This is a possible distinction between the two. While the both refer to people from rural, unpopulated areas, hillbilly has a more remote connotation to it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , hillbilly comes from the nickname from the given name William. Billy is a shortened form of William, so a hillbilly is a man possibly named Billy who lives in the hills or another outlying rural area. Some readers might see hillbilly as a more gently derisive term than redneck , but any difference is one of degree, rather than actual meaning.
A hillbilly is still a poorly educated person from a small rural town, probably with poor social skills and uninspiring career prospects. The term is still chiefly a derogatory insult that is not found in polite English. Both words have only gained popularity since roughly Hillbilly has seen consistently higher usage, possibly due to its perception as the milder of these terms.
Either way, this chart is not exhaustive in its literary scope, since it looks only at books published in this time frame, and no other sources. What does hick mean? Hick is another term with a similar meaning. It refers to a person living in the country, who is regarded as unintelligent or provincial. Unlike redneck and hillbilly there is no association with a region or geographic area when this term is used.
It does not refer to the South or the Appalachians. In modern contexts, these words are synonyms. You might choose hillbilly to describe someone from an especially remote region, but aside from this consideration, there is no real reason to choose one over the other besides personal preference. Both terms are derogatory and even considered to be racial slurs, so they are not words you will want to use in polite company.
Some readers may find hillbilly less derogatory than redneck , and it is also more common, so it might be a better choice if you are concerned about these issues. Since hillbilly rhymes with silly , you should have little trouble remembering that hillbilly is more silly than nasty. Is it redneck or hillbilly? The modern redneck is a yuppie. You see rebel flags with "redneck" on them, but you don't see anything about "hillbilly pride" because nobody really… I don't know.
To me, a real hillbilly is someone who lives for the hills, who really does care for their fellow man and their land. I like hillbillies. I feel like I'm a hillbilly. I might not dress like one, but you can tell by my accent—anywhere I go, people say, "You're from West Virginia, aren't you?
I grew up in a holler. I didn't know anyone who skateboarded; I got insanely interested in paved concrete because I was never around paved concrete. It takes like half an hour to get to a paved road. When I moved here, I was just struck by the concrete. Hillbillies know life is pain, and what's so cool about skateboarding is you can have fun, experience pain, and be creative, all at the same time.
That's why I hate it when people say skateboarding is a sport, because it's a whole 'nother world. A redneck is like the people who hang out in the Walmart parking lot, spend all their money on, like, upgrading their trucks, buying stupid Garth Brooks CDs. A hillbilly is like my grandpa—he never had a bank account in his life, he lived off the land as much as he could, he was poor as shit, but he was happy as shit.
To me that's a hillbilly, people who don't judge people. My dad was in coal. He was a strict union man. If you heard about John Henry the Steel-Driving Man, he was known around here as something like that. He could dig a lot of coal with a pick and shovel. My grandfather came out from South Carolina to work. He came to a little town not far from here called Capels. I never seen him or my grandmother, they passed before I was born. There were 13 kids in the family.
We lived off one meal a day sometimes. We struggled a little bit, but everything worked out real good for us. My father worked in the mines, but he didn't want any of us to go into the mines.
At the time, coal was still going, but in this area, jobs weren't available in money-making positions to minorities. So a lot of people went to Detroit, went to other parts of the country. When I first went to school, I went to an all-black school, in Davey I think.
We played together, the white kids and me, and we wondered why we had to go to different schools. I was the first [black police officer] in this town. There couldn't have been more than one or two in the county at the time. I started out as a regular patrolman. Then I moved up the ranks to the lieutenant, then chief of police. I think a lot of the time we just look at ourselves as West Virginians. I look at myself as a West Virginian, not black or white or any other color.
I surprise people when I go and play music because I do country. I surprise white, and I surprise black—I surprise both sides with what I do. When guys say they're redneck they do things wildly, freely, but not try to harm anyone with it. They have a good little time with it. What history focuses on a lot of times is the Hatfields and McCoys and the feuding, but at the same time, there were unions striking.
And there was a different mix of races involved in that: Irish, black, people from China, Italians, Greeks, Germans… This place was a real melting pot. People would come here from all over the world to work in the mines. That's how the music, bluegrass, came about. People from the South came up—and the banjo is an African instrument, they brought that—and their music mixed with the mountain music, fiddles from Ireland, and so on.
When I perform, some people say, "Why are you singing bluegrass? And if it weren't for the coal, you wouldn't have the music. People looking in just see the most publicized parts [of West Virginia and Appalachia], the Hatfield-McCoys and the feuding—they weren't seeing the black performers out here, the singers and the struggles. White and black, we live all together. My daddy worked in the mines, and we'd play together with the [white] kids next door.
We didn't know no hate or anything like that. All kids see is playing and fun. Only time we'd know a difference is when an older person would blast out something that had that racial whatever. But kids still didn't know what was going on. Throughout the years, I've seen whites call other whites white trash, and I've seen dark-skinned blacks say something about lighter-skinned blacks, "You high yellow," something like that.
Everyone always wants to be a little higher class than somebody else. That's just the way it is. I grew up with no bathtub or nothing in the house—we'd take baths in the washtub, and we had an outdoor toilet. When we got a bath for the house, we tied the thing to my dad's truck, he drove down the mountain, and it fell off, and he didn't notice. That's a redneck. My mother is a hillbilly, My mother told me she walked barefoot every day, even in the snow, just to go to school.
My momma's from Ashland, Kentucky, and she knows how to do tobacco and stuff like that. When she grew up, they were allowed to get married at Nowadays you're not allowed. They were allowed to do a lot of things back then like we can't do now. That's because this generation can't keep the guns away or anything like that. Instead of fist-fighting, like we did, they think, We gotta get a gun out and shoot somebody , or, We lost our job, let's go kill 'em up.
Back in my day, we got whippings, we got switched, but we grew up. I remember being five years old and having to do dishes and cleaning and stuff like that because my mother said that's how we learned things. Nowadays kids don't have to do that. My mom and dad didn't have a lot of money, but they made sure we had things, even if we had feed-sack dresses. My mom put linings inside them because they'd itch. My grandmother made most of my outfits. There were six of us, three girls and three boys, and we'd pass clothes down.
Back in the day—you know how'd you go down the side roads, and you'd see people just rockin' away, and they got the shotguns out there. Hillbillies, they got their own kind of living.
Hillbillies like raising a garden, fixing the corn, and doing the moonshine. My family, we [went viral] on Facebook because we went and got brand-new mattresses, we had four, and we stacked 'em on top of our little Durango. This guy took a picture and said, "If that's not a redneck, we don't know what is. That don't make me a racist person just because I'm a redneck. Hell, I like everybody. When I see people who walk down the street and don't have anything, I'll give 'em money. I have nothing against people.
I have a good life now. I have fun. Go rednecks! Go hillbillies too! When I think of "redneck," I think of bad country music. You could live in Atlanta and be a redneck. You could live Michigan, or Illinois or Indiana—it's not a term that's geographically located.
I think there's a political angle to it as well, there's definitely right-wing politics attached to it, and a big pickup, a certain element of machismo. But then you have girls who consider themselves rednecks—I'll have female students who will wear shirts with "redneck" on them. It's like "punk"; I went to this store in New York, like a punk store, and they're selling all these T-shirts, and everyone's getting all these tattoos.
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