THERE'S HISTORY IN THEM THAR HILL-BILLIES...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 73, 15 November 1940, Page 9

THERE'S HISTORY IN THEM THAR HILL-BILLIES...

ILL-BILLY music, you may or may not be happy to hear, has many cherished and honourable traditions, and a history which goes back more than 400 years. In its true form it is straight-from-the-heart folk music; the hill-billies who have spread gelatinously over American stage, and screen, and radio, during the past few years are, for the most part, an exaggerated expression of a popular craze. Hill-billies will die out, but hillbilly music will almost certainly go on. The history of this form of music goes back to the first English pioneering families which thrust into the backwoods of unknown America in search of good farm land. Many eventually penetrated into the mountains, there to struggle for existence almost completely cut off from the outside world. For generations these people saw no one but a few immediate neighbours. With difficulty they would meet occasionally in each other’s homes and there, to the accompaniment of an old fiddle, they would sing the songs they had brought with them from England. Not all of them were musicians; the tunes changed in part, and mew words were put to the old airs.

None of the true hill-billy songs are modern; almost all are adaptations of very old songs. For instance, "The Butcher Boy" has been traced back 400 years, and "It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’," that popular song of 15 years back, was being sung in Nebraska in 1870. It was with the coming of the railroad to America that the world first began to encroach upon the hill-billies. Then cowboy songs began to be mixed with the original music, and eventually an old man named Riley Puckett was dragged from his mountain fastnesses to make hill-billy gramophone records. Many combinations of hill-billy singers have sprung up in American radio, but few present the genuine old songs with such fidelity as the American Hill-Billies, who are heard every Saturday night at 8 o’clock from 2ZB.