Hillbilly Face

Or Why Americans Think It's Perfectly Okay to Mock Southern Appalachians

People who really know country music will know that the genre has its deepest roots in multiple traditions - broadside ballads from the British Isles, orally transmitted folk music with song, instrumental and dance traditions, gospel music and hymns, shape note singing, the "lining-out" singing of Scottish Islanders, the African-American creation of precursors to the modern banjo, the blues and various worksongs, Indigenous singing and drumming, Portuguese and Hawaiian guitar, Mexican music - the list goes on and on.

Many of the oldest country and folk songs still being sung or played today - Blue-Tail Fly, Camptown Races, Dixie, My Old Kentucky Home, Oh Susanna, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw - were actually written during the age of Blackface minstrel shows from the mid-1800s up to the early 1900s.

Between 1840 and 1870, Blackface minstrelsy was far and away the most popular form of musical theater in the USA. Where the Victorian English had their dancehall entertainment, and the Italians had opera, North Americans had Blackface.

The most successful "all-white" ensembles playing to packed houses in larger towns and cities were unambiguous in their condescending portrayal of distorted racial stereotypes.

Rightly seen as deeply offensive and racist by most people today, it is worth remembering that some minstrel shows were mixed ensembles including Black and "white" musicians, dancers, and comedians.

Indeed, at its height, Blackface minstrelsy even boasted a few wholly Black ensembles, owned and managed by African-Americans.

With the mixed and Black ensembles in particular, it is not entirely clear who was having a laugh at whose expense.

More on that towards the end of this piece...

With the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction, and southern Democrats reasserting White Supremacy and the KKK on an upward trajectory, most "white" audience members were soon left in no doubt who was on the receiving end of the loud laughter. Blackface theater entered a period of decline to be replaced by Vaudeville, until Vaudeville gave way to Nickelodeons and the birth of silent cinema.

It is a reflection on urban and "sophisticated" American culture that the very first "talkie" (a film including a soundtrack), was "The Jazz Singer", a movie about a Jewish immigrant wanting to make it as, well, a jazz singer.

Even today, this film tells us a lot about the unseemly haste of "not quite white" immigrants in their rush to join the correct racial caste, as they quickly adapted to and adopted "white" American attitudes to class and "race".

The film's star, Al Jolson, was a Lithuanian Jew named Asa Yoelson, born in about 1885 in what was then part of the Russian Empire. By age 42, when The Jazz Singer was released, Jolson was sufficiently Americanized to feel completely comfortable with performing much of the film in Blackface, even when this form of entertainment was already long on the wane.

USA culture has also been permeated from earliest times with "Redface", a sort of internal version of "Orientalism" a term so memorably described by the great Palestinian-American academic Edward Said.

If I can allow myself a coinage here, "Internal Orientalism" would be a good description for the situation in the USA, in which Indigenous Americans are othered and categorized according to "white" projections of "savagery". This "savagery" can be alternately characterized as violent or "noble" in nature (according to the story's requirements).

This is a cultural phenomenon which could form the basis of an entire series of essays, so we'll keep our description brief. "Redface" on stage and screen involves modern "white" Americans expecting Indigenous peoples past and present to act out various "Indian" tropes created within "white" mythology.

Indians are never shown as part of loving families or communities. Indians are never portrayed as carpenters or builders or composers of music.

No, Indians are usually "smoking a peace pipe", or they are "on the warpath". Indians are symbols, frozen in time at the moment of their demise at the hands of "white civilization".

Other tropes include Indians as the guardians of environmental or "nature wisdom", seen most memorably in the 1970s "crying Indian" anti-litter ad, in which an Italian actor clad in buckskin paddles a canoe along a litter-strewn and polluted river, before turning to shed a tear for the camera.

People of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous background had been performing "Redface" like this on stage and in travelling shows since before America's Indians Wars had even concluded, and it continued unabated into the age of cinema, TV, and commercial advertising. What sets "Redface" apart from "Blackface" is that it is mainly Blackface which consistently presented people as objects of mockery based on their imagined ignorance, stupidity, and other unsavory traits associated with America's lowest racial caste.

