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I'm no hillbilly singer.
I make no apology about being a hillbilly.
Country hillbilly music I love. Always have.
We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside.
Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.
I believe that Willy Nelson is the hillbilly Dalai Lama.
I haven't gone hillbilly rich, where you spend everything you have.
Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.
Hopefully I'll be the first Mexican-American going into Hillbilly Heaven.
Once in a while I get inspired and finish my act with the hillbilly hoedown.
You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.
Doing a thing call the Hillbilly Rock, some say it came from Elvis down in Tennessee.
I have noticed that these pop bands will play our hillbilly songs when they cain't eat any other way!
I get along with all the women singers, but especially Dolly Parton. We talk the same hillbilly language.
When I started out, I was what they called corny. After a week in Nashville they were calling me hillbilly.
To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure.
It's been years since any hillbilly has reported getting sodomized by an alien. Did they break up and not tell us?
When I first started, I had a mullet, and I was trying to play a hillbilly persona. While it was fun, it wasn't me.
The four things a hillbilly singer needs are a Cadillac, a Nudie suit, the right hairdo, and a pair of pointy-toed boots.
Usually going places makes me feel optimistic. And I'm a hillbilly, so heading to the countryside made sense a number of ways.
I'm a bit of a loner, you know? I'm more quiet by nature. And coming from, you know, hillbilly country, I'm probably more reserved.
It doesn't bother me to be called a 'hillbilly' because I lived in the hills. I grew up in the hills and the mountains are my home.
I'd lived in West Virginia on and off for four to five years growing up. I'm familiar with Bible Belt, with Appalachia, 'Hillbilly Elegy.'
You know what I do on Sundays? I sing in a choir. I sing in a Greek Orthodox choir, and I'm the only hillbilly tenor in the Orthodox Church.
Remember this, folks - I am a Hillbilly, and I don't always Bet the same way I talk. Good advice is one thing, but smart gambling is quite another.
Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.
I'm a native West Virginian and I've been called everything from a hillbilly to a stump jumper. I'm always proud of it; I'm very proud to be a West Virginian.
People look at you, and they've got just the perfect little box for you, the perfect category. Call you a redneck. Call you a hillbilly. Like those were insults.
If you take the riff from the song 'Cowboys From Hell' and really break it down, it's almost a hillbilly guitar riff: dekka dekka dekka dekka dekka dekka dekka dek.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by JD Vance made me entirely rethink U.S. republicanism, Donald Trump and the American white working class.
Hillbilly Rock' was the song that opened the door and gave me a reason to get a bus and a band and cowboy clothes to go out there and figure it out in front of everybody. And the hits started coming.
My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.
I feel like I'm the luckiest person alive. I'm always waiting for that phone call: 'Hello. We've just realized you're really a no-talent hillbilly. We've made a horrible mistake and we'd like you to leave now.'
I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don't want to lose that. I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it.
Let's call a spade a spade: when people look at me, they say, 'Oh, she's the androgynous one.' I'll tell you what type of character I would never be offered out there: The femme fatale. Or the white-trash, heterosexual hillbilly.
If I'm opening up for George Jones or playing a complete honky-tonk, I do true country music. But if it's a complete rock club, I'll do some country and a little bit of this hillbilly acoustic country metal or whatever it's called.
There was a misconception about me when I started off because I had my hair greased up and I have some vague resemblance to the hillbilly gene pool that Elvis came from. People would say, 'You want to be Elvis' and I would say, 'No'.
The music played most around St. Louis was country-western and swing. Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of the country stuff on our predominantly black audience. After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff.
In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.
I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.
I don't know that my voice ever makes sense anywhere, necessarily. I would sing bluegrass music, and I don't fit in there; I would sing rock music, and I'm probably a little too hillbilly for that. And country, I'm too much rock n' roll for there sometimes.
My family influenced me very deeply because my dad came from a musical background, from the hillbilly music part of it, and all that music came over from Scotland and Ireland and England in to the Appalachian Mountains and Ozark Mountains, where I was raised.
I think of myself as a Hollywood hillbilly, but I'm sick of all these questions people ask about Alabama. 'Do you have an outhouse?' 'Is there a lot of inbreeding in your family?' They think all Southerners don't have computers and TV sets and that we're all still living in 1862.
Not long ago, every time I did a picture shoot for a magazine, the photographer would ask me to show up wearing jeans and cowboy boots. They seemed to think I was a hillbilly. Now it's different. Now they're not quite sure what to make of me. And I show up wearing whatever I want.
When we first started recording, it was before rock, so people thought we were hillbilly hicks. That was something we had to deal with; the girls didn't think we were cool, although they did a few years later. We had ducktails and wore peg-leg pants. We looked like rock n' rollers.
Truth of the matter is, jazz is American music. And that doesn't mean bebop. Jazz is really about improvising. All the music that's been created in America has been pretty much improvised... Whether it's hillbilly or rock n' roll for blues, it's basically jazz music... It's basically about another way of hearing what comes out of America.
My parents were on the Grand Ole Opry. They traveled all over the country singing hillbilly music. That's what they called it back then. They were friends with Roy Acuff and the Delmore Brothers and the Carter Family. And all of my brothers and sisters who were older than me started on the show, after they were big enough to hold a guitar and sing.