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dence with the Scope proceedings.
But enough of this digression along scholastic Hnes. My point is that the hillbilly is here or he was here a minute ago. That is another strange fact about the hillbilly. He shows up promptly for his radio program and then disappears. I personally try to keep an up-to-date list of station employees and their addresses, but in over ten years of patient address-tak' ing, I have never known where to send a letter to a hillbilly, in case I ever wanted to. If you want to get in touch with him, you just concentrate real hard and he'll get off the elevator in a few minutes.
I wish I could get to the point of this article on hillbillies. What I want to say is this: The hillbilly is neither dumb nor
broke. He has come into his own and I'm glad. The time was that the hillbilly opened up the station at five or six o'clock in the morning. He kept the station on the air with his guitar strumming and yodeling until the paid talent decided it was time to go to work. Then the hillbilly would slink unobtrusively away into the cold dawn of the winter day to his cabin camp, his trailer or the back seat of his battered Ford and stay there out of sight until he was due at the studio the next morning. This went on for years. He huddled uncomfortably in his quarters in Kansas City, Chicago or St. Louis, making up lyrics about sage brush and cactus,
Swin^ August, 194)
western skies and round-up time, until people began to take him seriously. He never knew the contamination of the chrome trimming and leather upholstering of the radio front office. He sang his songs in Studio D and came in the back door.
Then what happened? This happened. Sponsors found out that the home-spun philosophy of the hillbilly, the earth-bound approach to the people, sold more pills and soap, hair tonic and Per una than all the fine orchestrations and Cole Porter lyrics in the book. They began to pay money for hillbillies, which brings us to the present state of affairs. Roy Acuff, who sings coast-tocoast, on the Grand Ole' Opry from Nashville, pays more income tax than the President of the United States. Roy Rogers, the King of the Cowboys, is sponsored over another network and pulls down a salary that would make many a corporation president green with envy. There is gold in them thar hills, Billie.
These days the hummoc\ wilhams come in the front door, present themselves at the cashier's window on Saturdays, look their creditors straight in the eye and have C stickers on their Packards. It's enough to restore one's faith in competitive enterprise. They did it the hard way and without the help of collective bargaining.
But the question still remains, where did they come from?