Exerpted from "A 'Tough Row to Hoe': Policy and Practice Implications of Caregiving in Rural Areas" by B Hudnall Stamm, Institute of Rural Health, Idaho State University; Susan L Metrick, Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Widener University; Mary Beth Kenkel, School of Social and Policy Studies, Alliant University/California School of Professional Psychology; Judith A. Davenport, School of Social Work, University of Missouri-Columbia; Joseph Davenport, III, Consultant, Columbia, MO; Amy C. Hudnall, Department of History, Appalachian State University; Amy Watson Ruth; Craig Higson-Smith, South African Institute of Traumatic Stress; Carol Markstrom, Family and Consumer Sciences, Child Development and Family Studies, West Virginia University

Population density models also refer to frontier, which is six to seven people per square mile. These remote communities are usually protected from large-scale settlement by harsh climate, difficult terrain, lack of water, distance from metropolitan areas, or lack of exploitable resources (Duncan, 1993; Popper, 1986). These areas, mostly contiguous counties west of the 98th meridian, constitute 45% of the U. S. landmass, but less than 1% of the population.

Despite definitional differences, a general characterization of rural settings emerges from the literature (Bushy, 1994; Human & Wasem, 1991; Weinert & Long, 1990). Substance abuse is likely similar to urban areas, but it is generally more difficult to get treatment (see Cellucci, Vik & Nirenberg, in this volume). Obtaining treatment for people with serious mental disorders is a particular problem (see Ax, Fagan & Holton, in this volume). The technological infrastructure—which could hold promise for ameliorating other challenges, falls short of expectations (see Stamm, in this volume). Rural economies are fragile. Younger individuals out-migrate seeking education or work, leaving behind a greater proportion of elderly and dependent individuals (see Guralnick, Kemel, Stamm & Greving, in this volume). Rural residents have less formal education, higher unemployment rates, and more poverty.

Agribusiness and Changing Economies

Data from the USDA-ERS (2000) indicates a shift away from mid-sized farms ($10,000-$99,000) down 2.3% (31,400 farms) across the two years. Most of these farms appear to be dropping into the small-farm class which increased by 26,860 farms across the two years. The others appear to have been absorbed into large corporate farms earning more than $100,000 per year, which increased 8,010 farms across the two years. This 16% of large, often corporate, farms accounted for 57% of land in farms, with an average size of 1,720 acres. Among the 3% of farms with an economic sales class greater than $500,000, the average size was 2,501 acres.

Federal Policies: Improvement and Disappointment

Providing Services

"Herb Gatherer: Ted Hicks" Excerpted from The Keepers: Mountain Folk Holding on to Old Skills and Talents narrative by Robert Isbell. Winston Salem, NC: John Blair Pub., 1999.

 Ted Hicks was born in an unpainted two-story house on a fifty-seven-acre cabbage and potato farm. The farthest he has ever strayed from this home “under the Beech” was to Spartanburg, not three hours away and just south of the North Carolina line. For the most part his world extends no farther than he can see from the mountaintop. On clear nights on the peak above his home he can look beyond the easternmost ridges of Tennessee to the distal, flickering lights of Elizabethton, Johnson City, and Bristol. These are the only other far places he has ever been.

He is aware but uncaring of his anomaly in a high-flown era in which people either follow a groove or glory in rebellion. He knows that each side falls into prevailing norms; he begrudges neither; he does not covet or fear; he does not flaunt his distinction or give it much thought. To him life is good; his place in the world is proper.

“I’ve never gone what you call far,” he says. “I ain’t got out of the rolling land yet.”

“And that makes no difference to you?”

“No. Could have gone far out, but never saw much need to.”

“But millions out there are wealthy, even famous. If you could be one of them, who would it be?”

“I reckon it’d still be me.”

“What work would you choose?”

“I’d gather herbs. Just like what I do now. It’s what I like to do. Like to pull galax. Like being out in the woods. Like hunting, getting out. Peaceful like. Mostly up on the mountain [Beech] but I go other places, too. Go to Rich Mountain, look for ‘sang [ginseng] there, But it’s beginning to lose its wildness. Houses being built there like at the Beech. Changed in the last ten years. Used to [be] you might meet maybe only one car over there anymore you meet several of them. Civilization keeps on coming, which helps out, makes a lot of jobs and stuff, but you lose the other things. I always did like it in the woods, but it’s getting harder to get away from things, especially around where I’ve been at. I guess there’s still a lot of places where, you know, it’s natural—like probably out west, or Alaska, something like that.”

