Hayseed Name

"My given name is Benjamin Buford Blue. People call me Bubba. Just like one of them redneck boys. Can you believe that?"

— Bubba, Forrest Gump

The Deep South/Midwestern farmland (i.e. rural) equivalent to Preppy Name and Ghetto Name and the naming version of Overalls and Gingham. This is a name that instantly marks someone as being from the sticks.

There are a few ways one can name their hillbillies or country bumpkins, none of which are mutually exclusive:

• Outdated Names or nicknames, which cater to the old-fashioned traditions associated with farmlands or evoke antebellum Americana. Men might be named Raleigh, Festus, Cletus, Elmer, Clem[ent], Buford, Beau[regard]/Bo, or Jody; names for women include Tallulah, Eunice, Beulah, or Tamara/Tammy.
• Biblical names, especially from the Old Testament, which may or may not be obscure. This is because many rural areas are also deeply religious. Male examples include Ezekiel or Zeke, Jeb/Jed[ediah], Jethro, Enos, Josephus, and Eli; women might be named something like Charity, Delilah, or Tabitha. Such names are also popular among Mormon, Quaker, and Amish communities.
• Compound or hyphenated names. Men will incorporate "second" names like "Joe", "Bob", or even "Boy", resulting in names like "Billy Bob" or "John Boy". Women might have names like "Lou", "Anne", "May/Mae", "Lynn" or "Jo", resulting in names like "Daisy Mae" or "Lou Anne". For the latter, "belle" may also be used for a longer first name, such as "Clarabelle".
• Some names invoke rural areas all on their own. "Dixie" is an example of this, being common in the American South.^note The name evokes either the Mason-Dixon Line or Louisianan ten-dollar notes, called dix in Cajun French.
• Parents may also be just referred to as "Ma"/"Mammy" or "Pa"/"Pappy".

The Australian and British equivalents are bogan and chav names respectively, although the terms typically refer to Whites living in working class suburbs rather than rural regions. Stereotypical names include ones named after cars and alcohol such as "Chardonnay" or "Mercedes", as well as deliberate misspellings of common English names by adding extra 'x's and 'y's or shortening letters such as "Jaxon" or "Jorja". Although the British rural stereotype also uses Old Testament names (the stereotyped The West Country yokel is generally called Jethro, while his Oop North counterpart is probably called Seth).

Endemic to Hillbilly Horrors, common to the Farm Boy, Farmer's Daughter, Good Ol' Boy, Southern Belle, Small-Town Tyrant, Half-Witted Hillbilly, Country Mouse, Southern-Fried Private and occasionally the Creepy Gas-Station Attendant, Ragin' Cajun, and Southern-Fried Genius. Obviously found in the Deep South and Flyover Country. May overlap with Wacky Americans Have Wacky Names.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• When 4Kids dubbed Ojamajo Doremi they changed Aiko Senoo's name to Mirabelle P. Haywood. They even change the name of her hometown to Buttercorn Ridge. This was partially an Accent Adaptation of Aiko's Kansai accent; bullies mocking her speech was changed to bullies mocking her name and calling her "Hayseed." Fittingly, she wears overalls.
• In Pokémon: The Original Series, James ran away from his wealthy home to escape his tyrannical fiancee doppelganger of Jessie. She is depicted in the English dub as a Southern Belle named (what else?) Jessebelle.
• In Star Blazers, Yamamoto Akio from Space Battleship Yamato was renamed Jefferson-Davis Hardy.

Comic Books

• In Astro City, Quarrel II was born Jessica Darlene Taggart in the Cumberlands region of Kentucky. She prefers to be called "Jess".
• The second meeting of Batman and Superman post-crisis involved a vampire in South Carolina named Ellie Mae “Skeeter” Skags.
• Billy Majestic's Humpty Dumpty is set in swampy Mona County, Mississippi: most of the named characters follow the trope to some degree, but the Asshole Victim brothers who provoke the title creature's rampage are particularly exaggerated examples: Pervis and Petus Brakk. Petus also has a flamethrower he calls Turbo Tammy.
• Fastback, the speedster of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!, is really a bumpkin from Okey Dokey Swamp named Timmy Joe Terrapin.
• In G.I. Jane, an Antarctic Press one-shot Gender Flip spoof of G.I. Joe, Wild Belle's name is Luan Chastity.
• Befitting the small town Alabama setting, these names are more common than not in Southern Bastards - Bertrand, Earl, and Buhl Tubb, Euless Boss, Esaw Goings...
• The Headsman from the Dark Reign version of Thunderbolts is a Louisiana bayou boy named Cleavon Twain, which doubles as a Punny Name that alludes to his giant axe and fascination with decapitation ("cleave in twain"). See also his older brother Cody, to a lesser degree.
• Spider-Man villain Carnage's real name is Cletus Kasady, who's occasionally portrayed as a psychotic redneck.