"Redface" finally began to peter-out in the last few decades, with the renaming of everything from sports franchises (the Redskins) to brands of chewing tobacco (Red Man).

Even after this progress, inspirational "Native American wisdom" memes for urban New Ager types will probably remain online until the end of time...

What many people may have failed to notice when learning about the history of Blackface minstrelsy, is the regularity with which "The Dumb Hillbilly" was also present as a stock character, side-by-side with "The Plantation Negro", almost from the beginning. 

Hillbillies, rednecks, or "white trash" have traditionally been so far down the American social pecking order that even the children of poor Italian immigrants - people like Michael James Gubitosi, better-known as the actor Robert Blake - could make their start in show business in the 1930s as part of a dance troupe called "The Three Little Hillbillies".

This "Hillbilly Face" - the comedic performance of Southern Appalachian, Deep South, "hillbilly", redneck, or "po white trash" stereotypes - has existed on the American stage and screen for at least a century and a half.

Before the age of radio and television, during the time of minstrel shows and Vaudeville, "Hillbilly Face" was performed right alongside "Blackface", with hillbillies being mocked for many of the traits regularly attributed to Black Americans.

Portrayed as ill-educated, prone to violence, laziness, alcoholism, and sexual profligacy, this public mocking of America's poor "white" underclasses is far less studied or written about than its Black- and Redface counterparts.

The transfer of "Hillbilly Face" from Blackface minstrel shows and Vaudeville to the silver screen was just as seamless as the evolution of "Redface".

As early as 1914, a silent film called "The End of the Feud" (which included Lon Chaney, Sr. in its cast) had introduced city audiences to "feudin'", a mainstay of later hillbilly tropes. The legendary Hatfield/McCoy feud along the West Virginia-Kentucky border had made national news only a couple of decades previously, so the newly-born film industry was already primed to turn stories from the sensationalist press about violent and uncouth mountain folks into screenplays.  

To explain why "Hillbilly Face" has been allowed to endure long after the end of Blackface and <most> Redface, we will need to step back in time for a bit of social history...

*****

The cultural foundations of the first English colonists in North America were far from uniform.

Early Anglo-American identity involved something of a tightrope walk between the forces of God (Puritans, Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Mammon (speculators, Virginia Colony).

This delineation was of course not entirely clear-cut.  Puritans enjoyed making money, and most speculators were at least nominally Christian.  It's more a question of emphasis.

As eastern North America began to fill-up with colonists, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans during the 1600s and 1700s, these parallel motivating forces of "God and Mammon" began to rub up against one another, becoming ever more deeply entwined.

When two such different outlooks on the world collide, it seems that religious people are always more likely to bend their religion to align with capitalism, than the other way around.

When a lover of money hears the words ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth: “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [Matthew 19:24], it is very rare indeed to see them ready and willing to bend capitalism to align more closely with Christian teaching.

Having acknowledged this, let's look at the long ideological drift of the Puritans toward the world of avarice and Mammon, and how this drift created an eventual theological basis for the modern American habit of "demonizing the poor".

*****

Many Christians in the USA today - especially the new-fangled evangelicals - are unaware that the "Pilgrim Fathers", and the Puritans who arrived after them, were strict Calvinists. Jehan Cauvin, or "John Calvin", was a French theologian and church reformer during the 1500s, and Calvinist doctrine included the theological concept of - get ready for this - soteriological predestination. This belief in salvation by predestination was shared by the Puritans of Plymouth Colony, which is to say, they believed that God had already decided at the time of His creation how every single person's life would eventually unfold.

This meant, quite literally, that some people were already damned at birth. Harsh, I know. Collateral damage in Jehovah's cosmic struggle with Satan and his minions...

Puritans walked through the world wondering whether they had been chosen for salvation or damnation, constantly looking for signs of their place in the universal schema.

