In the United States, the Hillbilly Highway is the out-migration of Appalachians from the Appalachian Highlands region to industrial cities in northern, midwestern, and western states, primarily in the years following World War II in search of better-paying industrial jobs and higher standards of living. Many of these migrants were formerly employed in the coal mining industry, which started to decline in 1940s. The word hillbilly refers to a negative stereotype of people from Appalachia. The term hillbilly is considered to be a modern term because it showed up in the early 1900s. [1] Though the word is Scottish in origin, it does not derive from dialect. In Scotland, the term hill-folk referred to people who preferred isolation from the greater society and the term billy referred to someone being a "companion" or "comrade". The Hillbilly Highway was a parallel to the better-known Great Migration of African-Americans from the south.
Many of these Appalachian migrants went to major industrial centers such as Detroit, Chicago, [2] Cleveland, [3] Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, Toledo, and Muncie, Indiana, [4] while others traveled west to California. [5] Many of the Appalachians lived in concentrated enclaves, an example being Uptown, Chicago, which was nicknamed "Hillbilly Heaven" in the 1960s. While most often used in this metaphoric sense, the term is sometimes used to refer to specific stretches of roadway, such as U.S. Route 23, [6] or Interstate 75. [7] The participants in the Hillbilly Highway are known as Urban Appalachians. The migration was not a finite process, as it is continuing today and the migrants commonly moved back to their home states in retirement, or relocated only temporarily.
Appalachia includes the whole of West Virginia, and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. [8] The region consists of 420 counties in 13 states. [9] The Appalachia is divided into 13 regions but is grouped into three commonly known sections; northern, central, and southern. Throughout the Appalachian region there are at least 31 mountains. [10] The Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership that currently focuses on economic and infrastructure development, was created in the 1960s to address poverty and unemployment in the region. In FY 2007, the Appalachian Regional Commission designated 78 counties in 9 states as distressed, based on low per-capita income and high rates of poverty and unemployment [11] (of 410 counties in 13 states included as Appalachian). [12] The ARC notes that some severely distressed areas still lack basic infrastructure, such as water and sewer systems. [12] The 1990 Census indicated that the poverty rate in central rural Appalachia was 27 percent. [12] In West Virginia, the 2000 poverty rate statewide was 17.9%; in nine counties more than a quarter of the population lived below the poverty line, with percentages as high as 37.7%. [13] Un- and under-employment rates are higher than the nation's average. [12] Breathitt County, Kentucky, had a 9.9% unemployment rate averaged over 2001–2003, a 33.2% poverty rate in 2000 (down from a twenty-year high of 39.5% in 1990), and only 57.5% of adults had high school diplomas in 2000. [14]
Coal mining has been integral to the region and its economy. West Virginia is one of the largest coal producing state in the Appalachian region. [15] One feature of the Appalachian coal mines was the existence of company towns. In the company towns, the coal companies provided the "municipal" services, owned the homes and the stores, where the accepted currency was usually company scrip (despite laws in some states against it) [16] and the prices were excessive. [17] Some of these towns were described by the U.S. Coal Commission in 1922 as being in a state of disrepair "beyond the power of verbal description or even photographic illustration, since neither words nor pictures can portray the atmosphere of abandoned dejection or reproduce the smells." [18] Eventually union struggles occurred in these towns; in central Appalachia miners battled to unionize the mines from the 1890s to the 1940s and fought again from the late 1970s to 1999. [19] Some company towns tried to become models of social welfare, in order to dissuade workers from unionizing. [20] Nonetheless, "mine wars" erupted, including in Matewan, West Virginia on May 19, 1920.
