Hillbilly is a term (often used in a derogatory sense) for people who dwell in Appalachia but also parts of the Ozarks in the United States. Due to its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term can be offensive to Appalachian-Americans. 

Origins of the term “hillbilly” are obscure. According to Anthony Harkins in Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, the term first appeared in print in a 1900 New York Journal article, with the definition: “a Hill-Billy is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.” This statement has all the hallmarks of Northern  Yankee prejudice.

The Appalachian region was largely settled in the 18th century by the Ulster Scots, Protestants, who migrated to the Irish province of Ulster before, during, and especially after, the Plantation of Ulster in the 17th century. The majority of these people originated in the lowlands of Scotland. In America, the Ulster Scots became known as the Scotch-Irish. Harkins believes the most credible theory of the term’s origin is that it derives from the linkage of two older Scottish expressions, “hill-folk” and “billie” which was an old synonym for “fellow”, or “friend”.

Although the term is not documented in America until 1900, I have always believed that it originated in 17th-century Ireland for Protestant supporters of King William III during the Williamite War. The Irish Catholic supporters of James II referred to these northern Protestant supporters of “King Billy”, as “Billy Boys”. However, my old friend, Michael Montgomery of the University of South Carolina, in From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English, states “In Ulster in recent years it has sometimes been supposed that it was coined to refer to followers of King William III and brought to America by early Ulster emigrants…, but this derivation is almost certainly incorrect… In America hillbilly was first attested only in 1898, which suggests a later, independent development.” Michael is president of the Ulster-Scots Language Society, which I founded in 1992.

Obsessed as he is with obsolete terminology, there is a serious inconsistency in Michael’s argument, which Harkins has followed..If the term only developed in America in the late nineteenth century, who in America was using the old  Scotch term “billie” for “fellow”  or “friend” at that time? I am a native speaker of Ulster-Scots and “fella” and “freen” were the only terms used in my own village of Conlig in Ulster and in my Granny’s home in Ayrshire in Scotland. We have never used the term “billie” instead of “fella” or “freen”, though it was indeed used in Scotland, including by Robert Burns in Tam O’Shanter. But where is the evidence that the term was used as such  in Appalachia ? Michael himself has stated that no attestation of “billie” as “friend” has been found in America other than Bruce (1801), who was an emigrant from Ulster, so how did the term enter common parlance?.

Harkins theorizes that use of the term outside the Appalachians arose in the years after the War between the States, when the Appalachian region became increasingly bypassed by technological and social changes taking place in the rest of the country, and purposely so. Until the Civil War, the Appalachians and Ozarks were not significantly different from other rural areas of the country. After the war, as the wounded Confederacy made a strategic retreat to the Hills until its time should come again, the Appalachian country retained its frontier character, and the poverty-stricken people themselves came to be seen in the Yankee heartlands as backward, quick to violence, and inbred in their isolation. Fueled by news stories of mountain feuds, such as that in the 1880s between the Hatfields and the McCoys, the hillbilly stereotype, which bordered on overt racialism, developed in the Yankee North during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It has been said that the Scotch Irish made three contributions to Colonial America.  They settled a frontier, they founded the Kirk and they built the school.  It was they more than any other group who created the first western frontier. The Reverend Francis Makemie (1658–1708) was born into the Ulster Scots community in Ramelton, County Donegal. He went on to become a clergyman and was ordained by the Presbytery of the Laggan, in West Ulster, in 1682. At the call of Colonel William Stevens, an Episcopalian from Rehobeth, Maryland, he was sent as a missionary to America, arriving in Maryland in 1683. He is considered to be the founder of Presbyterianism in the United States of America.

On February 8, 1693, under a royal charter (technically, by letters patent) granted by King Willam III  and Queen Mary II of Orange, The College of William and Mary in Virginia was established to “make, found and establish a certain Place of Universal Study, a perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and the good arts and sciences…to be supported and maintained, in all time coming.” Named in honor of the reigning monarchs King William III and Queen Mary, the College is the second oldest in the United States and was one of the original Colonial colleges. The King provided funds allocated from tobacco taxes, along with the Surveyor-General’s Office “profits” and 10,000 acres each in the Pamunkey Neck and on Blackwater Swamp. Founded as an Anglican institution, it made an  easy transition to secular status after the American Revolutionary War, but, like the rest of the South, suffered greatly under the Union occupation. But it has always remembered its Williamite roots and connections to the British monarchy.

To the Scotch-Irish much largely go the credit of being the first pioneers west of the Appalachians in opening up the Mississippi valley.  Not only were they predominantly among the pioneers-the mother of the first white child born west of the Rockies was Catherine O’Hare from Rathfriland, but they carried with them an important part of their cultural heritage, their music.  Whatever their influence in terms of cabin and barn styles, field lay-out, town planning and so on, it  seems likely that the greatest and most lasting contribution of the Scotch Irish was music.

However one may define their particular religious and ethnic identity musically they should be considered Ulstermen for they brought with them the mixture of Scottish and Irish tunes which is still characteristic of large parts of old Ulster. From the “Hillbilly music” of the Appalachian Billy Boys or followers of King William, which became Bluegrass, to the Soul music of the Gaelic singers of Donegal and the Hebrides, which became Rhythm and Blues, along with their brothers and sisters in the Black community, they left a lasting impression on  Americanism as  it  was to become. How proud they must be of being “hillbillies”, proud and brave. Elvis and Dolly, we love you…You will live forever