On a bright morning in May the sun spreads over the steep mountainside. Cool winds gusting down from Virginia scour clouds in an otherwise empty sky. Trees, shrubs, and wildflowers bob and sway. It is an in-between season for gathering herbs and plants, but Ted wants to assay the potential harvest; he leads the way to the lush thickets above his home.

"Now this is a mayapple," he says as he fingers new spring leaves. "here, see the flower underneath. Blooms this month. That's why we call it mayapple. Some say it's mandrake, like in the Bible, but we call it mayapple. Smells good, smells like a banana. You can eat it. Tastes like a banana too. It'll be ready in the fall. Best to dig the roots then. But it's not been on 'the list' in the last two or three years. Plenty of it, though."

Drug manufacturers use the mayapple's plump underground stems in the preparation of purgatives. Ted thinks the remedy has been in use "since the days of Indians."

The list refers to a sheet issued by Wilcox, an old company in Boone where Ted sells his gathered medicinal herbs and plants. Each season Wilcox's management provides a list of items needed. This year mayapple is not among the herbs it seeks.

"But now witch hazel leave—beadwood we call it—they're buying that, and I can get plenty. Don't have to go much outside our place here to get lots of it."

Ted harvests beadwood in the fall. He sells its dried leaves and sometimes its bark. Drug companies use it to produce liniments.

On a cool morning several Octobers ago Ted was off to himself pulling beadwood leaves at the edge of a forest. Thought the thick underbrush he could hear the rustle of leaves as his father, his brother Leonard, and his young cousin Michael from Tennessee worked together. To ward off the chill the men wore denim jackets, the boy wore a red coat.

Ted had nearly filled his sack with leaves when he heard a strange noise beyond the towering shrubs.

M-m-m, m-m, uh, m-m, went the sound.

"I looked back there toward the noise, holding the sack, you know, and the bushes just —whoosh—fell apart."

A dark form sprang through the foliage, and Ted threw down his sack and ran toward a locust tree. Trying desperately to get out of range of the great beast, he had neither the time nor the inclination to identify it. To him, at the moment, it was just black, huge, and attacking. As he ran he yelled to his companions, and in passing, frantically tore a large branch from the tree—"something to fight with, you know."

On came the critter, crashing through Ted's sack and scattering beadwood leaves over the forest floor. By then Ted had reached the other leaf gatherers and was yelling, particularly to his cousin.

"I didn't want Michael hurt atter he'd come from Tennessee to see us—my mother's brother’s son. I hollered for him to get up a tree. He said, ‘I can’t climb,’ and they told me later that I was a-trying to push him up the tree. The black thing—I figured it was a bear—rounded the bushes and was a-coming at us. Now I could see it, could make out what it was. It was a bull. A big, black Angus bull. And my cousin a-wearing that red coat.

"Well, my brother was already trying to cut off a limb with his pocketknife, but he didn’t have enough time, so he grabbed three or four rocks and started throwing at the bull, and it kept a-coming. I was waving my locust limb a-trying to keep it away from my cousin, and then I looked up. There Michael was in the top of the tree. Him in that red coat. Couldn’t climb, you know.

“Leonard throwed one rock and missed; he throwed another, and it just shaved the bull’s nose. But that caused him to turn left and tear out of there. Just a rock, you know. Barely hit it."

“Well, we grabbed up the beadwood and got out of there before he took it in his head to come back.”

He cannot remember—he estimates he was “maybe five or six”—when his father began taking him up on the mountain to gather herbs and plants. “I could barely get through the woods, but herbing got in my blood. I’d dig and carry things for Dad. Could do galax pretty good, too.”

The father, Ray Hicks, is said to be the country’s premier teller of Jack Tales, but his storytelling income alone was never enough to keep the family going. Therefore, besides farming potatoes and cabbage, Ray Hicks supplemented his income by gathering bounty from the forests.