Unusually for the wider population at the time, Puritans tended to be literate. This was essential for the study of Scripture, which Puritans believed crucial for understanding God's will, plan, and design for His creation.

This is a difficult concept for us today.  Professing faith in God and Jesus while "doing good" in the world were of themselves no guarantee of a heavenly reward.

"Doing good" was not a key to Heaven's Gate (an idea taught by other Christian sects).

Why "do good" at all, then?

Because "doing good" was more about being extra careful not to interfere in God's great plan. If a person had been blessed by having been "pre-selected" for salvation, then leading a life of Godliness was simply playing one's part in the fulfilment of His universal plan.

To do evil was seen as a "sign" that a person was being used as a vehicle for The Devil, and anyone assisting in Satan's work had obviously been "pre-selected" for damnation.

It might sound strange now, but the Puritan belief in predestination caused Puritans to live a little bit as if trying to "call God's bluff". 

By modelling "Godliness" in their daily life, a person hoped they could demonstrate - to themselves and their community - that they were an instrument of Providence in His fight against evil, and thus destined for salvation.

It is easy to see this as part of what drove the much remarked-upon "Protestant work ethic", an ethic which would greatly inform later American attitudes to money, labor, and leisure. 

To be successful or wealthy was a sign of Divine Providence - in other words, God was giving a sign to His favored, chosen, or "saved" people through His material beneficence.

Such a view of the world is of course endlessly capable of an internal self-justification for just about anything. 

The line between God's plan and Satan's work was patrolled by men (not women), and through these same men's interpretations of earlier men's translations of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. 

And after all is said and done, every American Christian of a certain age remembers the wry observation that "The Devil can quote Scripture to suit himself".

Every event which falls favorably for a person can be characterized as a sign of "God's Providence".

Even land theft.  Slavery.  Or massacres.

It is this mindset which can re-construe everything - poverty, suffering, and even plain human wickedness - as the "Hand of God" in action.

As Captain John Underhill (a soldier in the employ of the Puritans) remarked after the massacre and burning alive of hundreds of Pequot women and children - along with their elderly and infirm family members in 1637: "...sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents...We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings."

*****

This is not to draw a simple line between Puritan ideas of Providence and predestination straight through to historical and contemporary bigotry, racism, or the currently popular "prosperity Gospel". 

How ideas move, percolate and permeate a society is extremely complex.

It would take twenty essays to even begin to outline the ways in which various sects and denominations interacted and cross-pollinated one another.

Puritanism gave way to Congregationalism, the established Anglican church became the Episcopalian, while offshoot groups like the Baptists and Methodists became extremely popular in rural places via revivalist meetings and circuit-riding preachers, especially in Appalachia and The Deep South.

Colonial Virginia and Pennsylvania's town-based Quaker congregations spread first into the Carolinas and then into Appalachia proper and the Ohio Territory.

In rural areas and the backcountry, in the mountains and along the frontier, Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Primitive (Hard Shell) Baptists - and later cults such as the Mormons - were happy to pick up Free Black and Indigenous converts, and interethnic mixing within these faiths was not uncommon.

[It is important to point out that 19th century Mormons were extremely and explicitly racist - the only “non-white” converts welcome were in fact Indigenous and mixed-ethnic wives for males who practiced polygamy.]

BUT, as already mentioned, the forces of "God and Mammon" began to become more and more deeply entwined as colonial America became less fragmented by distance, and the post-Puritan, Quaker, and Anglican tradespeople, merchants, and manufacturerers of urban New England became more and more a symbiotic part of the southern "Mammon" slave economy.

"Your enslaved people can produce the cotton, and we will purchase it for our textile mills."

Fortunes were made in the Yankee northeast through smuggling and running sugar, molasses, and rum - all of which depended on the Caribbean sugar cane plantations where enslaved Africans were brutalized and literally worked to death.

