Redneck - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

The Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw are popular entertainments from years past, and they, as well as entertainers Hank Williams, Grandpa Jones and Jerry Clower, have seen lasting popularity within the redneck community. Entertainers like Minnie Pearl used homespun comedy as much as music to create a lasting persona, and musicians like Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt appeared on shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, lending credence to broad humor about uncomplicated rural Americans.

According to James C. Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia, the redneck comedian "provided a rallying point for bourgeois and lower-class whites alike. With his front-porch humor and politically outrageous bons mots, the redneck comedian created an illusion of white equality across classes."

Johnny Russell was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1973 for his recording of "Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer", parlaying the "common touch" into financial and critical success. Rednecks is a song by Randy Newman, the lead-off track on his 1974 album Good Old Boys. Country music singer Gretchen Wilson titled one of her songs "Redneck Woman" on her 2004 album Here for the Party as well as Craig Morgan with his song, "Redneck Yacht Club" released in 2005.

In recent years, the comedy of Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, Bill Engvall, and Daniel Lawrence Whitney as Larry the Cable Guy has become popular through the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" and Blue Collar TV. Foxworthy's 1993 comedy album You Might Be a Redneck If... cajoled listeners to evaluate their own behavior in the context of stereotypical redneck behavior, and resulted in more mainstream usage of the term.