“That’s what they did in my family long before I can remember,” says Ted. “We gathered herbs and things. My great-great granddaddy—Samuel was his name—was the first to enter this country. Homesteaded right over yander—can’t see from here—and paid for that old rocky land by selling herbs. Couldn’t have made it without herbs.”

So little Ted Hicks followed a line of herb gatherers—from Samuel to son Benjamin, to Benjamin’s son Nathan, and then to Ray and Ray’s children. But Ted thinks he may be the last of the herb gatherers in his family. He remains unmarried. He grins as he shakes his head and “guesses” he has waited too late. “Just have to look now,” he says. He believes that, for all his decades of combing the woods, his father still knows more about the herbs and plants.

“I learned from him. Learned how to find the plants, to pull them in the right season, to dry them, and to sell them.”

It was not long after his first trips with his father that he began to go “herbing” with his brother Leonard, five years his senior, who also learned herb gathering from the father. Leonard would pull witch hazel, and Ted would hold the bag. Later, when sickness began to curtail father Ray’s trips into the forests, Leonard and Ted took up the slack.

“It kept us in clothes,” says Ted. "Enough for school.”

In those days herbs were the main source for medicines, but in the decades since, synthetics have come along and cut demand. Ted remembers the herb market was once so active that the drug company would send a truck around to pick up the harvests.

“Me’n Leonard, we’d stack witch hazel leaves up there at the house and be waiting for the truck to come. They’d be there at a certain time, and they’d have scales—to weigh the herbs, you know. Pay us right there.”

“Me’n Leonard. They said where you’d see one you’d see the other. We all got along pretty good. Leonard was the oldest then a sister two years younger. I’m the middle one. Then there’s two other sisters. All of them live over the line in Tennessee, and Leonard still comes over and we go galax pulling. He comes over nearly every Saturday. The girls come up every once in a while.

“We got along good, all of us, except maybe there’d be pillow fights, even hair pulling, but we were pretty close. When it was too cold to get out we’d play chess. Had a little chessboard learned the moves from the directions; learned that the castle goes straight on both sides, that the horse jumps around, but the king could go just one space at the time. The king, we thought, ought to be boss, go anywhere he wanted to.

“We played other games, too—Monopoly—and we listened to Dad tell stories. That was in winter. But even then, when the weather was right, me’n Leonard would go out and pull galax or wild cherry bark. Beadwood bark, too. Just have to hew beadwood off in the winter. See, when there’s sap in it, it’ll strip good, but in winter there ain’t no sap. You just have to hew the bark off. We’d bring beadwood into the house and cut it, burn the wood that’s left. Smells good when it’s burning. Fume up your house.”

Also during the coldest months, Ted and Leonard hunted rabbits and grouse to supplement the family diet. There would be corn and beans that mother Rosa canned in late summer and stored for the winter in a little house they called the cellar, above the spring.

“Hardly ever freezes there,” says Ted. “We’d line the potato box with pasteboard. Makes good insulation. It’d have to stay real cold for a week or so before it freezes any thing. We had only a few potatoes to freeze on us.

“Now, cabbage. Seems like cabbages draw the cold in. They’ll freeze pretty hard, but when they thaw out they’re just as good as ever. In the winter we’d just pull them up from the ground, roots and all, and leave the roots sticking up. Dig a trench and cover them with dirt upside down. Somebody came there once and said, ‘Gollay, I didn’t know cabbage growed that way.’”

From January through March the weather was rarely inviting for those who lived in the high mountains. For days that seemed like months frigid weather kept Ted and Leonard out of their beloved forests; they yearned to walk in the woods; they needed to “limber up” their bodies, to shake off the torpid effects of being so long confined to the parlor, sitting close to an ancient stove.

There were days when the wind was calm and only a dusting of snow lay upon the forest floor. At such times Ted and Leonard were out after daybreak. Despite the forbidding season there were treasures to be found.

‘See, we could get out sometimes, even in January. On pretty days we might get log moss. Sometimes, when the moss was wet, we’d have to hang it out in the woods, let it dry before we could carry it out. Wet log moss is awful heavy

“That’s off a dead log, you know, and it grows back after you peel it. That’s why we always left just a little sprig. Then it gets the rain, and in a few years moss’ll cover the log again. See, the log rots, and once it’s all gone there’s nothing for the moss to grow on, and it dies.”

