Or How Why I Call Myself a Hillbilly 

Look, I get it.  We’re all educated and enlightened people here and we all understand the power of the politically correct shame.   More than once on my blog, I’ve been accused of perpetuating stereotypes by using the word “hillbilly” because it connotes, well, what it connotes.  

Let’s get one thing clear.  I know exactly how complicated a word like “hillbilly” is – and I know what I’m getting when I associate myself with it.  I’m deliberately doing more than one thing at once by using it.

I’m poking fun at myself, I’m honoring my ancestors (who go back over 150 years in the area an another 100 in the hill country out East before that), I’m trying to make a case for a dying culture by relating my memories about it. 

I get that people are people, that the south isn’t one giant monolithic thing. I love every nuance of it, really.  I also get that there’s some value in these places, and the people, who somehow associate themselves with the term.   The whole point here, in case you haven’t picked up on it yet, is to whittle away at the stereotype, complicate it, and at the same time celebrate what remnants of a place and time I can salvage.  

But let’s take it as a fair argument – the stereotype of the hillbilly.  Am I actually perpetuating it by trying to define myself, in part, by using the word?  

You bet I am, but I’m definitely not alone in that tradition.  If you’d like me to cite references for instances in which the very objects of the stereotype freely and willingly used it themselves to promote themselves to outsiders I would be most happy to do that.  But that’s not the point here.  The point is just two examples, the Booger Hollow Trading Post and Dog Patch USA. 

It’s empty now.  Weeds choke the parking lot and obscure the double-decker outhouse.   All the signs are still there, though obviously worn.   The red paint on the outside of the main building is starting to flake off.  There’s something ironic about this place as it is now, abandoned.

Kat Robinson, of the Tie Dye Travels blog, has already done a beautiful job describing Booger Hollow Trading Post and the drama around its demise.  Her photographs of the place during a typical Ozark fog capture it perfectly, in all its rotting iconic glory. 

During its life, Booger Hollow Trading Post played up the shabby and the homespun. It was the kind of place that sold homemade sorghum molasses next to plastic “Indian” headdresses made in China.  There was Hillbilly Toilet Paper (a corncob), and a Hillbilly Chastity Belt (a rock with some straps attached), and a Hillbilly toothpick (an oversized twig whittled down on one end). 

I once bought my friends Steve and Sheyene at set of wooden mallets called “Hillbilly Marriage Counselors.”  Each mallet was made of wood with the bark still on, and was inscribed per gender either, “Mamma’s Git Em Stick” and “Papa’s Get Her Stick.”  Or something like that.   

BHTP sold the best fudge I’ve ever had in my life from the front counter, and kept a slew of other handmade, distinctly southern edibles.   They sold a whole series of cards and calendars with pictures of a stereotypical hillbilly family doing ridiculous things.   In later years, they opened a café where they served a “Booger Burger.”  

BHTP was a geographical sleight of hand by the original founders of the place.   It isn’t really anywhere near Booger Hollow, or any hollow, for that matter.   It sits on top of a ridge roughly 10 miles as the crow files from the real Booger Hollow.   

The real Booger Hollow is north of Dover along highway 164, the east entrance into Bullfrog Valley, is named for the bad luck travelers had there during the American Civil War. The dark overhang of cliffs and trees on either side of the road made it a great hide-out for highwaymen and bandits. It was, at the time, also a major thoroughfare on the road from Harrison in extreme northern Newton County on the Missouri border and Russellville on the Arkansas River.

 Everyone traveling by wagon had to cross through Booger Hollow on their way in or out of the most remote part of the Ozarks. Cemeteries punctuate the hollow on both ends, which surely help its reputation. On the southwest end of Bullfrog valley, Silex Mountain (named after an early Anglo settler) marks the valley’s border north of Big Piney Creek.  

Booger stands for more than just ghosts or phantoms, as one blogger claims; it stands for scary monstrous people too.  The boogie monster in the stories I heard from my Bully Frog Valley Grandma was a horribly deformed creature with toes that looked like baked potatoes. A “booger” is anything that jumps out at you from the dark, with menace in its heart.    

The real Booger Hollow is pure local folklore, a beautiful example of how geography informs the stories people tell themselves. Both sides of my family are from just north up Hwy. 164 in Bull Frog Valley. Both sets of my great-great-great grandparents had to ride through Booger Hollow on their way to town in those wagons.    They were the people who lived the story, who told the story, who for forty years peacefully and cheerfully patronized the Booger Hollow Trading Post.

The people who used to own and run BHTP were locals, folks who knew exactly which folktale they were “capitalizing” on – which wasn’t much, honestly.   The place made a living for two or three people over a summer, and that was about it.   Still, it’s one of the most famous places along Highway 7, right through the heart of “hillbilly” country.

Dog patch is a completely different story.  Outsiders came in, hoping to capitalize on the former glory of Lil Abner.   They demolished a beautiful place called Marble Falls to build crooked cabins and bad fun park rides.   It thrived for a while in the 1980’s and then shut down, forever freezing the worst kind of hillbilly stereotype into the hillsides just south of Harrison.  

Donald Harington wrote a great essay about Dog patch in his book “Let Us Build Us a City.”    I can’t say anymore about it than he did.  I can say, however, that the difference between these two places is intention.   

The folks who told the story of Booger Hollow told it because they lived there, it was their story to tell, their story to do with as they pleased.   Maybe not everyone approved of the silly moniker “Population 7, counten one Coon Dog” at BHTP.   If my personal experience means anything, though, I think most of the locals didn’t mind one bit – mainly because it an image controlled locally, consumed locally, joked about locally. 

Dog Patch is another thing all together – a thing created and abandoned by outsiders who had no respect for the place, or its history.  

Yeah I get pissed off and frustrated when an outsider sneers at me while using the word “hillbilly.”   But personally – I think of it as a kind of honor to be the descendent of all those peasants who settled down in this particular part of the world.   They were tough people who made do with very little.  

Sure, they have their issues and complications and layers. Some people will jump all over me for glorifying what they themselves stereotype as “backwards,” some people will bicker with me for using it in any way to try to explain the Ozarks as I see it (because if I’m insulting the very thing I’m trying to chronicle, instead of doing it justice by trying to show all sides of it, I truly suck at this writing thing). I use the word with an endless reservoir of affectionate cheek, in roughly the same way the local owners of the Booger Hollow Trading Post did. 

As for whether or not there’s any difference between people here and everywhere else, you’re right, there’s not one iota of difference.   The “hillbillies” I know watch the same TV as everyone else and buy their clothes at the Gap.   They also have the real Booger Hollow, and the rest of ya’ll don’t.   

*all photos are from the wikimedia creative commons.