Hillbillies Were Popular Characters
By the early 1900s, the “hillbilly” became a comedy archetype in American culture, featuring in joke books and movies. The hillbilly image spread further through comics. Comics such as The Old Home Town series, The Mountain Boys, Lil’ Abner and the character Snuffy Smith in Barney Google was a play on the stereotypical hillbilly archetype. These works are a reflection of fears about the economic and social conditions; as bad as it was in cities it could be hillbilly-level worse.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the popular ‘Ma and Pa Kettle’ films show Ma and Pa Kettle and their brood of fifteen children as they bumble through encounters with modern amenities and technologies. Ma is loud and brash. Pa is slow in speech and thought, and embodies the stereotype of the hillbilly for a national, even international audience. But the hillbilly would achieve stratospheric popularity in the early 1960s.
