Hillbilly Highway

When Steve Earle released his road song Hillbilly Highway in 1986, generations of internal migrants were familiar with the colloquialism describing the network of roads and highways leading them from, or returning them to, their traditional homes in the Mountain South. Beginning in the 1920s, rural Appalachians fled structural economic crises plaguing small farmers, timber workers, and coal miners. Alone or as families, they traveled in carpools, on buses, or riding their thumb, seeking work in the industrial Midwest. Muncie, Cincinnati, Dayton, Akron, Columbus, Chicago, and Detroit, and dozens of smaller cities and towns welcomed the mountaineers to do necessary, often backbreaking work. Most residents of these places thought of the mountaineers as backward curiosities, incapable of aspiring to modern middle-class life. In part, Fraser complements the work of other historians of migrants, including James Gregory (2005), Chad Berry (2000), and Thomas Kiffmeyer (2008). These and others have documented how some migrants adapted rather seamlessly to urban industrial culture, consigning their previous lives to the rearview mirror, and raising children with little connection to the homeplace. Others tolerated steady or intermittent factory or domestic work, frequently traveling back home. Some rejected city life entirely after one or more trial runs, taking their chances on getting by back home. Fraser declares that regardless of the cultural exchanges between Appalachian migrants and native midwesterners, a significant portion of southern white migrants represented “something of a class apart in the urban Midwest throughout most of the twentieth century” (6).Fraser acknowledges and respectfully critiques the migration literature in his engagingly written narrative. In six thematically organized arranged chapters he analyzes the pushes and pulls of displacement, the burgeoning of a “transregional” working class, and the homogenization of traditional cultural markers He argues in these chapters that the “grand drama of American history” mistakenly treats the Appalachian migration “as only tertiary” to the national story (10). He rejects the marginalization thesis and claims that migrants were more accurately at the center of “many of the defining events” of the twentieth century (10). To cite one clear example (chapter 3), Fraser reconstructs the overlooked enthusiastic participation by Appalachian workers in the mid-1930s industrial union struggles in Akron, Flint, and Detroit. Their dedication to unionism confounded bosses and many co-workers, who suspected, based on conventional wisdom, that the “hillbillies” would be docile laborers suspicious of collective action (Nelson 1982).Max Fraser is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami. He specializes in American labor and working-class history, American politics, and popular culture. In Hillbilly Highway, his research and exhaustive documentation reflect a comprehensive mastery of these disciplines. In addition to working in more than a dozen print and oral history archives in the Mountain South and Midwest, Fraser recorded dozens of oral histories from first-, second-, and third-generation mountain migrants with stories dating from the 1950s.Fraser writes of the comforting familiarity that rural migrants established in the marginal urban ghettos that were typically the first residential options on their journey. The neighborliness that many migrants found in honky-tonks and storefront churches where they congregated eased the shock of leaving the familiar back home. The emotionalism and rambunctiousness associated with these community-building institutions, however, made native midwestern urban-dwellers, newspaper reporters, police, and city officials believe that the hillbillies were incompatible with the requisite behavior to be productive citizens. In one notorious feature a Chicago Tribune writer described the mountaineers as “a plague of locusts” descending on the city (109–10). Academics produced a stream of influential “culture of poverty” writing, emphasizing individual failure, which reflected the well-intentioned but commonly self-aggrandizing character of anti-poverty reformism in the sixties and seventies. Regarding Michael Harrington's The Other America (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962); Oscar Lewis's La vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (Random House, 1965); Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands (Little-Brown, 1963); and Jack Weller's Yesterday's People (University Press of Kentucky, 1965), each in its own way attributed the poverty in Appalachian, Black, and Brown ghettoes to “the casualness of a people who expected little” (140; quoting Harrington) or “a lack of impulse control” (172; quoting Lewis). The industrial-strength reform focus on Appalachian behavior even “combined to produce a unique profile of pathology—the Southern Appalachian Migrant—-or SAM” (174).Fraser's closing chapter describes a market-driven metaphorical migration of country music. He cites the hopeful vagabondism represented by Jimmie Rodgers morphing into the alternately whimsical and mournful balladeering of Hank Williams, who literally died on a West Virginia highway in 1953. Then came the descent (if I read Fraser accurately) into the bullying nationalism of Hank Williams, Jr., types. Fraser aligns the belligerent, over-produced, conformist drift of commercial country music, transmitted along the Hillbilly Highway, with the rise of right-wing politics beginning in the 1970s. A distant journey from Steve Earle.Hillbilly Highway is well-suited to undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars and will be read and talked about for decades. It will be welcomed by any readers seriously interested in Appalachian, working-class, and US history. It is a praiseworthy book that commands attention

Internal migration · Making-of · Middle class · Mountaineering · White supremacy · Working class · Appalachian Studies and Mathematics · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

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