When log moss was dry enough the brothers would carry it from the woods in a bundle. “We’d always take twine and tie up the moss in a bale. Tie it tight, put it on our shoulders, and take it through the bushes. Take it down to the truck and go back for more.”

After loading their truck the brothers would drive down to Pineola, about an hour away. There they sold the load to a company that prepared and marketed log moss for funeral carpets. Other uses were as decorations, as linings for hanging flowerpots, and as a substitute for peat moss.

On good days they would pick galax leaves, which will keep for many months in water. Wholesalers sell galax to florists, who use the green-to-bronze plant in flower arrangements.

Also in good weather, Ted and Leonard peeled wild black cherry bark. The product’s end use was chiefly for treating coughs, bronchitis, and colds.

Ted likes to peel wild cherry bark in the winter, because there is then little danger of livestock eating the wilting leaves. “When wild cherry begins to shrink,” he says, “and when a horse or cow comes up and eats it, it sort of packs their stomach and kills them. I’ve known about several cows killed like that. See, if you cut a wild cherry and there’s a cow around, you better carry the brush off and burn it.” In the winter, he explains, the leaves are dead, most of them blown away or decaying into the soil, past the poisonous stage.

Even as a boy Ted learned to conserve the precious plants he harvested. His father taught him early to leave sprigs so the log moss could regenerate and to cut down the wild cherry trees at their base, because if they _ stripped without cutting they would die eventually.

“But the little roots you leave, so the sprouts can grow from them. I’ve seen fifteen, maybe twenty sprouts come up where you cut it. Can’t take off that bark around where the young sprouts come up. Leave the roots and little trees come back, like a locust does."

Ted thinks the flagrant abuse of the forests began with the early settlers and continues today. He cites the rape of ginseng, perhaps the most popular medicinal herb ever gathered: "Sang comes in September. That’s when the berries are red. I just throw back the berries so the plant will come back; it takes about seven years for it to be fully grown. But too many people just take the whole plant. In a hurry, you know. So much of that has killed a lot of beds.”

For centuries the Chinese attributed mystical powers to the ginseng plant. Today some think the shape of the straight, two-pronged root is why ginseng is used as an aphrodisiac. “The ‘sang roots can look like a little man,” says Ted. “Got two legs, sometimes two arms, and a ‘quirl’ that looks like a head.”

The Chinese importation of American ginseng is the direct cause of its alarming decline in the Appalachians, where it once grew in abundance. The beds remaining, Ted thinks, will one day be no more. He says the laws now governing the harvesting of ginseng will not be enough; there is too little concern for the plants’ regeneration, too much building on lands where ginseng grows.

Ted’s father, Ray, ruefully recalls the killing of the plants’ beds: “Back then, when Ted was a boy, there was ginseng above Whaley, way up on that wing yander, what they called Buckeye Creek. All that in there was in ‘sang. There’s still some there, but they won’t let you gather it now—where they’ve got their homes, all that golf course. Yiah, when they built the homes up on the Beech, they pushed out big patches. Didn’t know they was doing it, you know.

“The last I gathered—it was with my uncle and Ted—was in the Rich Mountain above Boone. And people are living in there now, a-killing all that sang. Well, I always sowed the seeds back. Honest people do that, bury the seeds up in the leaves. Lot of people bring out the seeds with the berries. I’d leave mine. With a feeling, you know. Just have to do that with your feelings.”

Though he lived distant from his contemporaries, Ted Hicks does not remember loneliness. Besides the companionship of brother Leonard, Ted often roamed the woods with his best friend and cousin, Orville Hicks. At times Orville would bring friends.

“You’d see them a-coming on their bicycles, maybe four or five of them. They’d come and would tell jokes. We hunted rabbits and grouse, but mostly we just walked in the woods.”

Ted and Orville could identify the trees and shrubs and animals of the mountain forests.

“We didn’t care about the Latin names,” he says. “We knew the trees and shrubs by the names we were told to call them—oaks, pines, chestnuts, walnuts, sarvices [ berry], buckeyes, beech, sourwoods, laurel, and ivy.

