Hillbillies

I was thinking about the construction of the idea of the dispossessed (as in depression era migrants and Southern sharecroppers) represents a fiction that is every bit as pervasive as Said’s exploration of orientalism. Postmodern writing tends to portray the representation of poverty as exploitive and classist. However, it seems to me that those who did the representing did so with motives as variant as the people involved.

I do not see the sort of “institutional conspiracy” that most of the critics of a Marxist bent do. What seems to have been “sold” (as much as the rhetoric of big-brother government takes care of the people) is that there is something worth representing in the culture of the downtrodden. What dominates the rhetoric surrounding the music and art of these “hill people,” and what perseveres, is the idea that they were masters of resistance.

The South, or better still, migrant cultures, represent a people who resist assimilation. Migrant people are not seen as people, but rather, as an idea. I was reminded of this today as I was listening to the 1971 Kinks album Muswell Hillbillies.

Well I said goodbye to Rosie Rooke this morning,
I’m gonna miss her bloodshot alcoholic eyes,
She wore her Sunday hat so she’d impress me,
I’m gonna carry her memory ‘till the day I die.

They’ll move me up to Muswell Hill tomorrow,
Photographs and souvenirs are all I’ve got,
They’re gonna try and make me change my way of living,
But they’ll never make me something that I’m not.

Cos I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy,
But my heart lies in old West Virginia,
Never seen New Orleans, Oklahoma, Tennessee,
Still I dream of the Black Hills that I ain’t never seen.

Technology and conformity are seen as threats to the idea of migrant culture. I was particularly amused by the foresight of Ray Davies’ depiction of the role of education and technology in the lives of those who resist:

They’re putting us in little boxes,
No character just uniformity,
They’re trying to build a computerized community,
But they’ll never make a zombie out of me.

They’ll try and make me study elocution,
Because they say my accent isn’t right,
They can clear the slums as part of their solution,
But they’re never gonna kill my cockney pride.

Cos I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy,
But my heart lies in old West Virginia,
Though my hills are not green,
I have seen them in my dreams,
Take me back to those Black Hills,
That I have never seen.

It’s hard for me to not feel that we owe thanks, not curses, to those who worked hard to create the iconography of the depression. I’m pretty certain that Ray Davies had seen those pictures, and heard the efforts of people like Alan Lomax, to represent the people overrun by technology, only to be replaced with a dream.