Top 33 Hillbilly Quotes

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.

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 get along with all the women singers, but especially Dolly Parton. We talk the same hillbilly language.

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.

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.

When I started out, I was what they called corny. After a week in Nashville they were calling me hillbilly.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

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.’

Once in a while I get inspired and finish my act with the hillbilly hoedown.

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.

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.

I haven’t gone hillbilly rich, where you spend everything you have.

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.

I have noticed that these pop bands will play our hillbilly songs when they cain’t eat any other way!

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.

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.

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.

To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure.

Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of ‘that kind’ of person.

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.

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.

You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.

Country hillbilly music I love. Always have.

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’.

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.

Deep down, I’m just a West Virginia hillbilly.

The four things a hillbilly singer needs are a Cadillac, a Nudie suit, the right hairdo, and a pair of pointy-toed boots.

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.

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.’

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.

I make no apology about being a hillbilly.

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.

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.