Hillbilly Overalls: Dressing a Modern Vernacular

Abstract: Country music, or hillbilly music, developed a visual identity in parallel with its musical identity in the 1920s and 1930s, and overalls were adopted by performers in alignment with the hillbilly image. Though they were worn to signify rusticity and traditionalism, overalls were in fact the product of accelerating, sophisticated manufacturing enterprises, in much the same way hillbilly music was interconnected with emergent technologies and modern media culture. Overalls helped construct the hillbilly costume but also connected to the lived experiences of performers and audiences through materiality, fabrication, and function. Connections between overalls, the Southeast, and its workers and musicians ran deep and were embedded beyond the everyday or the stereotype. Overalls were central to the visual and material landscape of the nascent genre and shaped perceptions of musicians, rural life, and country music's complicated relationship to modernity.