Top 61 Hillbilly Quotes & Sayings

We spend so much money on these dresses that are terrible. And what do we get out of it? Nothing - a piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with her hillbilly cousin - no thank you. My family's very close; I can do that at home.

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

Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.

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.

Usually going places makes me feel optimistic. And I'm a hillbilly, so heading to the countryside made sense a number of ways.

I'm no hillbilly singer.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by JD Vance made me entirely rethink U.S. republicanism, Donald Trump and the American white working class.

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

Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison.

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 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.'

Hopefully I'll be the first Mexican-American going into Hillbilly Heaven.

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.

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.

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.

Doing a thing call the Hillbilly Rock, some say it came from Elvis down in Tennessee.

Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By.

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.

My parents were on the Grand Ole Opry. They traveled all over the country singing hillbilly music. That's what they called it back then. They were friends with Roy Acuff and the Delmore Brothers and the Carter Family. And all of my brothers and sisters who were older than me started on the show, after they were big enough to hold a guitar and sing.

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

For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source

Truth of the matter is, jazz is American music. And that doesn't mean bebop. Jazz is really about improvising. All the music that's been created in America has been pretty much improvised... Whether it's hillbilly or rock n' roll for blues, it's basically jazz music... It's basically about another way of hearing what comes out of America.

We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside.

Country hillbilly music I love. Always have.

I believe that Willy Nelson is the hillbilly Dalai Lama.

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

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 I first started, I had a mullet, and I was trying to play a hillbilly persona. While it was fun, it wasn't me.

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

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.

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

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

I was kind of a little redneck growing up, living on a farm, and running around in the country. I developed hillbilly tendencies, but I wanted to listen to something a little more meaningful than "Redneck Woman" or whatever.

I stay close to my roots and my family. I never want to forget any part of it. I'm still just a hillbilly at heart, thus a Backwoods Barbie.

Last night I dreamed I went to hillbilly heaven and you know who greeted me at the gate? The ole cowboy-philosopher himself, Will Rogers.

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.

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 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.

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'.

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.

I was always drawn to the roots music, bluegrass, blues, early rock - Sun Records, Elvis [Presley]. And I still love that music to this day. Memphis never gets the credit. It's much more musically rich than Nashville ever will be. Nashville manufactured that hokey-hillbilly image way back.

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish - a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow - to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested... Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.

Those songs [from church], I think, shaped to some degree how I would evolve as a writer, pentameter of songs, the melodies of those kind of hillbilly hymns - I used to refer to them - because they were not Southern gospel as much as they were passed down from Scottish Welsh Protestant hymnals.

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

I make no apology about being a hillbilly.

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

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.

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

Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering "who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?"

Hillbilly Rock' was the song that opened the door and gave me a reason to get a bus and a band and cowboy clothes to go out there and figure it out in front of everybody. And the hits started coming.

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.

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.'

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.

It's the hillbilly rock, beat it with a drum. Playin' them guitars like shootin from a gun. Keepin' up the rhythm, steady as a clock. Doin' a little thing called the hillbilly rock.

My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.

I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.

It's been years since any hillbilly has reported getting sodomized by an alien. Did they break up and not tell us?

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.