“The American Dream Gone Berserk”

In this chapter, I turn to the performance of Country American whiteness and so-called Hillbilly humor and show how stereotypes of poor rural white people were born out of the dominant culture&s;s strategic marginalization of them from normative whiteness. These types were performed with great abandon in barn dance radio on shows such as the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The structure and content of these shows were lifted directly from blackface minstrelsy and vaudeville and eventually morphed the blackface type into a poor rural white one. I apply Barbara Ching&s;s concept of country camp to analyze these stereotyped performances of white rurality as authentic and desirable by some (but not all) who identify as Country American. In addition to performing comedic ridicule of African, Asian, and Mexican Americans, I argue their performances of strategically constructed Country Americanness confused dominant ideas of whiteness through class, education, and professional status (or the lack thereof). Case studies: the Grand Ole Opry itself, blackface duo Lasses and Honey (later Jamup and Honey), Cousin Emmy (Cynthia May Carver), and husband-and-wife duo Lulu Belle and Scotty.