From The Beverly Hillbillies to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, stereotypes about “mountain folk” or “hillbillies” run wild throughout American cinema and culture. A common sound in many of these films is banjo music. Banjos are one of the most popular instruments in rural areas of the United States, so they’ve grown synonymous with hillbillies. In countless television and movie scenes, an uneducated and hot-tempered hillbilly strums a banjo.
When viewers think of banjos, a quote from Deliverance may come to mind: "Paddle faster, I hear banjo music." Deliverance associates banjos with the very worst stereotypes of Appalachians. Some filmmakers misuse banjos as an auditory symbol to further degrade rural people, but banjos actually have a long and rich cultural history. When viewers compare Deliverance with another film, Songcatcher, they can begin to challenge their assumptions of banjos and of the Appalachians who play these instruments.
Banjos, Rejection, and Violence in Deliverance
Banjos are an iconic and, at times, a sinister symbol throughout Deliverance. In the 1972 film, a group of businessmen from Atlanta fight to survive in northern Georgia, where they face unwelcoming locals and a perilous river. Banjos become the soundtrack of choice to this survival tale. As the four travelers flee from their hillbilly attackers, they hear strumming in the distance. One of the men exclaims, “Paddle faster, I hear banjo music.”
What plot points and cultural misunderstandings would lead the four businessmen to associate banjos with danger? This movie takes the cliche “city-slicker vs. country boy” rivalry to new and depraved levels. The businessmen perceive the Appalachians with condescension, describing the locals as stupid. But some of the Appalachian men react with outright hostility to the visitors. These attitudes reinforce persistent stereotypes that the Appalachians live in isolated communities and are suspicious—to the point of violence—of outsiders.
Banjos feature in some of the most visceral scenes of this escalating conflict. Early in the film, banjo music accompanies a relatively harmless moment of rejection. When Drew plays a rendition of the bluegrass classic “Feudin’ Banjos'' with an unnamed local boy, he soon finds himself outmatched by the sure-fingered lad. Drew tries to bond with the boy after they’ve played together, and he praises, “You play a mean banjo!” But the boy refuses to look at Drew or shake the man’s hand.
Content warning: this paragraph describes a rape scene. Please skip this paragraph if rape is a potentially triggering topic for you.
Banjos soon take on a more menacing tone. In a brutal rape scene, the abuser (an Appalachian man) tells one of the businessmen, Bobby, to “squeal like a pig.” This command has layers of cruelty. By comparing Bobby to a pig, Deliverance highlights the fact that male survivors of sexual abuse may feel emasculated and sullied, as though they should have been strong enough to fight against their attacker. In the context of the film’s banjo symbolism, this line gives another brutal insult. Many banjo players reject pig hide as too delicate to make a banjo drum. Stretched onto a banjo, pigskin is more likely to tear than is groundhog or cat skin. By comparing Bobby to a pig, the rapist infers that Bobby is weak and mocks Bobby’s anal tearing.
Content warning: continue here to avoid reading about a rape scene.
By the end of the film, Drew has been killed, and the other three men return home with physical and psychological scars. After one of the men startles awake from a night terror, the haunting notes of banjo music lead into the end credits. Up until the conclusion of this movie, banjos symbolize the characters’ traumatic experiences in the mountains.
These cinematic moments convey fundamental misunderstandings about Appalachian culture. Deliverance is a fictional storyline. Unfortunately, some of these stigmas in the film have had very real impacts on Appalachian people. Nearly thirty years after the movie first came out, I was a young girl growing up in the hills of North Carolina. I remember browsing through a local boutique with a family member. As I looked around the store, I overheard a couple of other shoppers chatting about how they had enjoyed their camping vacation but were excited to return home to Florida. Over the store’s speakers, the radio began playing a song with a banjo accompaniment. The shoppers looked at one another and joked, “Uh oh. Maybe that music is our warning to leave this town. You know, ‘Paddle faster, I hear banjo music.’” As the shoppers laughed, I watched the cashier quietly step over to the radio and turn it off.
