Where have all the hillbillies gone?

Where have all the hillbillies gone?On the final leg of a cross-country road trip that included long days spent traveling through both the Ozark and Smokey mountain ranges, the feeling that something was missing began to gnaw at my gut. Then it hit me: We'd covered more than 6,000 miles without a single roadside reference to those simple mountain folk of the South. I couldn' t remember even one billboard advertising a hillbilly café down the road ora gift shop selling corn cob pipes. Hillbillies, apparently, have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the dodo and the stay-at-home mom. Portrayed on film and television (think Jed Clampit and Ma and Pa Kettleif you're old enough) as barefoot, opossum-eating mountain dwellers who lived off the land, hillbillies have always seemed a bit more comic-stripcharacter than real. Certainly Snuffy Smith, Lil' Abner and Daisy Mae no longer have any basis in fact. They exist only in the funnies, replaced in American folklore by rappers, gay television stars and video game heroes. Too white and too closely tied to the land, they had less and less incommon with the rest of us. And, my mother would add, being a hillbilly was nothing to aspire to. They were lazy, didn't use proper English, stole chickens, operated moonshine stills and lived in hovels. All aspirations of mine at one time or another, but nothing that anon-line, cell phone-jabbering, bottled water-sipping, politically correct society could relate to in the 21st century. Signs advertising adult superstores, all-nude dancers and Yakov Smirnov's theater in Branson line the highways in Missouri, Georgia and Tennesseewhere hand-lettered advertisements for country cafes used to ask "Have yaet yet?" and offered home-cooked vittles. But while I mourn the absence of a visible hillbilly presence on the American landscape, I suspect there remains some isolated corner of this country where hill folk still reign supreme. Where a feller can still satisfy a hankerin' fer a sip of 'shine and there ain't a cell phone tower in sight. Where the Hatfield and McCoy feud still rages and the chicken is anything but store-bought. Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net