It is no coincidence that the economic elites of New England who pushed hardest for political and economic independence from Great Britain - many the inheritors of Puritan culture - turned to a "posh" Anglican, fox-hunting, slaveholding Virginia planter, surveyor, and military officer to be the first president of their new federation of states.

Within a hundred and fifty years, Puritan New England had gone from crossing oceans to escape the Anglican Church, to acclaiming a lifelong Anglican slaveholder as their leader.

*****

Never believe a person who claims that the USA is a classless society.

One thing the Puritans of Massachusetts had in common with the speculators of Virginia right from the beginning was an obsession with class and social status. This writer has lost count of the number of records showing people in Puritan New England - especially women - being publicly whipped for wearing an item of clothing which was considered a display of status "above their station". Silk headscarves or pieces of jewellery being worn by servants or commoners seems to have caused particular fits of rage among "people of substance".

While the post-Revolution USA did eliminate the English class system of hereditary aristocracy, this was merely replaced with a class system based on job status, naked wealth and racial caste.

Many will no doubt claim it is a harmless icebreaker, but the first question asked by many Americans upon meeting someone new "What do you do?", comes across to most non-Americans as an almost rude or vulgar attempt to quickly place people within a mental class hierarchy.

There is no point in putting lipstick on a pig - American Protestantism, with few exceptions, actively sought to interpret Scripture in a way which would underpin their belief in racial inequality, and justify the exploitation and excesses of American capitalism.

Only in a country like the USA would the first ever college course in economics (at Columbia University) be taught by a clergyman, and one of the earliest economics textbooks be written by a Baptist minister.

When early economists like Adam Smith spoke of "the invisible hand" controlling markets, they did not mean "the invisible hand of God".

It is hardly a coincidence that the oldest, most established Protestant denominations in the USA are still, to this day, made-up of almost entirely "white" congregations.

With the notable exception of Roger Williams' 17th century colony in Rhode Island, and a number of later Quaker Meeting Houses, it is hard to find any "establishment" church which preached and demanded class and race equality.

Among almost all mainstream North American Protestant churches, the classes or castes of people seen as "inferior" over the past four centuries have always been:

1) Enslaved or formerly enslaved people of African descent

2) Indigenous peoples

3) Brown peoples, including southern Europeans, Middle Easterners ("Mahometans"), South Asians (“Hindoos"), Gypsies/Romani, Latinos (Catholics), et al

4) "White Trash", aka Rednecks, Hillbillies, Melungeons, et al (note that New England also had such groups, called by other terms such as the "Pineys" of the rural New Jersey Pine Barrens)

5) Women of all colors, but especially Brown and Black women

It is hugely important to understand that "poor white folks" with deep roots in colonial America are in fact "presenting as white", and are almost always actually an ethnic mix of groups 1, 2, 3, and 4.

That last point is not a mere side observation. It is crucial to understanding the formation of the "white" American underclasses, and why they still exist, despite their perceived "white privilege".

All of these groups display characteristics which certain types of Christians have conveniently pointed to as a sign of moral turpitude or God's disfavor:

People are enslaved because God has placed "The Mark of Cain" upon them.

People's land is taken from them because they are savages and non-believers, and their loss is God's "Manifest Destiny" being revealed.

People suffer poverty or resort to crime because "The Devil makes work for idle hands" or because God has pre-destined it that "some must be rich, while others must be poor".

Women are bound to submission, forever deemed to be "lesser" due to their "natural lasciviousness" and "sin" in the Garden of Eden.

And if God himself has shown disfavor for certain people, then why shouldn't humans do the same?

*****

Even though most American Christians no longer believe in predestination, America's ancient symbiotic and perverse linkage between God and Mammon persists in significant ways.

The grotesque wealth of tax-exempt mega churches and tele-evangelists is the most obvious example of this.

A less obvious example would be the tendency of social media influencers and celebrities to constantly refer to themselves as being "blessed", as if their God had taken a personal interest in their pecuniary success under the capitalist system.

The obvious inference to be taken from certain people being "blessed" is that an impoverished working mother about to lose many of her Medicaid entitlements is clearly "damned".

