Home is where the hillbilly is

If you ask a hillbilly, he’ll tell you there is no one place that the Hillbilly Nation calls home. It’s true. Thanks to CBS, there was even a clan out in Beverly Hills, California. Well, they were originally from the Ozarks, but what with all that oil money, you know….

 

But while a hillbilly can come from any number of states or regions, there can be no argument that the capital of the Hillbilly Nation is Pikeville, Kentucky, and all because of our little annual celebration called Hillbilly Daze.

Yes, and any denizen of the Hillbilly Nation can tell you all about this little affair, its cofounders "Dirty Ear" Howard Stratton and "Shady" Grady Kinney and its very noble purpose; raising money for the Shiners Children’s Hospitals.

It also gives hillbillies of all stripes a chance to come to the Hillbilly Nation’s capital and compare notes on what it means to be a hillbilly or just to see old friends who make Pikeville an annual destination.

Hillbilly Daze was first held in 1977, so that means that 35 years have come and gone since the Hillbilly Nation first assembled in Pikeville, and a whole lot of things have changed since then. For one thing, we now live in the New Millennium, aka the 21^st Century, and we have computers. So keeping up with all your hillbilly friends is a lot easier, especially with Twitter and Facebook.

Still, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t lost a little of ourselves to modern innovation. In times past, without the TV or computer to occupy us at night, we might have spent more time out of doors in the spring and summer. That would have allowed us to become better acquainted with nature.

For instance, back in the late 70’s, when I lived in Paintsville, some of us used to occasionally drive along the Paint Creek road on a summer evening and sit and just listen. By around 9 or 10, you could hear whippoorwills call from every direction.

Going back considerably farther in time, when I was a teenager, we had TV, but it was black and white and we only had 3 networks and no more than 5-6 stations. In springtime, when extreme boredom with the idiot tube drove us away from it, we could sit on the front porch and listen to the frogs as they sought romance.

Or on those evenings when a thunderstorm came up and we were forbidden to watch the TV lest we and it get struck by lightning, we could again sit outside and watch the lightning strike, then count to see how far away it was.

I don’t think any of us had any inkling of the advances that awaited us in what was then the distant future. But tomorrow had to get here eventually and here it is, with youtube replacing the idiot tube.

Oh, who am I kidding? We most certainly were not better off in the age of dinosaurs. Can anyone really way they were happy sitting on a front porch, watching lightning and counting? Really! That’s about as exciting as listening to frogs make out.

So when you show up at Hillbilly Daze with your new-fangledy stuff, enjoy using what we’d have killed for in 1977. And don’t for a minute feel guilty. After all, who knows what’ll be here in another 35 years.