“One time the science teacher at Valle Crucis took the class into the forest, up on the Beech, and he’d stop and say, ‘Who knows the name of this tree?’ If nobody’d answer he’d ask me, because he knew I spent so much time in the woods. Then, when we’d tell him the name of the tree, the one we knew, he’d tell us the scientific name. But one time he asked the name of a tree that the others didn’t know. I’d drifted behind everybody, you know, so he hollered, ‘Where’s Ted?’ Well, I came up and saw the tree. Couldn’t tell what it was. Then I looked on the ground, and there was a walnut in the leaves, and I said, ‘Black walnut tree!’ Nobody knew that I’d been stumped; all that saved me was that walnut a-lying on the ground.”

No matter the season, Ted and Orville ranged the woods. They knew the ways of the animals—foxes, groundhogs, rabbits, raccoons, possums, red squirrels, and chipmunks. They studied the birds—wrens, finches, cardinals, chewinks (towhees), snowbirds (juncos), and mockingbirds, on rare occasions they might see a scarlet tanager or a rose-breasted grosbeak.

Sometimes Ted visited Orville, who was born and reared in a place called Sandy Flat.

“Orville’s dad was a preacher. Pretty strict. And Orville didn’t have funny books. So me’n Leonard, we’d sneak them to him. Orville told me once that when he seen my dad a-coming he knew me’n Leonard would be with him, knew we’d be bringing funny books. We didn’t even let my dad know about the funny books. Dad probably wouldn’t mind, but we sort of figured it best to keep funny books hid.

Even today cousin Orville—though busy with his obligations—remains a close friend. He spends a few Saturday afternoons with Ted in the forests; still, family life causes him to visit less often.

Sometimes he’ll come over,” says Ted. ‘We’ll pitch horseshoes, just like long time ago.”

Ted's father, in his seventies, is not able to get around as he once did. He often must refuse invitations to recite folk tales; apparently even his annual trips to the storytelling festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, are numbered. When people ask if Ted will succeed him, Ray shakes his head: “Ted knows the stories, but he ain’t going to follow me he can’t stand that many people.”

From the online magazine, Story South: The Best from New South Writers, summer 2002

Throughout history and literature, outsiders have long tended to characterize the American South with massive generalizations and stereotypes. What we see of the South on television, and therefore in The Dukes, is no different. Analyzing The Dukes as a representation of the South is a two step process. First, the show must be viewed in the context of television, and compared to the various other Southern television shows. What lied behind The Dukes of Hazzard is a formula that drove many other television shows of its genre before it. None of the symbols or portrayals in The Dukes offer anything new to the viewer, so they should be easy to understand and evaluate as a representation of reality.

The first of the Southern sitcoms followed the heels of country music shows like Hee Haw onto television in 1957, when ABC began its series, The Real McCoys. The debut of The Real McCoys marked the genesis of the style, and in just a few years, the list of Southern back country television shows grew to seven. They included The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle USMC, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Mayberry, R.F.D. "The rural situation comedy became the way to portray the South and Southerners in the 1960s,"[1] says Marsha McGee in "Prime Time Dixie: Television's View of a 'Simple South.'" From 1965-1970, an average of six Southern shows aired per season, providing America with a heaping dose of the down home simple life.

By 1970, however, stories portraying the South as a land populated by a universally simple and often silly group of inhabitants" began to strike a sour note with sponsors.[2] CBS cancelled its full lineup of Southern comedies in 1971. In spite of the fact that three of the shows remained in the top 20, the network felt pressure from advertisers to draw in a young, sophisticated, urban, audience.[3] The recipe of heavy doses of good ole boys and girls, wise parent/grandparent figures, warm friendships, simple humor, bad grammar and beautiful women/girls in varying states of undress living in rural or small-town communities,"[4] did not fit the bill.

When The Dukes pilot episode, One Armed Bandits, aired, it unveiled a show recycling the same formula for rural situation comedy, complete with stock characters, generic settings, and repetitive plots. Therefore, it should be no surprise that CBS planned eight episodes for The Dukes as a replacement series, expecting it to perish from the same causes that its predecessors did. When examined with McGee's formula in mind, The Dukes shows irrefutably its ties to the shows and symbols of old.

Filmed in Covington, Ga., the show takes place in fictional Hazzard County. Hazzard, where Atlanta is referred to as "the big- city," fits the prescription for a rural community perfectly. When the Dukes visit Atlanta, Waylon Jennings, the shows narrator, it clear that the Dukes roots are not exactly sophisticated: "The Dukes are a little out of their picture when it comes to breakin' in the big city."

