Embodying the Hillbilly: Performance, Labor, and Masculinity in the Mid-20th-Century Ozarks

In 1904, Marion Hughes’s popular travelogue Three Years in Arkansaw sedimented the emerging trope of the hillbilly with a telling illustration, “Interior of a Typical Arkansaw Home.” In the drawing, barefoot and disheveled children run around with pigs, dogs, and chickens. A woman, old before her time, breastfeeds two babies at once as she smokes a cigarette. Her bare feet are planted firmly on the ground and her torso is pitched slightly forward; she could get up to wrangle another child if needed. The husband, in contrast, sits in repose with his chair tilted back against the wall and plays the fiddle. He cannot spring into action. Playing music signaled the male hillbilly’s unfitness as a breadwinner in a capitalist economy. Sixty years later, two self-described hillbillies founded variety shows—the Mountain Music Jubilee and the Baldknobbers Hillbilly Jamboree—in the Ozark Mountain town of Branson, Missouri. They traded upon hillbilly stereotypes while simultaneously pushing back against the idea of artistic labor as unmasculine and unproductive. Their efforts seeded the development of a massive tourism industry that today attracts over ten million visitors a year who can choose from over one hundred live entertainment options, including variety shows, impersonation shows, gospel music shows, musicals, and outdoor dramas. Branson has also become a cultural mecca for the political right and counts the executive directors of Christian nationalist organizations among its residents. This paper examines how the founding patriarchs of Branson entertainment worked through contradictions about performing arts, labor, masculinity, and the white working class during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s to answer a head-scratching question: how did a place built on performance, an activity most often associated with the political left (“Hollywood liberals”), successfully brand itself as a haven for conservatives?