![]() During a visit, her brothers see her performing menial tasks wearing old-timey garb and jump to the conclusion that Mr. Drysdale’s secretaries, Jean (played by black actress and Playboy playmate Jeannie Bell in one of her five appearances on the show), decides to help out with the chores. While staying at the Clampett mansion, one of Mr. Drysdale is the Clampetts’ banker and next-door neighbor. A notable exception is the 1970 episode “Simon Legree Drysdale.” Mr. Even if Granny occasionally discusses the “War between the States,” and in one episode confuses the nearby filming of a Civil War movie with the actual reigniting of the conflict itself, the show is nearly silent on the issue of race. It taught them that erasing was easier than confronting the weighty problem of white southern racism. Like The Andy Griffith Show, the near total absence of black characters on The Beverly Hillbillies made the show’s southernness more viable to its millions of viewers. Such was the power of the Down-Home South. It is ironic that a show that critiqued the banality of postwar American life was itself a prosaic, modern creation. The white southerners of the Hillbillies are caricatures, although many Americans probably unthinkingly accepted them as fairly authentic representations of little-understood southern mountain people. But whereas Griffith and his collaborators strived to create a semiveracious TV version of white southern life, verisimilitude seemed of little concern to creator Paul Henning and his team. The Beverly Hillbillies conveys a similar message about the value of an inveterate southern existence-this time exclusively rural. This popular view of white southernness downplayed–or simply ignored–the negative characterizations of white southerners (the Vicious South) prominent during the civil rights era, while promoting the small-town and rural white South as a place of traditionalism that functioned as a refuge from the ills of modern, technocratic American society. Lechner argues that the program, like The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960-1968) represented what he terms the Down-Home South. Lechner discusses The Beverly Hillbillies, a long-running, fish-out-of-water sitcom (CBS, 1962-1971) that followed the antics of a nouveau riche Ozark family of mountain people in their adopted southern California. ![]() ![]() In this excerpt from his book The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Zachary J. ![]()
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