The Branson HillbillyCommingling Power and Marginalization on the "Heartland" Stage Joanna Dee Das (bio) and Jay Buchanan (bio) In 1967, nineteen-year-old Gary Presley did not put on a tie-dye T-shirt to participate in the iconic "Summer of Love." He also did not throw a bottle to participate in the more than 150 rebellions against racism and police brutality erupting in American cities across the country. Instead, he donned his grandfather's oversized overalls, plopped a broken straw hat on his head, and blacked out several of his teeth with an eyebrow pencil to transform himself into Herkimer, a hillbilly, for his family's variety show three miles outside of Branson, Missouri. The Mabes, who had been running their own variety show out of a municipal building downtown, opened a theatre across the highway one year later, featuring Jim Mabe as hillbilly Droopy Drawers. The entertainment industry in this Ozark Mountain small town exploded in the decades thereafter. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than forty-five theatres were operating over one hundred shows, many with their own hillbilly characters, for more than nine million tourists a year.1 While New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas are more nationally recognized US entertainment centers, Branson holds its own as a popular destination to see live performance, particularly for residents of the South, Midwest, and Southwest regions of the United States. Dominated by variety shows, Branson's entertainment industry abides by a motto called "The Three F's": Faith, Family, and Flag, a triumvirate of values linked to the rise of what is called "movement conservatism" in US politics.2 Yet vague assertions of values will not attract audiences; a show needs a character to embody these principles. Enter the hillbilly. The hillbilly is a stock character, [End Page 88] blending the long-standing "wise fool" archetype (e.g., Feste from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) with stereotypes about poor whites from the Southern mountain regions of the United States. In early-twentieth-century US American theatre, the hillbilly stock character had a specific name—Toby—a "red-wigged, freckled, clownishly garbed country bumpkin who was the foil of the evil, conniving urban characters that tried to take advantage of simple rural people."3 The archetype was so popular that for several decades an entire genre of rural itinerant performance, the Toby Show, was built around it. This type of touring tent show faded into obscurity in the early 1960s, precisely when Gary first appeared as Herkimer and the rapid expansion of leisure nationwide enabled Branson's success as a tourism destination.4 At Presleys' Country Jubilee in the early 2020s, septuagenarian Gary has stopped blacking out his teeth, but he still bounds onstage in overalls six nights a week, ten months of the year, to tell jokes and engage in physical comedy. When asked why the Jubilee remained popular with audiences after several decades, he stated, "When you go to Hawaii, you want to see the Hula Girl. When you go to Branson, you want to see the hillbilly."5 The persistent popularity of hillbilly performance in Branson from the 1960s to the 2020s warrants a reconsideration of how expressive culture functions to create and sustain power structures in the United States. Power comes not simply in the form of wealth or in control of government; power comes in the form of being seen as someone who has influence, recognition, and admiration. How these affective registers of feelings interact with more traditional levers of power to determine one's standing in society is a subject of major debate. Historically peripheral to the plantation economy of the antebellum South, economically disadvantaged, and culturally scorned in the centuries thereafter, the hillbilly figure nevertheless bears a primary indicator of power and centrality in the United States: whiteness. And while there are hillbilly women, the classic hillbilly archetype is a man, so it also bears the privileges of masculinity.6 The hillbilly's commingling of marginalization and privilege plays out both onstage and off in Branson. Tourism boosters express frustration about the city's negative reputation as cheesy and backward, yet the destination's differentiating characteristic in a...
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Oct 31, 2022
Cameron R Cheri + 2
Open Access