Hillbilly Face

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

It is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.  To explain why, we need to step back in time…

America’s earliest cultural foundations always involved a delicate 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 Christians.  It’s more a question of emphasis.

As eastern North America began to fill-up with colonists during the 1600s and 1700s, these parallel forces of “God and Mammon” began to rub up against one another, becoming more and more deeply entwined.

Most Christians in the USA today are unaware that the Puritans believed deeply in the theological concept of “predestination”.  That is to say, they believed that God had already decided at the time of His Creation how every single person’s life would unfold.

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.

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.

Why “do good” at all, then?

Because to do evil was seen as a “sign” that a person was being used as a vehicle for The Devil.  Anyone assisting in Satan’s work had obviously been “pre-selected” for damnation.

“Doing good” was a way of being extra careful to show all the outward “signs” of “pre-selection” for salvation.

It might sound strange now, but it was a bit like trying to “call God’s bluff”.  By modeling “Godliness” in their daily life, a person hoped they were acting-out their “pre-destination”.

This is part of what drove much of the Puritan work ethic, an ethic which would greatly inform later American attitudes to money, work, and leisure.  To be successful or wealthy was a sign of Divine Providence – in other words, God was giving a sign to His favored or “saved” people through His 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, and through men’s interpretations of other 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 characterised as a sign of “God’s Providence”.

Even land theft.  Slavery.  Or massacres.

It is this mindset which can even re-construe plain wickedness as the “Hand of God” in action.

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This is not to draw a simple line between Puritan ideas of Providence and Predestination straight through to historical bigotry, racism, or current “prosperity Gospel”.  How ideas move, percolate and permeate a society is extremely complex.

As already mentioned, the forces of “God and Mammon” began to become more and more deeply entwined as colonial America became less fragmented.  Puritanism gave way to Congregationalism, while groups like the Baptists and Methodists became especially popular in rural places via revivalist meetings and circuit-riding preachers, especially in Appalachia and The Deep South.

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

But whether it was the Puritans, Anglicans, or any other religious group (with a few notable exceptions), class and race tended to matter a great deal.

And across most religions, the four most abused groups of people in North American history have always been:

1) The enslaved or formerly enslaved

2) Indigenous peoples

3) “White Trash”, aka Rednecks, Hillbillies, Melungeons, et al (note that New England also had such groups, called by other terms)

4) Women

All of these groups displayed characteristics which certain types of Christians could conveniently point to as a sign of 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 non-believers, and it is God’s “Manifest Destiny” being revealed.

People are poor because “The Devil makes work for idle hands” or because God has pre-destined it to be so.

Women are bound to submission, forever deemed to be “lesser” due to their “sin” in the Garden of Eden.

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

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Most think that the history of Blackface is only a story of “white people” blacking-up, and mocking African Americans.

The story is far more complicated.

For a start, USA culture has also been permeated with the constant presence of “Redface”, a sort of internal Orientalism, in which Indigenous Americans are othered and categorised according to “white” projections of “savagery” – alternatively violent or “noble” in nature.  This is a cultural phenomenon which would take volumes to attempt an elucidation.

This piece is concerned with an aspect of Blackface minstrelsy which many fail to notice – the regularity with which “The Dumb Hillbilly” is also present as a stock character, side-by-side with “The Plantation Negro”.  What sets “Redface” apart from “Blackface” and “Hillbilly Face” is that it is mainly the latter two who are consistently presented as objects of mockery for their imagined ignorance, stupidity, and other traits associated with the lowest underclasses.

Hillbillies or “white trash” have traditionally been so far down the American 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”.

People of the American heartland who grew up in the 60s and 70s watching variety shows like “Hee Haw”, probably never stopped to think that this show was a late, almost post-modern, wink-to-the-camera, sanitized version of Blackface/Hillbilly face.

Regular guest Minnie Pearl‘s character, while seemingly self-mocking instead of ill-intentioned, was still pulled straight from the age of minstrelsy.

But set aside for the moment all the “white”, non-Appalachian people participating in Blackface/Hillbilly face.

It seems extraordinary to this writer that no one has seemed to notice just how many Blackface minstrel shows were comprised of and performed by people from “non-white” backgrounds, including Black Americans and people from mixed-ethnic backgrounds such as the Appalachian Melungeons.

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

Again, it is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” has co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.

The marginalised underclasses of the world have been doing this since time immemorial – using their streetwise or insider ethnic status to transcend and leverage the lower caste social identity placed on them.

They then bend it back onto the middle and upper classes, by selling a “product” to gormless outsiders who are willing to pay for an “ethnic experience”.

People like Jason Aldean and J. D. Vance are STILL performing Hillbilly Face, but not in the gently knowing, letting-you-in-on-the-joke way of “Hee Haw”.  And what makes it triple-twist funny, is that they and others like them don’t even seem to realize it.

#JDVance #hillbilly #blackface