Among the southwestern humorists, none was more effective in crafting the image of the hillbilly’s ancestor than C. This development had two primary causes: the proliferation of Arkansas stories written by southwestern humorists in the twenty-five years before President Abraham Lincoln’s election and the Arkansas Traveler legend, which spawned songs, dialogues, a musical, and two popular paintings. As Anthony Harkins notes, by the time of the Civil War, the word “‘Arkansas’ was becoming instantly recognizable shorthand for the half-comic, half-savage backwoodsman.” The popularization of the term hillbilly might be a twentieth-century phenomenon, but the genealogy of the hillbilly icon stretches deep into Arkansas history, from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s caustic descriptions of the Arkansas Ozarks’s earliest settlers to the late-nineteenth-century stories of Opie Read in his Arkansas Traveler.

One can argue that “hillbilly” and Arkansas have been synonymous ever since. Although the subjects of the Journal piece were residents of the Alabama hills, the first scholarly use of the term appeared four years later in a study of Arkansas Ozarks dialect. The term was likely in common use, however, in the rural South by the late nineteenth century. Referring to poor, uneducated whites, generally in the Appalachians or the Ozarks but not always confined to these two Southern highland regions, the hillbilly made his literary debut only in 1900, in the pages of the New York Journal. In modern American popular culture, the term hillbilly is often used interchangeably with other epithets for poor white people such as “redneck,” “cracker,” or “white trash.” But, throughout much of the twentieth century, the word hillbilly conjured a character whose geographic origins were more narrowly defined. Wrapped up with the condescension in people’s common view of the hillbilly is a trace of admiration for what they perceive as his independent spirit and his disregard for the trappings of modern society. Whether a barefoot, rifle-toting, moonshine-swigging, bearded man staring out from beneath a floppy felt hat or a toothless granny in homespun sitting at a spinning wheel and peering suspiciously at strangers from the front porch of a dilapidated mountain cabin, the hillbilly, in all his manifestations, is instantly recognizable. Despite the lack of scholarly consensus on the origin of the term-historian Anthony Harkins gives as the most likely explanation that Scottish highlanders melded “hill-folk” with “billie,” a word meaning friend or companion-there is no shortage of hillbilly images in American popular culture. Ships include: The Oasis, Harmony, Allure and Symphony Of The Seas.The “hillbilly” has been an enduring staple of American iconography, and Arkansas has been identified with the hillbilly as much as, if not more than, any state. The band has had the honor of performing on some of the largest cruise ships in the world with Royal Caribbean. Notable Performances include CMT & ACM awards. HBRS has performed thousands of shows - many being headline appearances - in cities across the U.S. With over 14 years of touring, we have plenty to write about. The band quickly realized the only way for the band to evolve was to continue writing more and more, sparking the soon to be released sophomore album coming in 2022. Garnishing rave reviews and a lot of radio airplay, the EP 'Feels Like Home' took off. In 2018, HBRS released their first single and followed up with a 5 song EP titled 'Feels Like Home'. The requests from fans and promoters wanting them to perform more original music kept coming so the band decided it was time to deliver what they wanted. After years of building a following, Hillbilly Rockstarz has become Chicago's top country band. We started out as a concept in 2007 to be a top tier country cover band promoting good times with good people.

They called it the hillbilly rock