Hazzard qualifies as the setting input to the formula, and Bo and Luke Duke fit the "good ole boys" category perfectly, joining them with past good ole boys Andy Taylor, Jed Clampett, and Luke McCoy. The Dukes assigns the label to Bo and Luke immediately and intentionally, when Waylon Jennings belts out the first two lines of his banjo-driven theme song: Just two good old boys, never meanin no harm, beats all you never saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born."

With this label cast upon Bo and Luke, it is important to understand just what Good Ole Boy means as an icon in Southern culture. W.J. Cash, in his The Mind of the South (1941) summarized the ideal of the Southern man:

stand on his head in a bar, to toss down a pint of raw whisky at a gulp, to fiddle and dance all night, to fight harder and love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell of a fellow-such would be his focus.[5]

Between 1941 and 1979, Good Ole Boy became the label for what Cash s ideal described. A standard episode of The Dukes shows clearly how Bo and Luke are intended to personify this ideal. In every episode, the Dukes make at least one visit to Hazzard County's local honky-tonk bar, the Boar's Nest, where they kick up their heels and throw back a few. And not only did the Duke boys drink a little whiskey, but they processed it an smuggled it as their major source of income.

In spite of their home distillery business, the Dukes also fit the good-fellow billing. The plot of nearly every Dukes episode rests on one primary foundation: Boss Hogg develops a plan to add to his riches or get the Dukes thrown in jail. Then Bo and Luke, with the help of Uncle Jesse and Daisy, foil it. In the pilot episode, Bo and Luke hijack Boss Hogg's shipment of illegal slot machines, then give the profits to an orphanage. In another episode, entitled "Money to Burn," the Dukes foil Boss Hogg's plans to steal a million one dollar bills that had been scheduled for destruction. Bo and Luke again frustrate Boss Hogg in "Return of the Ridge Raiders", when they alert the state senate about his plans to misuse funds appropriated for a senior citizen's center. Again, the theme song describes the Dukes perfectly, when Jennings croons that the boys are "Fightin' the system like two modern-day Robin Hoods." There are few characters that identify with the characterization of being known far and wide as a good fellow, as well as Robin Hood. So the Dukes, because of their association with him, take on that quality too.

Bo's and Luke's surrogate father, Uncle Jesse, fits the role of the wise grandparent figure. A seasoned moonshiner, Jesse mimics the role created by Aunt Bee of Andy Griffith, Minnie Pearl of Hee Haw, Grandma and Grandpa Walton of The Waltons, and just plain Granny of The Beverly Hillbillies. It is never explained how the responsibility of overseeing three nieces and nephews fell upon his shoulders. But nonetheless, he serves as a wealthpot of knowledge and advice to the younger Duke generation. Jesse always has the answers, even if everyone else but a backwards citizen of Hazzard County probably would too. Consider this brilliant nugget of wisdom: "If I'm not mistaken, genetics has got something to do with the function of the human body. Jesse's CB name, Shepherd," provides a perfect summation of his job: when the Duke boys "mixtures of adulthood and boyish adventure"[6] err too much on the latter side, it is Uncle Jesse who saves the day.

Daisy occupies the dual role of "good ole woman" and "girl in various state of undress," following into the limelight The Beverly Hillbillies' Ellie Mae Clampett, and Billie, Bobbie, and Betty Jo of Petticoat Junction. The casting description for Daisy Duke says it all: "a tomboy who could drive a car and outshoot a man... the kind of girl who could also blow you away when she put on a pink cotton dress."[7] She is hardly the stereotypical Southern Belle that "springs into being at seventeen as respectable Chi-O or Tri-Delt, wrestling around on the third tee at every country club South of Maryland."[8] Rather, she adds to the growing group that Reynolds Price describes as "Mack trucks disguised as powder puffs," or what James Whitehead labeled "Iron Magnolias."[9]

In one episode, Daisy finds herself with a girlish crush on a visiting Englishman, but just four episodes later, in "Officer Daisy Duke," she becomes a Hazzard County deputy. Episodes substantiate both sides of the Mack Truck-powder puff paradox throughout the series. In "Mrs. Daisy Hogg," Boss Hogg's nephew sweeps Daisy off of her feet, but in the same season, Daisy and Lulu Hogg team up to champion the cause of equal rights for women of Hazzard County. Later, she gets the opportunity to become a NASCAR driver, and in another episode, she moonlights as a reporter for a local newspaper, foiling one of Boss Hogg's schemes with her investigative work. Like The Hillbillies Ellie Mae, the "former hot-pepper eating champion of Baywood, La."[10] Daisy, is a revamped, redesigned alternative to the mousey, acquiescing Southern Belle of yesterday.

