A term used for Country music until at least World War II, and now used principally by scholars to describe the music during the years 1920–41 before it became nationally popular and commercial. ‘Hillbilly’ has been used from about 1900 to describe the backwoods inhabitants of the South, and originally had a pejorative connotation. It was first applied to rural music in 1925 when the producer Ralph Peer of Okeh Records named Al Hopkins’s band the Hillbillies. Other early hillbilly performers included Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and Dr. Humphrey Bate and the Possum Hunters; the original Carter Family was one of the last groups so described. The term came to be applied to country music as a whole, although record catalogues did not make general use of it. Since the 1960s the term has been used to describe performers and styles adhering to pre-World War II rural or folklike sounds; it encompasses traditional songs, non-electric instruments, and rural imagery (e.g. in the performances of Roy Acuff, Grandpa Jones, and Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper).
A. Green: ‘Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol’, Journal of American Folklore, lxxviii (1965), 204–28
N. Cohen: ‘Early Pioneers’, Stars of Country Music, ed. B.C. Malone and J. McCulloh (Urbana, IL, 1975), 3–39
C. Ginell: The Decca Hillbilly Discography, 1927–1945 (Westport, NY, 1989)
M.J. Perkins: Hillbilly Music and its Components: a Survey of the University of Colorado’s Hillbilly Music Collection (diss., U. of Colorado, 1991)
BILL C. MALONE/RONNIE PUGH