Things become so much easier for the richest 1% when poor peoples' economic situations can be blamed on illegal immigrants, laziness, or simply laid at the feet of a judgemental God - instead of a bought-and-paid-for Congress...

Most people from everywhere along the political spectrum realize that there are real, historical reasons for the lack of economic and social equality for women and minority groups, even when they don’t admit it.

What the Left and Right disagree on is the extent to which contemporary opportunity and economic and social equality are still affected by historical injustices, and to what extent those racist and gender-based injustices still persist.

We'll skip the Critical Theory for today, but even most American conservatives have come to accept (at least publicly) that Blackface and Redface are a form of racism.

But because Hillbillies are perceived as being "white folks", no accusations of racism could ever be levelled at the performance of "Hillbilly Face".

The reason "Hillbilly Face" remains, is because in the USA, under the hybrid intellectual system of "God and Mammon", “white people” should have no excuse for being poor or uneducated.

BACKWARDNESS AND POVERTY MUST BE THEIR OWN FAULT.

Ergo, they DESERVE ridicule.

Even as Blackface was finally beginning to fall out of fashion and favor, urban populations only became ever more fascinated with the idea of "white folks gone wrong".

It seems weirdly reminiscent of today's professional urban women tucked-up at night on their couches watching endless murder mysteries and real crime dramas.

This is the entertainment of "Thank God I'm not there, and thank God it's not me".

The earliest explicit description of hillbillies offered to an urban audience appeared in the New York Journal 125 years ago, in a piece by political writer Julian Hawthorne:

“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.”

And for the rest of the 20th century thereafter, Southern Appalachians became the one group of Americans who would remain socially acceptable targets of mockery and ridicule.

From 1934 to 1977 - for almost half of the 20th century - around 60 million readers had much of their perception of Southern Appalachian life formed by the comic strip Li'l Abner.

The essence of Blackface, Redface, and "Hillbilly Face" is when social stereotypes are propagated or acted out BY SOMEONE COMPLETELY OUTSIDE THE GROUP THEY ARE PORTRAYING.

Li'l Abner was a cartoon drawn by a man named Alfred Gerald Caplin "Al Capp" from Connecticut, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants.

While Capp's portrayal of life in Dogpatch, USA was not malicious in any way, it fed massively into outsiders' views of mountain men as oafish simpletons, and mountain women as scantily clad and giddy sex kittens in the hay.

Appalachia and Appalachians became the canvas upon which Capp could paint his worldly political satire, and as is so often the case, the urban intelligentsia lapped it up - until he descended into Nixon-friendly conservatism and constant trouble with the law due to his sexual assault of a number of women.

Another hugely popular cartoon strip during the early 20th century (also set in Appalachia) was Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, a comic also conceived, written, and drawn by men who had never lived there. The originator, William DeBeck, was from Chicago, while another artist involved, Paul Fung, was in fact the son of evangelical Chinese immigrants from the west coast!

Films and TV continued with the now widely-familiar hillbilly tropes, from the daft Ma and Pa Kettle films of the 1940s, to the spate of 1960s and 1970s hickster/hillbilly fare of The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction.

The mostly - but not always - gentle ridicule of hillbillies for being uneducated unsophisticates would turn out to be the least of it.

The darkness of the Vietnam and Watergate era had changed peoples' tastes and attitudes. Hillbillies would remain as stock characters in American entertainment, but now the "simpletons" would turn ugly.

A British director named John Boorman would adapt James Dickey's 1970 debut novel "Deliverance" into an Academy Award-nominated film in 1972, bringing bluegrass music to a worldwide audience while portraying the backwoods people of northern Georgia as inbred, murderous rapists and sodomizers of unwary city slickers.

And just like that, thanks to Hollywood, being raised in the hills and hollers of Southern Appalachia became forever associated with a nasty social trope implying all manner of hidden debauchery and wanton violence, along with dangerous levels of inbreeding (to the sound of a 5-string banjo).