A Southern sitcom would be incomplete without its fair share of grammatical mistakes, but The Dukes fits the bill here as well. In one episode, Uncle Jesse bemoans, "There's somethin' terrible wrong with Duke." Minutes later, Jennings chips in with several tidbits that would make a grammarian cringe: "The ruination had done started, things was gettin' mighty nasty." The show comes complete with its fair share of backwater sayings too: "I ain't gonna do it 'til possums make love to hound dogs!"

The Dukes just repackaged stock characters and settings for its viewers, but it also helped solidify the status of two other elements in the inventory of Southern stereotypes. The Dukes had the benefit of drawing symbols from movies that were contemporaries of shows like The Hillbillies and The Real McCoy.

Southern television boasted a few bumbling fools before the Dukes, like Barney Fife and Gomer Pyle of Andy Griffith and Jethro of the Hillbillies, but The Dukes writers redefined the role when they introduced Boss Hogg and his cronies, whose primary influences lay on the big screen. Robert Mitchum's movie, Thunder Road, debuted in 1958, featuring a fast- talking, fast-driving, moonshining ridge whose primary escapades consisted of outsmarting incompetent, corrupt law officers. Burt Reynolds began a series of similar films in 1968, with In the Heat of the Night. In Reynolds' 1973 film, White Lightning, his adversary is a crooked Southern sheriff named Connors, who is "in cahoots with a rustic moonshine kingpin" and can not "tolerate blacks or hippies or 'commie pinkos.'"[11] From name down on to bigotry, the directors created a satirical portrayal of infamous Birmingham police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor.

Six years later, Jefferson Davis, a.k.a. "Boss," Hogg and his cronies hit the small screen. The Dukes writers left Connors' xenophobia on the big-screen, but created an remarkably similar character in J.D. Hogg. The calculating Duke producers even tied their character to a historical counterpart: James S. Hogg, former governor of Texas from 1891-1895. In his political career, J.S. Hogg faced "charges of political expediency from some of the contemporary, large city newspapers," and gained a reputation as a "demagogue."[12] C. Vann Woodward and James Tinsley have both charged that "after Hogg made money in oil he became a deserter of the forces of reform."[13]

Boss Hogg's demagoguery hearkens back to that of the Texas governors, with the exception that it reigns over a smaller territory. Under the auspices and protection of his sheriff's badge, Hogg spends his time figuring out new ways to embezzle, pad his bank balance, and pad his waistline. A Dukes episode can not pass without at least one shot of Deputy Roscoe P. Coltrane feeding Boss a plate of six hot dogs or a colossal pot of spaghetti. Boss, with his white suit and bib, represents nothing more than an overfed, overgrown baby. Producers delegate Rosecoe himself to the role of overgrown child also. Every episode features Roscoe carrying on one-sided conversations with his basset hound, Flash. Roscoe's assistant deputies, Cletus and Enos, have enough sexual innuendo in their names to leave little question for the viewer about their chances of chasing down the Dukes in their General Lee. Thunder Road and the Reynolds movies offered a fresh adaptation of television s bumbling fools for The Dukes to emulate, but they also helped to popularize another Southern icon and make it television ready. The Hillbillies and other shows never touched on auto-racing as a Southern element, but when Mitchum and Reynolds did, it cleared the way for The Dukes to cast it on the small screen. In 1978, Jack Kirby's Media Made Dixie discussed the growing popularity of bootlegging- autoracing themes: "Running moonshine in souped-up cars, traceable at least as far back as Thunder Road, and simply running wild in hot cars, were complementary subjects very popular in the 1970s."[14] What caught Kirby's eye aroused interest in the Duke's writers as the perfect ingredient for their show, and the final result was the General Lee.

