photo #8770903

The term "hillbilly" in the United States started early in the 18th century when British soldiers began using it when referring to Scots-Irish immigrants who lived in the frontier areas of the Ozarks and Appalachian Mountains. These Protestant Irish colonists brought their traditions with them when they immigrated. Many of their stories, songs, and ballads dealt with the history of their Ulster and Lowland Scot homelands, especially relating the tale of the Protestant King William III, Prince of Orange. Many of the settlers in the Appalachian mountains were of German origin and were named Wilhelm with the short form Willy, a common German name during that time. Those Wilhelms, who went by Bill or Billy, living in the Appalachian Mountains became known as hillbillies, that is Bills who lived in the hills. The term emerged as a derogatory nickname given by the coastal plain-dwelling Southerners to the hill-dwelling settlers of Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia (including modern West Virginia), and Eastern Kentucky. The term Appalachian Hillbillies 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. Until The War Between the States, the Appalachians were not significantly different from other rural areas of the country, but after the war, as the frontier pushed further west, the Appalachian country retained its frontier character, and the people themselves came to be considered as backward, quick to violence, and to make their living from moonshine stills. Fueled by news stories of mountain feuds, such as that in the 1880s between the Hatfields and McCoys, the hillbilly stereotype developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.