State of the Redneck in the Early 21** Century:
The Case of Jeff Foxworthy
The 1993, death of the thirty-two-year-old NASCAR driver
Davey Allison sent a shock through the sport’s legions of fans. On the
day of Allison’s funeral, thousands gathered outside St. Aloysius
Catholic Church in Bessemer, Alabama to honor the memory of the
popular competitor. People magazine later ran an article featuring
photographs of the crowd of mourners and some of the creative flower
arrangements they bore.
It is with these images that American comedian Jeff Foxworthy
opens his 1996 autobiography. No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem.
Foxworthy remembers considering the photographs one evening in bed:
“Black carnations in the shape of a race car, a big wheel, and who knows
what else. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone had made a set of points
and plugs out of rose petals” (1). Foxworthy shares the photographs with
his wife, and then wonders aloud: “Since people know me mostly as that
Redneck guy, I don’t even want to think about the flowers you’d get if I
died now. Rebel flags. Brown carnations shaped like a spit of chewing
tobacco juice mid-flight” (2). Pondering the article, Foxworthy finds
himself strangely troubled. “It took a while before I understood what was
bothering me. I felt a kinship with Davey Allison, a regular guy from the
South who became a celebrity just doing what he did best” (2). To his
wife, Foxworthy asks, “You know. I’m proud of my Southern roots, but
don’t you think I should get a little past this Redneck thing before I buy
the farm?” (2).
Doing so would seem to represent a tall order for the comedian,
since being “that Redneck guy” had been the foundation of his initial rise
to fame and remained central to his famous joke series, “You might be a
Redneck if...” but was also tied to his own self-styled persona of a
simple, unsophisticated, working-class guy, a man who was able to make
the jokes he did in part because of his own identification as one speaking
from within the redneck community. In the years following his
autobiography, Foxworthy has indeed maintained his status as “that
redneck guy,” and his redneck jokes have continued to proliferate, now
numbering well into the hundreds, and pervaded into popular culture. It
is not too much to say that since the early 1990s, Foxworthy has become
the foremost authority in defining the parameters of the cultural icon that
is the American “redneck.”
Certainly, the concept of the redneck did not begin with
Foxworthy. The figure of a white “Other” has been a staple of American
culture, in one form or another and in varying degrees of prominence.