WE FINALLY KNOW MORE ABOUT AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS STEREOTYPE

How the Scots-Irish became hillbillies in America is not the story you have been told. The word did not come from Ulster. It was not King Billy's boys. It turns up in American newspapers in the 1880s — Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi — describing what a man owns, not where his grandparents came from. The ancestry story was welded on later, by a college president who needed donors. THE KING BILLY STORY IS WRONG. Michael Montgomery, who compiled the dictionary of what Ulster gave American English, calls the Williamite derivation almost certainly incorrect. The Oxford English Dictionary breaks the word down as hill plus billy, earliest citations out of Kentucky. WHERE IT REALLY FIRST APPEARS. Cincinnati, 1881: a group "known locally as Hill Billies." Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 1886. Nashville, 1890. Then Port Gibson, Mississippi, 1892, where a reporter records that opponents "characterize the members of the People's Party as red necks and hillbillies." The next year Hubert Shands defined the companion word as "applied by the better class of people to the poorer inhabitants of the rural districts." In 1900 Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote the first national definition — about Alabama. NINE WORDS IN A RECORDING STUDIO. On 15 January 1925 four musicians from Watauga County, North Carolina and Grayson and Carroll Counties, Virginia recorded for Ralph Peer in New York. Asked for a band name, Al Hopkins said: "Call us anything you want. We're nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia anyway." The industry kept it as a sales category for twenty-five years. Nobody in Appalachia ever used it for their own music. THE PURITY STORY WAS A FUNDRAISING PITCH. William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College, published "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains" in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1899, and told Northern donors that "Appalachian America has received no foreign immigration." Ellis Island had been open for seven years. What followed flipped the same premise: Theron Crawford's An American Vendetta (1889), Mongrel Virginians (1926) — which Abraham Myerson called "a really absurd and useless book" — and Hollow Folk (1933), sold in Shenandoah visitor centres while five hundred families were moved off the land it described. HALF THE LAND, FOUR PERCENT OF THE TAXES. In 1978 researchers read every deed in 80 Appalachian counties across six states. Corporations held about 40% of the property and 70% of the mineral rights. In many central Appalachian counties the mining companies held half to 70% of the land while paying 4% of county property taxes. That is what a poor school district is made of. HONEST FRAMING The Scots-Irish migration is real and enormous — more than 150,000 out of Ulster before the Revolution — and the Ulster signature in mountain grammar is real: might could, you'uns, needs taught. But Montgomery finds only about one in five distinctive Appalachian features traces to the British Isles at all, and calls the "Elizabethan English" claim the least supported of the lot. Print is a floor, not a birth certificate. And the deeds are a measurable part of Appalachian poverty, not the whole of it. CHAPTERS 0:00 — Nine words in a New York recording studio 1:43 — Half the land and four percent of the taxes 2:24 — Three things I cannot tell you 3:43 — Why the King Billy story is wrong 4:20 — Where the word first appears in print 5:06 — Red necks and hillbillies in a Mississippi election 7:53 — The real Scots-Irish migration out of Ulster 11:22 — The college president who needed donors 14:13 — The New York World rides into Logan County 19:08 — Reading every deed in eighty counties 22:51 — Six presidents out of the same province 24:13 — What word did your family get handed TELL ME WHAT YOU FIND Is there a word your family got handed by somebody else — hillbilly, redneck, cracker, mountaineer, hick? Put the word and the county in the comments. And if your people are in the coal counties of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia or Tennessee: does your family still own the minerals under the land? It is in the deed book. #Hillbilly #ScotsIrish #Appalachia #Genealogy #AmericanHistory #FamilyHistory #AmericanBloodlines hillbilly word origin, where the word hillbilly comes from, Scots-Irish Americans history, Appalachian stereotype history, William Goodell Frost contemporary ancestors, hillbilly music Ralph Peer 1925, Appalachian land ownership study, Appalachian English Elizabethan myth