Supporters of King William often refered to themselves as Billy Boys and
those Hielandmen who came down fromt the Ulster mountians in support of
King William were called the Hill Billies.
The origin of this American nickname for mountain folk in the Ozarks and in
Appalachia comes from Ulster. Ulster-Scottish (The often incorrectly
labeled "Scots-Irish") settlers in the hill-country of Appalachia brought
their traditional music with them to the new world, and many of their songs
and ballads dealt with William, Prince of Orange, who defeated the Catholic
King James II of the Stuart family at the Battle of the Boyne, Ireland in 1690.
Supporters of King William were known as "Orangemen" and "Billy Boys" and
their North American counterparts were soon referred to as "hill-billies".
It is interesting to note that a traditional song of the Glasgow Rangers
football club today begins with the line, "Hurrah! Hurrah! We are the Billy
Boys!" and shares its tune with the famous American Civil War song,
"Marching Through Georgia".
REDNECK
The origins of this term are Scottish and refer to supporters of the
National Covenant and The Solemn League and Covenant, or "Covenanters",
largely Lowland Presbyterians, many of whom would flee Scotland for Ulster
(Northern Ireland) during persecutions by the British Crown. The
Covenanters of 1638 and 1641 signed the documents that stated that Scotland
desired the Presbyterian form of church government and would not accept the
Church of England as its official state church.
Many Covenanters signed in their own blood and wore red pieces of cloth
around their necks as distinctive insignia; hence the term "Red neck",
which became slang for a Scottish dissenter. One Scottish immigrant,
interviewed by the author, remembered a Presbyterian minister, one Dr.
Coulter, in Glasgow in the 1940's wearing a red clerical collar -- is this
symbolic of the "rednecks"?
Since many Ulster-Scottish settlers in America (especially the South) were
Presbyterian, the term was applied to them, and then, later, their Southern
descendants. One of the earliest examples of its use comes from 1830, when
an author noted that "red-neck" was a "name bestowed upon the
Presbyterians." It makes you wonder if the originators of the ever-present
"redneck" joke are aware of the term's origins?
CRACKER
Another Ulster-Scot term, a "cracker" was a person who talked and boasted,
and "craic" (Crack) is a term still used in Scotland and Ireland to
describe "talking", chat or conversation in a social sense ("Let's go down
to the pub and have a craic"; "what's the craic"). The term, first used to
describe a southerner of Ulster-Scottish background, later became a
nickname for any white southerner, especially those who were uneducated.
And while not an exclusively Southern term, but rather referring in general
to all Americans, the origins of this word are related to the other two.