Even the usually good-hearted and much-beloved cartoon "The Simpsons" couldn't resist - with Cletus Delroy Montfort DeMontblanc Bigglesworth Spuckler being portrayed as a slack-jawed and dim hillbilly, his low mental faculties attributed to probable inbreeding - and even incest.

Hillbilly (or more accurately, southern redneck) representation in the media reached its likely nadir with "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo", in which the already odious genre of reality TV went in hard for some cheap and nasty "Hicksploitation" of people who clearly needed just about anything in the universe imaginable except a television producer and cameraman.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is even more complicated than it already seems.

*****

Remember at the top of this piece when we said it is not always clear who is having a laugh at whose expense?

Remember when we suggested that the essence of "Hillbilly Face" is about tropes and negative stereotypes being propagated by people outside the group they are portraying?

Set aside for the moment all the "white", non-Appalachian people who have participated in Blackface or "Hillbilly Face" over the decades.

We already noted how some Blackface minstrel groups were integrated - having Black members and "white" members.

This is another situation where America's binary racial caste categories break down and fail to account for the endless hidden nuance in American history, because:

1) Many people presenting as Black in the USA have a large percentage of Indigenous and European ancestry (among other things).

2) Many people presenting as "white" in the USA also have a large percentage of Indigenous and African ancestry (among other things).

It seems extraordinary to this writer that no one has seemed to notice just how many of the integrated Blackface minstrel shows (and even some of the non-integrated shows) included people PRESENTING AS WHITE, who were actually from mixed-ethnic backgrounds - people such as the Appalachian Melungeons.

Put simply, it appears that some people (clearly not as "dumb" as outsiders imagined) used their insider ethnic status to transcend and leverage the lower-caste identity placed on them by "respectable society".

The so-called "white trash", people who had for generations grown up adjacent to Black and Indigenous communities, people who had shared and played music alongside Black and Indigenous musicians, people who were actually kin to many of their Black and Indigenous neighbors - these mountain folks saw city folks dressing up as Black people and Hillbillies (and making damn good money doing so), and thought "Okay. You'll part with your cash to watch Black folks and Hillbillies sing and dance? Great. We'll give you singing and dancing Black folks and Hillbillies."

The not-even-remotely-stupid marginalized underclasses of the world have been doing this since time immemorial - selling an "ethnic experience" to outsiders, understanding full well the urban desire to quench their thirst for "Orientalism", the transgressive, the exotic.

It's everywhere. From Gypsy fortune tellers to Filipino girls cos-playing as Hawaiians and greeting gormless midwestern tourists at Honolulu airport with a flower lei.

Much in the way Black Americans began to reclaim old words of insult over the past decades, and much in the way LGBT+ people have recently reclaimed the word "queer", it seems that Black, Indigenous, and mixed-ethnic Hillbilly peoples began to reclaim minstrelsy in the later 1800s and early 1900s.

And as the old minstrel shows faded in popularity and the Blues and Old-Timey music became the new fashion, Indigenous, Black, and Hillbilly folks were right there on top of it, together.

Jimmie Rodgers, Ledbelly, Big Chief Henry's String Band, Ma Rainey, were all part of the same gang from a wider shared music scene, until the new recording industry of the 1920s split them into marketing categories based on "race".

Vast numbers of African-Americans fled Appalachia and the violent Jim Crow south for better opportunities in northern cities, and many of the remaining Choctaw, Shawnee, and Cherokee of Appalachia chose to rejoin their extended kinship groups out west in places like Oklahoma.

The only member of the original gang left in Appalachia would be the not-so-entirely-white Hillbillies.

And the music they had once shared with Black and Indigenous Appalachians would be "rediscovered" by urban song collectors and ethnographers who would portray it as some sort of "pure" window into the music of Elizabethan and Jacobite Britain, when it was nothing of the sort.

Its contact with African, Indigenous, Swedish, German, Finnish, Dutch, French, Mexican, and other peoples' music had already changed it into something else entirely.

American music.