Given the instability of coal prices, particularly after World War I ended, and the ongoing union fights, many miners chose to leave the industry and migrate north for jobs. This resulted in the economic exploitation of coal workers which is a period from 1880 to 1930 called the "Coal Wars". One of the most notable events during the coal wars was the Battle of Blair Mountain. This battle came to be known as the largest labor uprising in the United States history as well as being the largest armed uprising since the Civil War. This tragic event lead to upwards of 100 people being killed while many more were arrested. With the added friction in coal mining, and prohibition taking full effect, many so called mountain people carried on selling moonshine since that was one of the prime sources of income at the time. [21] Though this trend would start to slowdown due to the increasing interest of the government to go after these people since it was after all illegal. [21] Factories like General Motors started recruiting people after World War II, causing around seven million people to migrate North. Whites tended to go to areas in Ohio and Pittsburgh, while African-Americans tended to go to areas in Detroit and Baltimore. [22]
As much so as coal mining, migration has been an important part of the Appalachian experience. Large numbers of people migrated out of Appalachia in the 20th century for economic reasons. Between 1910 and 1960, millions of Southerners left their home states of Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Virginia and West Virginia. [23] A large percentage of those leaving Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee went north for jobs in the industrial sector.
Many West Virginians and Kentuckians migrated to the industrial cities of Ohio, for jobs in rubber and steel. [24] Industrial towns in Southern Ohio, including Dayton and Cincinnati, were favorites for migrants from Eastern Kentucky because they remained close to home.[ citation needed ] Some Ohio companies (including Champion Paper Company, Lorillard Tobacco Company, and Armco Steel) reportedly recruited their labor force from specific counties in the mountains, and gave preference to employees' family members when hiring new workers, making out-migration from rural Appalachia easier. [25]
In a 1935 article in The Nation , Louis Adamic writes that the "hill-billies" were believed by Detroit auto manufacturing employers to be "safe" – that is, not inclined to unionize. [26] Adamic reports that auto companies were recruiting during the early 1930s with the belief that these rural people had not been influenced by ideas of unionism.[ citation needed ] The article goes on to report that the hill-billies were looked down upon by almost everyone, due to their extremely low standard of living and lack of familiarity with modern plumbing, and because they were seen as taking away jobs from the old-time automotive workers.[ citation needed ] The advent of assembly lines meant that unskilled workers could ably perform tasks at manufacturing plants, so these unskilled mountain folk were adequate employees.
The Appalachian people who migrated to Detroit (and in smaller numbers to Flint) in order to work in the automotive plants gained an identity distinct from the one that they possessed in their home state. [27] Many families were forced to separate and adapt to new environments, causing traumatic experiences. The discrimination and negative stereotypes that they faced caused new issues that went into following generations. The migrants felt out of place and had a hard time feeling a part of their new community. [22] In their home states, people saw themselves as distinct from those living in other parts of the state, or in a different part of the South. Once they migrated to Michigan, they were lumped together as southern white laborers, and a group consciousness based on that label emerged. Migrants from all over Appalachia began to feel a social solidarity with each other, preferring to work and live beside other Southerners than with Northerners. It was believed that the southern Appalachian migrants began to resemble one another by characteristics less rapidly than Northern rural migrants because of their group consciousness and the persistence of certain southern regional attitudes, and an acute awareness of the difference between themselves and other native-born white Americans.[ citation needed ] Because the Appalachian migrants had no cultural context for situations they encountered in northern industrial cities, their reactions were dictated by their rural southern lives and attitudes.[ citation needed ] This led to these migrants going back to their old homes during holidays and layoffs where everyday life seemed more familiar to them.[ citation needed ] As many as 35% of migrants would return to their old homes from places like Flint and Michigan during such periods of layoffs between 1940 and 1970.[ citation needed ]
Country singer Bobby Bare's 1963 hit single "Detroit City", written by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis, describes the homesickness and culture shock commonly experienced by Southern migrants.
Singer Steve Earle wrote a song titled "Hillbilly Highway", recorded on his 1986 album Guitar Town . Also released as a single, "Hillbilly Highway" recounts the story of three generations of Appalachian men who leave their homes to find work elsewhere. [28]
Country singer Dwight Yoakam's song "Readin', Rightin', Rt. 23" from his 1987 album "Hillbilly Deluxe" describes how, for the children of coal miners south of Prestonsburg, Kentucky, the most important things that they learn are reading, writing, and to take U.S. Route 23 out of the area to find factory jobs in the industrial cities north of Appalachia. However, the singer laments that the same migration that might lead them to financial stability could also separate them from their families and social support system. [29]
Hillbilly is a term for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in the Appalachian region and Ozarks. As people migrated out of the region during the Great Depression, the term spread northward and westward with them.