Comic Strips

• Garfield: John's father sometimes adds "Boy" to the ends of everyone's names. The most common example is John's brother, Doc Boy- a nickname he dislikes.
• Everyone in Li'l Abner is a hillbilly in the fictional village of Dogpatch, USA. Characters include the titular lunkhead Abner^note an obscure Biblical name, his love interest Daisy Mae, their son "Honest Abe" Yokum, and Abner's parents Pansy "Mammy" and Lucifer "Pappy" Yokum.

Film — Live-Action

• Ernest P. Worrell of the Ernest series.
• Lampshaded in Forrest Gump; Benjamin Buford Blue AKA Bubba notes bemusedly that his nickname is "like one of them redneck boys." Like Forrest, he's from rural Alabama.
• In The Hunt (2020), the protagonist is a small-town Southerner named Crystal May Creasey. There's also a Crystal Mae Creasey in the same town, whom the antagonists actually meant to kidnap.
• Kill Bill has two:
  • Bill's brother Budd is an alcoholic strip club bouncer who lives in a Trashy Trailer Home in the middle of nowhere. Despite appearances, he overlaps with the Southern-Fried Genius trope as a surprisingly philosophical Noble Demon whose Combat Pragmatist tendencies make him one of the Bride's more effective opponents.
  • Buck doesn't get that sort of complexity, being a creepy orderly who pimps out comatose patients at the hospital where he works. In addition to this trope, his name also seems to have been chosen so he could say, "My name is Buck and I'm here to fuck!"
• In another example courtesy of Quentin Tarantino, the racist perverts in Pulp Fiction who imprison Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames in the Torture Cellar beneath a Confederate flag–emblazoned pawnshop are named Zed and Maynard.
• Ted has a bit where Ted tries to remember "that white trash girl"'s name by guessing compound names ending in -Lynn. It was Tami-Lynn.
• Depending on the movie, Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is known to his family or even friends as Bubba, Junior, Jackson, or Jedidiah. In the timeline of the 2003 movie, his given name is Thomas, but his family includes mother Luda Mae and a boy named Jedidiah. The Wildstorm comics briefly feature cousins Connie Jean, Shiloh, Ezekiel, etc. as well
• Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage take someone with a name that qualified, Cletus Kasady aka Carnage and goes with it, with Woody Harrelson having a very noticeable drawl. This is in contrast to his Surfer Dude portrayal in the comics (where he's from upper state New York in spite of the redneck-sounding name).
• Waiting for Guffman has Blaine, Missouri native and Dairy Queen hostess Libby Mae Brown, who speaks with a pronounced accent and smokes cigarettes heavily.
• The creepy Good Ol' Boy who terrorizes the out-of-towners in Wendigo is named Otis.

Literature

• The Dresden Files's Ebenezar McCoy is an elderly wizard who is also a homesteader in rural Missouri in his off-time. Justified since he's around 300 years old, substantially predating the modern connotations of the Biblical name.
• Lewis Grizzard has a number of characters from rural Georgia with hillbilly names in his newspaper columns and books, such as Kathy Sue Loudermilk and Billy Bob Bailey.
• Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In by Joe Bob Briggs. Briggs (Pen Name of John Bloom) is a Texan redneck who reviews schlocky films, scoring the quantities of Breasts, Beasts, Bodies and Blood they contain.
• Patternist: Asa Elias Doyle is a Black and Nerdy Southern-Fried Genius geologist and astronaut despite his double-barreled Puritan name, but is very good at code-switching and playing up his accent when he wants to be underestimated.
• One early villain in the Skulduggery Pleasant series is an American Psycho for Hire named Billy-Ray Sanguine.

