Fighting Back Against Backwardness: Understanding “Degraded” Appalachia

When I was 21, I discovered a book that changed my life. It was called Hillbilly, and it was written by Dr. Anthony Harkins, a historian who just so happened to teach at Western Kentucky University where I was an undergraduate. (Funnily enough, I didn’t meet Dr. Harkins until 5 years after I graduated, but that’s another story.) As the name implies, Hillbilly traces the history of the “hillbilly” image in American popular media starting around the 1700s. And it argues that while the details of the hillbilly have changed over time, the effect has always been the same: It positions Appalachians as a group “other” from the rest of America, a group that is somehow, fundamentally, broken. 

The thing I had always felt yet never been able to articulate was finally put into words.

When I began doing research for my Master’s thesis at MIT, I once again poured over the pages of Hillbilly. This time, I was really struck by the way that these images were so conflicting: Hillbillies were sometimes terrifyingly violent, other times comedically dumb. In some cases they were helpless victims of circumstance, in others the cause of all their own problems. Ultimately, there was no one way to define what Appalachians looked like in media; there were many. So, I got to work cataloging all the tropes I came across.

Eventually, I narrowed my list down to four of the most common. The one I noticed the most by far is a trope I’ve come to call Degraded - the idea that Appalachians are primitive, degenerate, and destitute. Sometimes, these images are meant to be funny; others, deadly serious. In all cases, Appalachians are positioned as a society wholly separate from the rest of the world - a group that is other. I’d like to briefly give a few examples of this trope throughout history so you can see what I mean.

Degraded Appalachia: Backwardness, Helplessness, and Degeneracy

The image of Appalachia as a place that’s degraded - backward, poor, all-around lesser - is one of the oldest tropes in the book. In fact, the image predates the formal recognition of Appalachia as a region altogether. As early as 1728, colonial surveyor William Byrd II, upon visiting the mountains of North Carolina, wrote of his disgust with the people who lived there in his report titled The History of the Dividing Line. Here’s one excerpt from his account:

“Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live with less Labour than in N Carolina. […] The Men, for their Parts, just like the Indians, impose all the Work upon the poor Women. They make their Wives rise out of their Beds early in the Morning, at the same time that they lye and Snore, till the Sun has run one third of his course, and disperst all the unwholesome Damps. […] Thus they loiter away their Lives, like Solomon’s Sluggard. ”

Byrd’s disgust with the mountain people stems from their rejection of what he perceives to be the “natural” order: the need for structured labor, the physical and economic dependence of women upon men, and a distinction between white colonialists and Native Americans.  Byrd sees a cultural backwardness in the mountains of North Carolina - a conclusion that many writers, journalists, and media makers would echo in their work on Appalachia for centuries to come. 

Many portrayals of Appalachia that followed were similar, not only in their negativity but in their positioning as objective – even scientific – fact. Take the 1933 scientific study Hollow Folk for example, which detailed the lives of five communities in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia as it traced “the human race on its long journey from primitive ways of living to a modern social order,” arguing that Appalachians were actually evolutionarily less advanced than other Americans. Or a 1936 medical article, titled “Mental Deficiency in a Closely Inbred Mountain Clan,” which proposed that Appalachians should be systematically sterilized due to a culture of incest. 

Images of Degraded Appalachia began to migrate into popular media around this same time by way of a trio of popular comic strips – The Mountain Boys, Li’l Abner, and Barney Google. Though the plots of these comics vary, they all feature Southern mountain “hillbilly” characters who, among other things, are secluded, ignorant, and almost animalistic in their primitiveness. In The Mountain Boys, for example, the three main characters each have an exaggeratedly large number of children and often sleep in the barnyard while the animals sleep inside. And when one character is presented with a bar of soap, he tries to eat it because he’s unfamiliar with the concept.

Documentaries and nonfiction works have often had a different take on Appalachian degradation by highlighting scenes of poverty, helplessness, and destitution. These types of works became especially popular in the 1960s, as three major scholarly and nonfiction books – The Southern Appalachian Region–A Survey (1962), a collection of essays chronicling the “troubled” region; Harry M. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963), which presented Appalachia as a “ravaged land with a battered people”; and Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which called for decisive action to end Appalachia’s “needless suffering in the most advanced society in the world” – were released in quick succession. Also during this time, CBS released a documentary titled Christmas in Appalachia, which contrasts a “normal” American Christmas of plenty with the “wretched” poverty of coal mining families in the Appalachian mountains. With so much media concentrating on the “problem area” of Appalachia, it’s no surprise that just a year later Lyndon B. Johnson so infamously launched his War on Poverty campaign from a cabin porch in Eastern Kentucky. 