And because mostly white-presenting "Hillbillies" were the only people left in Appalachia performing it, this kind of music would be marketed as "white music", and come to be seen as "white music" by much of its audience.

This is the music which would eventually arrive on the stage of the Grand Ol' Opry during the 1940s and 1950s, and many of its earliest stars - Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash - came from mixed-ethnic hillbilly families like the Salyers, Meadors, and Hensleys.

People of the American heartland who grew up in the 60s and 70s watching TV variety shows like "Hee Haw", probably never stopped to think that this program was a late, almost post-modern, wink-to-the-camera, sanitized version of the old Blackface and "Hillbilly Face" minstrel shows of yesteryear.

Stringbean Aiken and Minnie Pearl, stalwarts of the show, both played characters which were seemingly self-mocking rather than ill-intentioned, yet both were nonetheless plucked straight from the age of minstrelsy.

So at the end of it all, we can see that not all "Hillbilly Face" is created equal.

It all depends on who is pulling-on the costume, and what their intentions are.

*****

Vice President J. D. Vance launched his entire political career by playing a hillbilly in his own "memoir".

He wasted a lot of good paper and ink trying to tell real hillbillies why they are poor, and why they are just all-round losers in general.

This is the old, ugly kind of "Hillbilly Face", predestination included, being given a modern spin.

Except this time, your fate hasn't been preordained by God, it's been preordained by your GENES and your inherited "Scots-Irish" culture, at least according to Vance, prize poodle of the Technocracy.

But you could override this destiny if you really wanted to, if you would only get up off your ass, quit taking drugs, and join the Marines. Or something.

"It's your own fault you're poor."

This message has to be driven home again and again, over centuries.

Why?

Because if rich people don't keep repeating it, in the ensuing silence a new generation of young people might accidentally hear the truth.

Like how Israeli-Ukrainian oligarchs are allowed to set up anonymous LLC companies to launder money in the USA, and buy-up everything from Appalachian manganese mines to Mid-Western real estate.

"It's your own fault you're poor."

Hillbillies might finally realize who is poisoning their rivers and streams, and closing their local hospitals (hint: it's not transgender kids, and it's not Mexican immigrants).

They might figure out that faceless oligarchs can shut down an entire mining town in West Virginia, and disappear hundreds of jobs, with the snap of a finger, just because a couple of hundred million dollars needs to be moved from Delaware to Cyprus by next week for a billionaire's latest scam.

"Feeling depressed about losing your job? Here are some opioids, made by a billionaire friend of mine."

"And by the way, it's your own fault you're poor."

Once your wits have been dulled, you might not notice all of the international money trails criss-crossing, doubling back, but still always leading eventually to the pockets of lawyers, congressmen, cabinet members, judges, and all the way to the Oval Office.

Where the guy behind the desk - silver spoon son of a rotten, racist New York property developer - gurns for the cameras, talking about God (but worshipping Mammon), while wearing a...red hillbilly hat.

Hillbillies. Great-grandchildren of the men and women who fought actual gun battles on Blair Mountain against another bunch of mining barons and their private armies a hundred years ago.

"It's your own fault you're poor."

Hillbillies. Great-grandchildren of the men and women who watched the government help their rich crony benefactors by sending in the National Guard to murder brave and decent labor organizers.

"It's your own fault you're poor."

Hillbillies. Once among the least racist people in America. Where was the first newspaper dedicated to the abolition of slavery published? New York? Boston? No. It was published in 1819 in Jonesborough, East Tennessee. Right in the heart of Melungeon country, where people knew that skin color said nothing about the value of a human life.

"It's your own fault you're poor."

This transgenerational chain of folk memory must be broken, in case it might inspire hillbillies to switch-off Fox News, and rise up again.

"It's your own fault you're poor, you dumb, inbred hillbilly!"

<<CUE RAUCOUS LAUGHTER>>

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Image: Members of the mixed-ethnic Scott Family String Band (left and bottom); Minnie Pearl (top right)