Live-Action TV

• The titular characters of The Beverly Hillbillies are Ozark mountain folks who strike it rich when they find oil in their swamp. They are comprised of patriarch Jedidiah "Jed" Clampett, his mother-in-law Daisy Mae, his daughter Elly Mae, and his nephew Jethro. By contrast, their wealthy next-door neighbors are the preppily-named Milburn and Margaret Drysdale.
• Commonplace in The Dukes of Hazzard - you had Bo, Luke, Coy, Vance, Uncle Jesse and Daisy Duke (along with their friend Cooter) opposed by Roscoe, Enos, Cletus, and of course Jefferson Davis "Boss" Hogg.
• Firefly has Kaywinnit Lee Frye, although she goes by Kaylee.
• In one episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the family is living under new names in witness protection in Deliverance, Alabama. Uncle Phil and Carlton become Big Zeke and Little Zeke respectively. Another episode reveals Uncle Phil had a rural upbringing he doesn't like to talk about, and that Zeke is in fact his given name.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  • In the episode "Devil Fish", as the titular sea monster attacks a large search party in the Everglades at the climax of the film, Crow remarks "A lot of guys named 'Bo' died that day."
  • Riding With Death (from Gemini Man) gives an original story credit to H. G. Wells; in the episode, Servo claims that's not the H.G. Wells, but Hud Gomer Wells.
  • Crow mocks a name seen in the opening credits of Boggy Creek 2: And the Legend Continues like so:
  Crow: Ah, from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, [hillbilly accent] Jimmy Clem.
  • Similarly, Servo sees the name "Andre Scruggs" in the credits or Future War and jokes that it's the name of a French country singer.
  Crow: Yeah, he's usually paired with Guillaume Tubbs.
• My World… and Welcome to It: Zeph Leggin, the local homespun sage and hayseed jokester who matches wits with John in the episodes "A Friend of the Earth" and "Native Wit," has a name which suggests he has a rural Southern or Midwestern background.
• Sam & Cat: Goomer is a former MMA fighter and Louisiana native who hangs around with the main characters. In an episode where his mother visits, it's revealed his real name is Gieux Merr, suggesting he is of Cajun ancestry.
• There was an episode of Top Gear which featured them on a road trip through the Deep South. A Credits Gag at the end renamed the main cast members "Cletus Clarkson", "Earl Hammond Jr.", "Ellie May May" and "Roscoe P. Stig", with every member of the production team being rechristened "Billy Bob".
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Jacqueline's birth name is Jackie Lynn White, and she grew up in rural South Dakota. As a New York socialite, she now goes by the more sophisticated-sounding Jacqueline.
• Victorious: In one episode, the protagonists must adopt a fake persona for a method acting exercise. Jade's character is a sweet and innocent farm girl named Betty-Sue Goldenheart.
• The titular family on The Waltons is full of these: John-Boy, Jim-Bob, Zebulon, Esther...

Music

• "Ode to Billie Joe" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry, set in a rural community.
• The trope is, of course, common in Country Music and are too numerous to name. However, the trope is parodied in Sammy Kershaw's "Vidalia," in which a Southern Belle is named after both her parents, Violet and Dale. The pun is that she's always making him cry. The parody is almost missed if you don't listen too closely to the lyrics, as it slots in well next to George Strait's "Adalida" and The Oak Ridge Boys "Elvira," which are this trope.
• The Little Feat song, Down on the Farm, sings about a farm girl named Linda Lou, who leaves her boyfriend (who's the perspective of the song)and the country to work as a hooker in a big city saloon.
• Steve Miller Band has the song Take the Money and Run which features the criminals Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue, who are chased by a Texas detective named Billy Mack.

