and by thousands of Americans within and outside of the Southern mountains to both uphold and challenge the dominant trends of twentieth-century American life— urbanization, the growing dominance of technology, and the resulting routinization of American life.” Harkins sees the hillbilly stereotype as a “continually negotiated mythic space through which modern Americans have attempted to define themselves and their national identity and to reconcile the past and the present.”
²⁴

For example, from the 1920s to the 1940s, country music in general, and the hillbilly image in particular, became very popular. However, the meaning of the image varied greatly. Radio promoters such as George D. Hay and John Lair took a direct and active role in shaping the musicians' public presentation, even changing the names of groups (for example, from “Dr. Humphrey Bate and His Augmented Orchestra” to “Dr. Bate's Possum Hunters”) and requiring publicity photos to be shot in cornfields or in front of barns. Although Hay and Lair later wrote that they refused to use the term
hillbilly
because they considered it derogatory, their actions created “a rural country image that helped legitimize both the use of the term and a humorous rustic conception of mountain folk and country musicians.”
²⁵
The image could mean different things to different people in different places at different times in the nation's history. Such flexibility and adaptability promised this stereotype a long life.

Second, some argue that the images are so popular because people use them for profit. According to Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings, “Outdoor dramatizations of the Hatfields and McCoys and John Fox Jr.'s
Trail of the Lonesome Pine
, for example, have been performed now in West Virginia and Virginia for roughly twenty-five years.”
²⁶
Similarly, Chris Burritt of the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
reported, “Here along Blackberry Creek [Kentucky], a spot of rugged beauty with a murderous past, descendants of the Hatfields and the McCoys are plotting a killing of a different sort.
Gathering this weekend [June 10, 2000] for a big family reunion, they hope to parlay an accurate telling of the bloody legend into tourism dollars for this hardscrabble patch of Appalachia.” Given the decline in coalmining—a loss of more than half of Kentucky's coalmining jobs since 1990—planners sought to attract tourism dollars by building a Hatfield and McCoy museum, erecting highway markers, and organizing a Hatfield-McCoy festival. According to Ron McCoy, the organizer of the reunion, “We think the notoriety of the Hatfield-McCoy feud is a draw that the area has not capitalized on. It is so recognizable that a lot of people out of curiosity will come here and walk the sites.”
²⁷

Third, some people may accept the stereotypes because by putting down someone else, they feel better about themselves. Darlene Wilson argues that with the stereotypes at the turn of the twentieth century, “white Americans wanting desperately to believe in a three-class (or more) structure could breathe a sigh of relief. ‘See,' they could say, ‘that's the bottom for white folks and we're not like that at all,' thus confirming their idealized middle-class self-positioning.”
²⁸
Middle-class white Americans needed this reassurance, Wilson argues, because they were buffeted by industrialization, urbanization, economic depressions, immigration from southern and eastern Europe, labor unrest, and reform movements. These Americans faced “crises of identity and purpose” and took legislative, economic, and social steps to “purge Americanism of any taint of otherness” and shore up the insecurities they had about the world around them and their place in it.
²⁹

J. W. Williamson makes this point more generally. “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.”
³⁰
For example, Williamson notes that the hillbilly image gained popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Why? “Economic collapse, for one thing. The early 1930s forced middle-class urban Americans to consider seriously the unthinkable possibility that the whole damn shooting match of the American economic system itself was about to land them back in Rural Subsistence Hell. So Paul Webb's hillbillies [in cartoons for
Esquire
magazine] were the shadow of our doubt, a nervous clowning talisman to wave off the evil of failure.”
³¹

Fourth, the stereotypes may be popular because they serve as a release for mainstream middle America's fears. J. W. Williamson describes the “Womanless Wedding folk play,” which featured “the hillbilly garb and the hillbilly props—outlandish rural poverty enacted by and for small-town people,” being performed throughout Appalachia but also in states such as Florida, Ohio, and Michigan.
³²
From his own experience growing up in west Texas, Williamson saw men in “a raucous burlesque wedding, some of them
taking men's parts . . . but many of them starring as the women.” The comical plot

 

dealt with a shotgun wedding between two clans, hillbillies of the classic cartoon guise. The bride, played by the biggest, most macho tub-belly in [town], 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 misstater, a monumentally dumb hick, so the ceremony itself was full of interruptions accompanied by general vulgar high jinks. . . . The main course and centerpiece of the evening was unembarrassed pregnancy out of wedlock.
³³

Why were these shows, and by extension the stereotypes, so popular? Williamson argues that these performances “allowed us to make sport of what actually and truthfully frightened us. . . . 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 their own families apart. . . . 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.”
³⁴
The writer Stephen King makes a similar argument for our desire to see horror films. “The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized.” The films serve the purpose of “lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man.”
³⁵
Williamson asks comparable questions: “Were we allowed this vent so that the hillbilly in us wouldn't break out for real? Was the hillbilly fool part of our cosmos to keep us in line? Or was our public pageant a more innocent display to help us maintain our balance in a plainly unpredictable world?”
³⁶
Perhaps Appalachian stereotypes have remained so persistent because they speak to such deep emotional needs.

