Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon.

Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. By Anthony Harkins. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp xii, 324. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-518950-7; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-19-514631-X.)

The figure of the hillbilly has been a fixture of American popular culture for more than a century now and shows no signs of disappearing despite the turn away from most ethnic caricatures. In this important book, Anthony Harkins traces the origins and evolution of the hillbilly as an American icon, tracking representations across the decades and through different cultural media while arguing that the figure has an amazing endurance that derives from its complexity and ambiguity, characteristics that have made it popular in different ways at different times.

The term hillbilly first appeared in print in 1900, adding a humorous label to what had been a long literary fascination with backwoodsmen, remote rural folk, and Appalachian and Ozark mountaineers supposedly out of touch with modern America. Harkins begins with that nineteenth-century prelude but concentrates on the twentieth century, showing how the hillbilly figure came together in joke books, pulp fiction, and silent films before World War I and gained accelerating popularity in the following decades. His chapters explore the way particular media worked the figure. What is now country music started in the 1920s as "hillbilly music" and helped millions of southern and rural whites find something positive in the hillbilly label (p. 141). Comic strips--Li'l Abner, Barney Google, and Paul Webb's Mountain Boys cartoons for Esquire--cranked up the laughter in the 1930s, mostly in ways that were distancing and demeaning. Hollywood jumped back into the hillbilly game in the 1930s, followed by television, which from the 1950s through the early 1970s went to the bank with hillbilly situation comedies like The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and especially The Beverly Hillbillies, the most popular program on television through much of the 1960s.

Harkins shows the transformations in the hillbilly figure as it moves through these different hands, finding the key to its enduring popularity in a shifting mix of references that he calls the essential ambiguity of the figure. Here is his central argument. The hillbilly combines, he says, "derogatory conceptions of backwardness, ignorance, and savagery with positive ideas of ruggedness, independence, and devotion to family and home" (p. 140). And because of that mix it has been continually used by social groups with very different stakes in the figure, including white southerners and Appalachians who identify with some aspects of the hillbilly representations. Moreover, the figure vacillates between humor and seriousness, serving as something to laugh at, something to laugh with, something to be afraid of, and something to be nostalgic about.

This is promising, but Harkins pulls back from fully developing how the hillbilly icon acquires its meanings. The concept of ambiguity is itself ambiguous and cries out for comparative discussion of other popular media caricatures and for some attention to theories of humor. Harkins also has a tendency to fall back on the notion that each new version of the hillbilly gained popularity because it somehow reflected public moods or anxieties. This is too simple. Culture is never an exact mirror of society, and at any given moment many contradictory cultural products enjoy popularity.

The strength of the book is its rich description, careful analysis of texts, and attention to institutional and chronological context. Harkins has followed the hillbilly figure from one medium to another, researching each extensively. He is especially good with visual images and includes seventy-nine cartoons, photographs, song covers, and other reproductions in the book. He has also posed an important question that will prompt further interest and research: how does this curious and controversial figure endure?

JAMES N. GREGORY

University of Washington