Professional Wrestling

• ECW had a stable called The Dudley Boys, the many disparate sons of a father who Really Gets Around. One was a stuttering simpleton with a Confederate flag bandana named Bubba Ray. Amusingly, Bubba was played by an Italian-American New Yorker who gradually stopped masking his natural accent.
• Fred Ottman and the Big Boss Man both worked under the name "Big Bubba" when they broke in.
• Impact Provincial Wrestling Federation, Impact Wrestling's spoof of smalltime mid-80s territory wrestling, featured Eddie Edwards as "Cowboy" Colt McCoy, presumably after the former Heisman finalist quarterback from the University of Texas.
• The Jim Crockett answer to Hillbilly Jim was a giant farmboy named Mighty Wilbur. Uniquely, though he had an accent most would place around Mississippi, he was neither from the South nor "flyover country" — he was said to be a vineyard worker from northern California.
• On that note, the WCW incarnation of the Studd Stable recast Jimmy Golden as "Bunkhouse Buck".
• The State Patrol, a WCW jobber tag team of Georgia state troopers, featured Buddy Lee Parker (real name DeWayne Bruce).
• WWE has had a number of examples:
  • There was a stable of wrestling hillbillies in the '80s - Hillbilly Jim isn't quite in the spirit of the trope, but Uncle Elmer, Cousin Luke, and Cousin Junior are.
  • WWE's idea for Tracy Smothers was to repackage him as a bored Wyoming farmer named Freddie Joe Floyd, a Tuckerization using the Wyoming-born Brisco brothers' birth names.
  • Briefly in the mid-'90s, there was a team of uncivilized mountain men called the Blu Brothers: Jacob, Eli, and their Uncle Zebekiah. Zebekiah, later Zeb Colter, previously wrestled as whip-wielding desperado "Dirty Dutch" Mantell.
  • The team of weasely Jesse and his Half-Witted Hillbilly brother Festus. Their theme song was about biscuits and gravy.
  • When Terry Funk arrived in the WWF, his brother Dory was rechristened "Hoss." A third, Unrelated Brother was soon added: Jimmy Jack Funk.
  • The hog farming team of the Godwinns were very briefly managed by their uncle Cletus.
• Memphis midcard heel stalwart Billy Joe Travis. He had been wrestling as Billy Travis when a promoter pitched giving him a “cowboy-type name”, and this was the compromise they eventually reached.
• Earl Cooter of the northeast indies, billed from Stinking Creek, Tennessee.

Theatre

• Combined with Gunman with Three Names in Assassins, when John Wilkes Booth mentions this in a conversation with Lee Harvey Oswald while also referencing James Earl Ray, and referring to all three as "rednecks".

Video Games

• Borderlands has Moxxi's children Scooter and Ellie, a pair of unsophisticated auto mechanics. Their family was formerly a part of the racecar-loving trailer trash Hodunk clan, led by Jimbo "Papa" Hodunk.
• One of the MERC mercenaries in Jagged Alliance 2 is Thorton "Bubba" Jones, a cruel, bigoted former Alabama prison guard.
• Luigi's Mansion 3: Clem the repairman has a stereotypical redneck look (mullet, overalls, trucker cap, bit of a goatee) and is usually accompanied by banjo music.
• The Orcs of Hazzard team in Mutant Football League plays in (the post-apocalyptic orc-and-zombie-inhabited version of) Georgia and the players are all named like this to an exaggerated degree. Some choice examples include Festus Podunk, Elrod Cornfed, Bubba Colt, Raleigh Barnstormer, and Cletus Moonshine. A decent percentage are specifically named after The Dukes of Hazzard characters or famous country singers.
• Hazard Company, one of the street leagues in Need for Speed Payback, is an off-road racing outfit of proud "hicks-to-the-core" with names like Cletus, Bobbi Jo, Forrest and Leanne.
• The protagonist of Redneck Rampage and his brother are respectively named Leonard and Bubba. Both characters (and the whole game in general) are embodiments of redneck stereotypes.
• The "Cowboys" gang from River City Ransom, have hick and/or cowpoke names: Bart, Bubba, Duke, Dusty, Jed, Luke, Merle, Shane, Slim. In the GBA remake they're instead named after Wild West figures. Compare the Frat Guys.
• In the 1920s Period Piece Secrets of the Old Clock, Nancy delivers telegrams to a variety of recipients, many of which are pop-culture references or running gags. One recipient collects messages for co-workers and family members at a farm, all of whom have names like "Bobby Joe", "Billy Jay", or "Bobbie Mae".
• In Team Fortress 2, the Engineer, hailing from a podunk town in Texas, is named Dell Conagher. He also has 11 "Hard" PhDs and his likes are listed as "barbeque, guns, and higher education."
• In Yo Kai Watch 3, Nate's story is set in St. Peanutsburg, which is a cultural and geographical mishmash of the entire Deep South region. Among the kids his age he befriends (in the English localization at least) are Buck, Sue-Ellen, Mary Lou, and Jolene.