When the General crashed onto the screen, complete with a roof sporting the confederate flag and a horn blaring Dixie, it marked the official fusion of rough and tumble country driving with complete recognition as a Southern tradition. Stockcars evolved from "bootleggers' getaway machines, and consequently seemed a natural solution to speed-lovers in a poor country: 'formula' racers cost too much."[15] While formula racers may have cost too much, Warner Brothers spent plenty to portray the Duke boys as speed lovers. Nearly 300 identically painted Dodge Chargers met their mechanical deaths during the filming of the show.[16] Like bootlegging, racing stockcars was a Southern pasttime, as Kirby states:

Foreigners and Yankees might dominate the chic grand prix and Indianapolis 500, but in the rough world of the souped-up family sedan, romantic fellows from the South were elemental.[17]

The General Lee did not exist when Kirby wrote his book in 1978, but in 1989, when the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published, the General Lee had become famous enough that two of the three references to automobiles in the media referred to the General. Only ten years after its creation, the speeding confederate icon became the symbol for Southern racing history.

Discussion so far has centered mostly on what the Dukes of Hazzard does contain. To understand it as a representation of the South, one must also focus on what the show leaves out. As The Dukes mimics its predecessors in what it does have, so the series does in what it omits, as Christopher Geist observes:

Few series have grappled with the region's many difficulties in such important areas as race relations and economic structures, preferring instead to highlight superficial conflicts in their stories. An entire population of the South, the middle class, is rarely treated in the television South.[18]

Race is not an issue in The Dukes of Hazzard. The only black person in the entire show is Sheriff Little of Chickasaw County. With a grimace on his face, and reflective sunglasses hiding his eyes, Sheriff little would wait at the county border to track down the Duke boys, who managed to make an occasional moonshine run into his territory or escape into Chickasaw County and get away from the incompetent Hazzard authorities. Little is a neutral character, neither an idiot nor a hero. Little was more competent than Hogg as a police officer, and nearly nabbed the Dukes once or twice, but his role had no racial underpinnings. The decision to cast Little as a black law officer was probably an attempt by Warner Brothers to give The Dukes a chance at seeming realistic.

Like the shows that preceded it, The Dukes offers no real glimpse at the Southern middle class. The Dukes, and the rest of Hazzard county, are all blue collar workers, and Boss Hogg, who owns the bank, the Boar's Nest, and most of the property in the county, serves as the lone representative of the rich. But to find someone whose occupation and speech indicate that they have had the benefit of a college education, viewers must stick to the random background characters that occasionally materialize to fill the support roles that some scripts require.

The Dukes was a simple series that required little digestion or deep thought on the part of the viewer: "Dukes considered the South to be a land of freedom, moral valued, and simple people. Good and evil are easily defined, and the good guys always won."[19 ] As a television series designed to draw a viewing audience and get a few laughs, Dukes served its purpose well, but it, and its sitcom predecessors, are should be billed as neither a thorough nor accurate representation of average working class Southerners.

Edward Ayers, in "What We Talk About When We Talk About the South," discusses misreprentations of the region: "Television, movies, novels, roadside markers, old history books, and jokes tell the same basic stories about the South over and over, even when people know they are not true to their own experience or to the complexity of human life."[20] He uses two anthropological terms to describe this phenomena. The first is essentializing, or "to locate in some other people an essence of what they really are." The second is exoticizing: to make specific features of a society's thought or practice not only its essence but also its totality." What happens when these two things take place is that "we draw boundaries between things we call cultures and then fill in those boundaries with something to make the boundaries meaningful."[21]

Are the writers of The Dukes of Hazzard guilty of this tendency to simplify? If the answer is not readily obvious by now, take the intangible processes that Ayers refers to and apply them to the tangible borders of Hazzard County. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture has trouble accepting the reality of the county: "Fictional Hazzard County, the setting of the enormously successful Dukes of Hazzard series, is a land of swamps (complete with alligators!), fertile valleys, pine barrens, and mountains; in short, the fictional county's geography is that of the South as a whole."[22] An essentialized setting provides the set for a program boasting characters essentialized and exoticized to a literally hilarious extreme. The contents of Hazzard County, as created by Warner Brothers, are a brilliant amalgamation not of what tells about the South, but what sells the South.

Links:

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