Having discussed several tools to analyze Appalachian stereotypes, perhaps the time has come to tackle one of the most interesting examples around. Pikeville, Kentucky, celebrated its twenty-fifth annual Hillbilly Days Festival in April 2001. Begun in 1977 by local Shriners such as Howard “Dirty Ear” Stratton and “Shady” Grady Kinney to raise money for their children's hospitals and burn centers, the festival this year brought more than 100,000 visitors into the town of 6,500, making it the state's second largest annual gathering after the Kentucky Derby. The Shriners had created a “hillbilly degree” to recognize its members' achievements and had designated its units as “out
house” chapters. Activities and events included music by invited performers, an open stage, a “kiddie carnival,” the annual square dance, arts and crafts demonstrations and displays, and “the climactic event each year,” the Hillbilly Parade, where thousands of people dressed up in “hillbilly garb,” carried moonshine jugs, and wound their way through the streets of Pikeville.
³⁷

Try analyzing this phenomenon by using the following pieces of evidence:

 

[The opening screen of the Hillbilly Days home page]

Welkum Ya'll.. . . Come on in, crack open a Pepsi, and sit a spell rite cher in good ole Pikeville, Kentucky! We would like to thank everywun for visitin us durin the 2001 Hillbilly Days. We would also like to thank all of our sponsors for their generosity and support. Over the next few weeks we'us will be postin some piturs taken at the festival. Make sure ya vist the archive piturs taken by the web cams. See ya next year!
³⁸

 

[Devon Scalf, retired teacher]

Hillbilly? Everybody gets stereotyped in life, but everybody's heritage just gets more valuable with time.
³⁹

 

[George C. Wells, ninety-one-year-old local car dealer and Shriner]

Well, there was complaining from some at first about using hillbilly. But it soon became a real fun thing, and look at all the children we brought out of the backwoods who needed hospital care.
⁴⁰

 

[Sandy Runyon, executive director of the Area Development District of the Big Sandy River region]

We walk a fine line between being very proud of our heritage and trying to dispel the typical idea the rest of the world has. It remains a sensitive point. A lot of people would rather not remember the past, but it gave us a heritage to be proud of.
⁴¹

 

[Paul Patton, governor of Kentucky]

It's a little paradoxical, but when you can laugh at yourself, that's a healthy sign that you can acknowledge a part of your heritage and be comfortable with it. The old days of Lyndon Johnson's foray into eastern Kentucky to highlight domestic poverty are gone. What we offer now is intellectual service to people around the world.
⁴²

 

[Bob Dart, reporter for Cox Newspapers]

Sykes, an international computer troubleshooting firm, has communications centers in Pikeville and nearby Hazard. It employs more than 1000 highly trained residents of Appalachia to deal with computer problems of people around the world.. . . Pikeville Methodist Hospital and the medical school are linked to a new telecommunications network that will help provide medical care to federal prison inmates across the country.
⁴³

 

[Melissa Cornett, staff writer for Appalachian Focus Civil News]

Coca-Cola Enterprises of Pikeville announced Monday [March 5, 2001] it will offer a specially-decorated eight-ounce bottle and carrier to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the annual Hillbilly Days Festival. . . . A total of 96,000 bottles featuring a Hillbilly Days logo and the date for the three-day festival were produced. . . . [According to Gov. Paul Patton,] “These bottles will be taken back by our guests to all parts of the country and displayed as proud mementos by people who have adopted this very special cause of celebrating the heritage [of] Appalachia and helping the children of the region through the Shriners' efforts.”
⁴⁴

 

Now consider the meanings and implications of Appalachian stereotypes in modern America. Why would tens of thousands of people who live outside the mountain region want to come to the Hillbilly Days Festival? Why would the residents of Pikeville support an event that, at one level, fosters a stereotypical image of themselves? Perhaps it's all about money, but there is more to it than that.
⁴⁵

What does the future hold for Appalachian stereotypes? Anthony Harkins has described the stereotype's durability and flexibility over the past century, and there's no reason to suspect it will not endure for another hundred years. The images continually surround us; for example, over the weekend of July 28–29, 2001, the cable television station TV Land broadcast episodes of the old
Beverly Hillbillies
show for 48 consecutive hours. Although it may not be in our power to control the dissemination of such images, we do have the power to interpret these stereotypes critically and in ways that take into consideration the people of Appalachia past and present.