Visual Novels

• Maximillion Galactica, a famous magician and client in the second Ace Attorney game, was secretly born and raised in the sticks as Billy Bob Johns. Maya and the Judge are shocked to learn this and can see why he changed it; the name and his natural accent both clash with his mysterious pretty boy persona. In the original Japanese version, the name is Kouhei Yamada, which has the same cornpone connotation.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: The episode The Harvest Moon Festival takes place in the rural parts of the Wrath Ring, which is quickly established to be be the Deep South in Hell. This extends to naming conventions, with Millie's parents named Joe and Lin, and her sister named Sallie May.
• Homestar Runner: In "Marzipan's Answering Machine 17.2", Strong Bad calls pretending to be "the new girl character in town", a hot-tempered redneck type named Sharpdene, which is apparently a Malaproper-flavored attempt at this kind of name.

Webcomics

• Unsounded: Emil Toma, a Farm Boy turned Peaceguard Captain who married into a noble family, has an In-Universe version in his birth name:
  Emil: ...Emil Sava.
  Elka: Damn that really is some weakass goat boy shit.

Western Animation

• On one Pinky and the Brain short on Animaniacs, Brain's plan to take over the world involves him becoming a country singer. One of the requirements of being a country singer is to have a name with no less than three words, so he picks Bubba Bo Bob Brain.
• The titular Country Mice of Big City Greens. Bill Green, son of Alice Green, has named his own children Tilly and Cricket.
• Futurama:
  • The second episode, "The Series Has Landed," introduces a hydroponic farmer on the moon. He has three "beautiful robot daughters" named Lulubelle 7, Daisy-Mae 128k, and The Crushinator.
  • When Bender jeers a hillbilly DJ by calling him "Vanilla Corn," the DJ snipes back (in an exaggerated Appalachian accent) that his name's Mixmaster Festus.
• In a severely exaggerated example, Gravity Falls has Fiddleford McGucket, a hillbilly who dresses like a prospector, communicates by ham boning, laces his speech with countryisms, married a raccoon, and was a genius inventor who suffered emotional trauma, developed a device to erase traumatic memories, and turned his brain into pineapple Jell-O by overusing it. His accent's real, though.
  • His family also follows this trope, as revealed in the show and various supplementary materials: his son is named Tater (shortened to Tate), his wife is Emma-May Dixon, and he has a cousin Thistlebert.
• One of Farmer MacDonald's hulking farmboy sons in Jackie Chan Adventures is named Buford — and is a renowned nuclear physicist Jackie was honored to meet.
• Mongo Wrestling Alliance featured a parody of Hillbilly Jim named Booter Lee Bogg, and Rusty's Georgia-twanged brother Balthazar.
• A side character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a hillbilly pony called Hayseed Turniptruck.
• The Simpsons:
  • Some folk'll never eat a skunk, but then again some folk'll, like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel.
  • Homer was at one point the manager of a country singer named Lurleen Lumpkin.
• Stan's uncle Jimbo in South Park, a redneck deer hunter. There are also three recurring incidental redneck characters who, according to one episode, are all named Skeeter.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Plankton's Army", Plankton's thousands of country cousins come to visit, and cousin Clem tries introducing them all to him.
  Clem: Of course, you remember Zeke, Rufus, Geke, Billy Bob, Billy Jim, Billy-Billy-Bo-Billy-Banana-Fanna-Fo-Filly, Doug, Enos... (some time later) Fletcher McGee, Rainchild, Zeke Junior—
  Plankton: ALRIGHT, I GET IT!!!
• Squidbillies: Deep South incarnate, the Cuylers have followed this naming rule for years. Ruby Jean Cuyler, Hezekiah Ray Cuyler, Earland Jubal Stonewall Cuyler, Herschel Walker Them Dogs Are Hell Don't They Cuyler, Russell Jesse James Kenny the Gambler Rogers Number Three The Intimidator Dale Earnhardt Kenny the Gambler Rogers America's Number One Cuyler, Lil Cuyler, et cetera.
• In Wacky Races, the Arkansas Chuggabug (a shabby coal-powered jalopy) is driven by Lazy Luke, a moonshining, easygoing, barefoot hillbilly with a scraggly beard.
• Time Squad featured the square-jawed, musclebound, unshaven Texan Gun Nut Beauregard "Buck" Tudrussel.
• Total Drama: Though he's not from the US like most examples of this trope, Ezekiel definitely qualifies. He's a Farm Boy from rural Canada who's lived in the country all his life (and whom Gwen refers to as a redneck), and his name, Ezekiel, definitely indicates this.

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"Hey, Alison? What's with that lil' blue bit o' letters, right down there?"
"Why that's just The Stinger, Bobby Joe."