While we’re on the topic of major world events and depictions of Appalachian poverty, let’s look at a few more contemporary examples: the 2008 economic recession and the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections. Shortly after the former, ABC News released a 48-minute special report titled A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains, following the difficult lives of four of Appalachia’s “forgotten children.” Host Diane Sawyer points to Appalachia as the culprit for these forgotten children’s struggles, as it’s a place with “three times the national poverty rate, an epidemic of prescription drug abuse, the shortest life span in the nation, toothlessness, cancer and chronic depression.”

Appalachia again saw an uptick in news coverage surrounding the 2016 election as news organizations sought to understand the inner workings of “Trump country.” And it just so happened that around that time, J.D. Vance released his smash-hit autobiography Hillbilly Elegy – a memoir that most from outside the region were all-too-ready to accept as an easy explanation for the new American political landscape. Though Vance’s childhood was undoubtedly difficult, he places the blame for these struggles squarely on the shoulders of Appalachia’s “hillbilly” culture, writing that “some of the very traits that our culture inculcates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” (Vance and his book have, of course, re-entered the national conversation after he became Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election.) Politics aside, my point is that while Vance had the opportunity to provide insight into Appalachian issues from the perspective of someone who has suffered dearly because of them, he instead played into dominant narratives that Appalachian poverty, substance abuse, and unemployment could be solved if we all just stopped being so lazy. 

Because images of Appalachia as a degraded place have been around for so long, they’ve tended to shift with time and according to the purposes of those producing these images. In early cases, such as The History of the Dividing Line and Hollow Folk, they contributed to a perception of Appalachia as a deviant and culturally inferior place; doing so made it much easier for politicians, organizations, and the general public to ignore any problems the region faced. Other representations like Christmas in Appalachia, Children of the Mountains, and Hillbilly Elegy have been used as justification for the political landscape of the day and for campaigns (like the War on Poverty) that have rarely actually benefited Appalachians. In short, images like these position Appalachia as an easy scapegoat for many problems that plague the country as a whole; at the same time, they allow the country to ignore the problems unique to Appalachia.

With such pervasive, long-standing, and harmful imagery dominating representations of Appalachia, creating genuine and meaningful counter-representations can help strip them of their power. Below, check out a few examples of stories I’ve shared - through my work with The Appalachian Retelling Project and elsewhere - that aim to combat these stereotypes. 

“Inside the Image”: Appalachian Culture from All Angles

One of the most interesting things I learned while writing my Master’s thesis is something that at first glance feels counter-intuitive: The best way to fight a negative image isn’t to simply flood the world with positive ones. Instead, it’s better to do something that media scholar Stuart Hall describes as going “inside the image” - focusing on the very stereotypes that are used to harm people and undermining their meaning. This can happen in a lot of ways; in some cases, that might mean exploring topics like poverty, drug abuse, and education in Appalachia from an angle that attempts to humanize the problem rather than demean or place blame. In others, that might mean showing the more “everyday” experiences of the region that don’t fit neatly into a positive or negative category. Showing a group from so many angles can help audiences see it in a new way: not as “bad” examples of a stereotype or as “good” people who prove its opposite, but as whole, complex, and unique beings. As a media maker, I try to keep this approach in mind when thinking about the stories I tell and how I want to tell them. 

When thinking about the trope of Degraded Appalachia, then, I’ve tried to share stories that speak to the region’s culture from many angles. One of the first mini-documentaries I made for The Appalachian Retelling Project was an interview with my dad, Rusty Justice, an entrepreneur who credits his success in business to his upbringing in Appalachia.

In another early video, researcher Jordan Laney speaks directly to the book Hillbilly Elegy and why she believes it’s a harmful representation of the region - both as a scholar and someone who grew up there. 

More recently, I hosted Appalachian Retelling’s first ever in-person event, in which participants shared stories about their experiences in Appalachian culture, both good and bad. I then created a short write-up including audio excerpts from the event.

I’ve done work on this topic outside of Appalachian Retelling, too. As a producer for the show Kentucky Life on KET, I created a segment about the Hillbilly Days festival held in my hometown of Pikeville and explored how this event might help people in the region reclaim the hillbilly in a positive way. 

Ultimately, the Degraded stereotype - and the many others that exist in the region - is a powerful image, and it’s impossible to change it overnight. But I believe deeply in the power of story to change hearts and minds, and my hope is that with time and effort, we will have gone far enough “inside the image” to help others see our region not as other but as wholly, uniquely, and wonderfully ourselves.