Deliverance’s depiction of banjos silences the long and diverse heritage of bluegrass music in Appalachian culture. Fortunately, another film, Songcatcher, can correct some of these misconceptions.
Banjos, Family, and Community in Songcatcher
Deliverance uses banjo music to emphasize the cultural and physical conflicts between urban and rural men, but mountain music has brought people together for generations. In the 2000 film Songcatcher, musicologist and professor Lily Penleric relocates to western North Carolina. Penleric expects to be bored stiff in the tiny town, but she has few other places to turn after she is denied tenure from her university. However, the musicologist is amazed when she hears the resident Appalachians singing traditional British and Scots-Irish ballads. When Penleric hears a young girl, Deladis, singing one of these songs, she asks, “Where did you learn this song?” Deladis replies, “My granny gave it to me.” Penleric realizes that long-forgotten songs and tunes have flourished for hundreds of years in the mountains, preserved as Appalachian women passed down their music (and their hand-crafted instruments) to their children.
Songcatcher and Deliverance both feature certain stereotypes about Appalachian men as being poor and unworldly in comparison to people who live in a city. But while Deliverance uses banjo music to confirm these misconceptions, Songcatcher fights against these notions to show a deeper history of gender, immigration, and community.
The movie uses its banjo-heavy soundtrack to confront stereotypes and the erasure of Appalachian women. Although Penleric is an outsider to the community, she learns why many Appalachians are hesitant of strangers. Residents worry that visitors will publish and sell their ballads and stories without bothering to learn why this music is important to the families who sing and play these songs every day.
These characters use bluegrass music in almost all parts of life. They chat with strummers outside the local post office; they dance to lively banjo music at a barn hoedown; they sing to one another to fill the silence in their home. Penleric bonds with her future mother-in-law as she sits beside the older woman, watching as the woman strums a banjo. If banjos are the sound of death and social rejection in Deliverance, this instrument represents home and community in Songcatcher.
This film models how other movies and television shows might more accurately portray banjos and Appalachian people. Both movies lack BIPOC characters, but Songcatcher at least portrays one Black Appalachian man who teaches Penleric about music. This character may be a nod to Lesley Riddle, a Black man who helped the Carter Family write many of their most famous songs. While Deliverance fails to depict Appalachian women for more than a passing glance, four women (not four businessmen) are central to Songcatcher’s plot: Penleric, Deladis, Eleanor (Penleric’s sister), and Harriet (Eleanor’s lesbian lover).
Another fundamental difference in the two films is how they did (or did not) empower Appalachian actors to directly engage in the production process. One of the most memorable supporting actors in Deliverance is nicknamed “Banjo Boy” for his dueling banjo scene. But in reality, filmmakers did not consult child actor Billy Redden about how they planned to portray rural America. In a New Yorker interview with journalist Tad Friend, Redden said that he “regretted being the poster boy for Deliverance’s Gothic view of America.” Redden remembers how Burt Reynolds, who played one of the four businessmen, “wasn’t polite. And he made us look real bad—he said on television that all people in Rabun County do is watch cars go by and spit.”
In comparison, the creators of Songcatcher consulted with local musicians, Appalachian Studies scholars, and the John C. Campbell Folk School. Some of these local residents even feature directly in the film. Directors hired musician Bobby McMillion, who is an expert on North Carolina’s ballads, to play music as a background character during the film’s barn hoedown scene. Many viewers are none the wiser about the identity of the background musicians. But by featuring local musicians, Songcatcher allows these local Appalachians to reclaim the banjo from the content creators who have previously used the instrument to reinforce negative stereotypes about hillbillies.
While Appalachians continue to seek authentic representation in Hollywood, Songcatcher shows how filmmakers may use something as seemingly simple as a banjo to uplift rural voices instead of reinforcing existing stereotypes.
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Get your copy of the Songcatcher DVD by clicking here.