Appalachia is a geographic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. Its boundaries stretch from the western Catskill Mountains of New York into Pennsylvania, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains into northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, with West Virginia being the only state in which the entire state is within the boundaries of Appalachia. In 2021, the region was home to an estimated 26.3 million people, of whom roughly 80% were white.
Trans-Appalachia is an area in the United States bounded to the east by the Appalachian Mountains and extending west roughly to the Mississippi River. It spans from the Midwest to the Upper South. The term is used most frequently when referring to the area as a frontier in the 18th and 19th century. During this period, the region gained its own identity, defined by its isolation and separation from the rest of the United States to the east. It included much of Ohio Country and at least the northern and eastern parts of the Old Southwest. It was never an organized territory or other political unit. Most of what was referred to by this name became the states of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and western Virginia. It is still a vague and little used place name today.
The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was substantially caused by poor economic and social conditions due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States; there, African Americans established culturally influential communities of their own. According to Isabel Wilkerson, despite the loss of leaving their homes in the South, and the barriers faced by the migrants in their new homes, the migration was an act of individual and collective agency, which changed the course of American history, a "declaration of independence" written by their actions.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) is a United States federal–state partnership that works with the people of Appalachia to create opportunities for self-sustaining economic development and improved quality of life. Congress established ARC to bring the region into socioeconomic parity with the rest of the nation.
Appalachian music is the music of the region of Appalachia in the Eastern United States. Traditional Appalachian music is derived from various influences, including the ballads, hymns and fiddle music of the British Isles, and to a lesser extent the music of Continental Europe.
The culture of the Southern United States, Southern culture, or Southern heritage, is a subculture of the United States. From its many cultural influences, the South developed its own unique customs, dialects, arts, literature, cuisine, dance, and music. The combination of its unique history and the fact that many Southerners maintain—and even nurture—an identity separate from the rest of the country has led to it being one of the most studied and written-about regions of the United States.
Southwest Virginia, often abbreviated as SWVA, is a mountainous region of Virginia in the westernmost part of the commonwealth. Located within the broader region of western Virginia, Southwest Virginia has been defined alternatively as all Virginia counties on the Appalachian Plateau, all Virginia counties west of the Eastern Continental Divide, or at its greatest expanse, as far east as Blacksburg and Roanoke. Another geographic categorization of the region places it as those counties within the Tennessee River watershed. Regardless of how borders are drawn, Southwest Virginia differs from the rest of the commonwealth in that its culture is more closely associated with Appalachia than the other regions of Virginia. Historically, the region has been and remains a rural area, but in the 20th century, coal mining became an important part of its economy. With the decline in the number of coal jobs and the decline of tobacco as a cash crop, Southwest Virginia is increasingly turning to tourism as a source of economic development. Collectively, Southwest Virginia's craft, music, agritourism and outdoor recreation are referred to as the region's "creative economy."
The Upland South and Upper South are two overlapping cultural and geographic subregions in the inland part of the Southern United States. They differ from the Deep South and Atlantic coastal plain by terrain, history, economics, demographics, and settlement patterns.
Appalachian Ohio is a bioregion and political unit in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Ohio, characterized by the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and the Appalachian Plateau. The Appalachian Regional Commission defines the region as consisting of thirty-two counties. This region roughly overlaps with the Appalachian mixed-mesophytic forests, which begin in southeast Ohio and southwest Pennsylvania and continue south to Georgia and Alabama. The mixed-mesophytic forest is found only in Central and Southern Appalachia and eastern/central China. It is one of the most biodiverse temperate forests in the world.
Urban Appalachians are people from or with close ancestral ties to Appalachia who are living in metropolitan areas outside of the region. Because migration has been occurring for decades, most are not first generation migrants from the region but are long-term city dwellers. People have been migrating from Appalachia to cities outside the region ever since many of these cities were founded. It was not until the period following World War II, however, that large-scale migration to urban areas became common due to the decline of coal mining and the increase in industrial jobs available in the Midwest and Northeast. The migration of Appalachians is often known as the Hillbilly Highway.
Appalachia is a geographic region of the Eastern United States. Home to over 25 million people, the region includes mountainous areas of 13 states: Mississippi, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Maryland, as well as the entirety of West Virginia.
The Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) was a non-profit organization, active from 1912 to 1989, concerned with education and community development in southern Appalachia.
The Appalachian region and its people have historically been stereotyped by observers, with the basic perceptions of Appalachians painting them as backwards, rural, and anti-progressive. These widespread, limiting views of Appalachia and its people began to develop in the post-Civil War; Those who "discovered" Appalachia found it to be a very strange environment, and depicted its "otherness" in their writing. These depictions have persisted and are still present in common understandings of Appalachia today, with a particular increase of stereotypical imagery during the late 1950s and early 1960s in sitcoms. Common Appalachian stereotypes include those concerning economics, appearance, and the caricature of the "hillbilly."
The Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 established the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which was tasked with overseeing economic development programs in the Appalachia region, as well as the construction of the Appalachian Development Highway System. Membership included representatives from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as one federal appointee. This Act is one of the longest serving place-based regional development programs in the United States, and is the largest in terms of geographic scope.
Environmental justice and coal mining in Appalachia is the study of environmental justice – the interdisciplinary body of social science literature studying theories of the environment and justice; environmental laws, policies, and their implementations and enforcement; development and sustainability; and political ecology – in relation to coal mining in Appalachia.
The Appalachian Land Ownership Survey was launched by the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force in 1978. The survey was created in order to understand the demographics of land ownership within the Appalachian mountain region. This survey spanned the area across 420 different counties from Georgia to Maine. The main focus of the survey was to identify patterns within land ownership, specifically absentee owners and the effects on regional development in the areas. It is mandatory for agricultural land owners in the United States to participate in these surveys to account for their production, financing and inputs within each state.
The city of Baltimore, Maryland includes a significant Appalachian population. The Appalachian community has historically been centered in the neighborhoods of Hampden, Pigtown, Remington, Woodberry, Lower Charles Village, Highlandtown, and Druid Hill Park, as well as the Baltimore inner suburbs of Dundalk, Essex, and Middle River. The culture of Baltimore has been profoundly influenced by Appalachian culture, dialect, folk traditions, and music. People of Appalachian heritage may be of any race or religion. Most Appalachian people in Baltimore are white or African-American, though some are Native American or from other ethnic backgrounds. White Appalachian people in Baltimore are typically descendants of early English, Irish, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh settlers. A migration of White Southerners from Appalachia occurred from the 1920s to the 1960s, alongside a large-scale migration of African-Americans from the Deep South and migration of Native Americans from the Southeast such as the Lumbee and the Cherokee. These out-migrations caused the heritage of Baltimore to be deeply influenced by Appalachian and Southern cultures.
The city of Chicago, Illinois is home to a significant Appalachian population. The Appalachian community has historically been centered in the neighborhood of Uptown. Beginning after World War I, Appalachian people moved to Chicago in droves seeking jobs. Between 1940 and 1970, approximately 3.2 million Appalachian and Southern migrants settled in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest. Due to immigration restrictions in the 1920s, personnel managers in Chicago encouraged working-class migrants from the Upland South to fill those jobs. The culture of Chicago has been significantly influenced by the culture, music, and politics of Appalachia. The majority of people of Appalachian heritage in Chicago are white or black, though Appalachian people can be of any race, ethnicity, or religion.
The Metro Detroit region of Michigan is home to a significant Appalachian population, one of the largest populations of Urban Appalachians in the United States. The most common state of origin for Appalachian people in Detroit is Kentucky, while many others came from Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, and elsewhere in the Appalachia region. The Appalachian population has historically been centered in the Detroit neighborhoods of Brightmoor, Springwells, Corktown and North Corktown, as well as the Detroit suburbs of Hazel Park, Ypsilanti, Taylor, and Warren. Beginning after World War I, Appalachian people moved to Detroit in large numbers seeking jobs. Between 1940 and 1970, approximately 3.2 million Appalachian and Southern migrants settled in the Midwest, particularly in large cities such as Detroit and Chicago. This massive influx of rural Appalachian people into Northern and Midwestern cities has been called the "Hillbilly Highway". The culture of Metro Detroit has been significantly influenced by the culture, music, and politics of Appalachia. The majority of people of Appalachian heritage in Metro Detroit are Christian and either white or black, though Appalachian people can be of any race, ethnicity, or religion.
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