Um…the Appalachian Trail starts in Georgia.
Cue banjos…
Duel! Duel! Duel! 
True enough but hillbillies are from the backwoods and you don’t get them in GA.
in GA they’d be called rednecks or good ol’boys, depending on where they toss their empties (good ol’boys hit the bed of the truck)
Some hillbillies have blue skin from a small gene pool. Not joking. They’re a real demographic
Harlan County…
Fire in the hole!
Are you sure they’re not Kree? (Just kidding I’ve read about the Fugate Family)
My sister went to West Virginia University for her master’s and every once in a while you run across one in town. It made me stare impolitely first time I saw one and my sister whacked me good. Justifiably. Not just the Fugates
They’re Crowders, Crowes, Bennetts and Givenses.
(Please excuse all the obscure-to-some Justified references. I just love that series.)
I lost you.
I was still following when you discussed Mad Max as the apex of movie making; and I even know that the Appalachian trail is quite a scenic route (even if you have to be careful with bugs potentially infecting you with Lyne disease).
I also know about the stereotype of “illicit relationships” in rural places
But all these pieces of the puzzle that I know …leave me utterly unable to follow your jokes. I don’t even know if you are joking anymore …I give up 
Things have become…esoteric. 
Aren’t they in The Ozarks too?
I lived in Arkansas for a decade, and in the Blue Ridge for 20 years on the GA border, and they use the term in the Ozarks very rarely. I could probably count on one hand the number of people who used it, and all about the same person.
Use the term?
Or refer to themselves as?
I beleive most go by Rednecks unless you are actually pretty high or deep within the hills to start calling themselves hillbillies?
Or maybe hillbillie and redneck are used more in the larger cities, to refer to other people as, and on the skirts , country and hills tgey just call each other Folks.
I think this conversation is nearly universal to any locale with elevation differences:
A: “What the f*ck?”
B: “Dude, they’re from the hills.”
A: “Ahh, gotcha.”
You have to be deep in the hills to be called a hillbilly. And uneducated - it’s not a good term.
Then you have Rednecks and Good Ol’ Boys. Which people use all the time. The difference between a Redneck and Good Ol’ Boy as they say is a redneck throws his beer cans out the window; a Good Ol’ Boy throws them in the bed. Of the pickup, cause everyone drives a truck. People are proud to call themselves Redneck. Of course living in South Carolina like I did, the KKK had a presence. We had a KKK shop in town, which was near the Dead Head Shop, that was owned and run by Natalie Merchant’s (10,000 Maniacs) mother. The South is not as monolithic as it looks from the outside.
In SC you heard people use the term hillbilly some, but not when I lived in the Ozarks.
Truth
It takes actually being from a place to know what’s what there.
Love it!
Hillbilly is historically a derogatory term, so I don’t think anyone from the hills actually referred to themselves like that.