In Chapter 1, Vance details his early youth at his great-grandmother’s house in Jackson, Kentucky, a town of “about six thousand in the heart of southeastern Kentucky’s coal country” (11). Vance’s grandparents left Kentucky, after World War II, in the late 1940s, and moved to Middletown, Ohio, where Vance would grow up, returning to Jackson every summer up to age 12.

Vance reveals that he was abandoned by his biological father and alludes to his strained relationship with his mother, who is often absent from Vance’s life or a toxic agent in it due to substance abuse. He also offers a partial list of his mother’s boyfriends and husbands and their roles as father figures to Vance.

Vance introduces us to his very large hillbilly family: Uncle Teaberry, who dies when Vance is four; Uncle Pet, who owns a string of successful timber and construction businesses; and Uncle David, a bearded “old rebel” with “long, flowing hair” (15) and a sizable marijuana plant in his backyard. He also offers brief introductions to another of Mamaw’s brothers, Uncle Gary, who owns a roofing business in Indiana, and Mamaw’s two sisters, Betty and Rose.

These family introductions are interspersed with tales of violence extending from protecting family honor. While it was fine for the Blanton clan to fight and gossip among itself, any outsiders who did so were met with swift and often outlandishly violent retribution.

Vance reflects on a recent trip back to Jackson and the poverty and despair he sees there, which is partly due to rampant regional substance abuse. The state has seized control of the public schools, due to their performance, and an obesity crisis further plunges the town, and region, into a state of morbid cynicism.

In referencing a 2000 paper written by a trio of sociologists, Vance says,

hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly (20).

Chapter 2 begins with a closer look at the lives of Vance’s grandparents, Jim Vance and Bonnie Blanton, known through most of the text as, respectively, Papaw and Mamaw, Vance’s nicknames for them. Papaw, born in 1929 and “something of hillbilly royalty” (24), had a distant cousin who married into the famous Hatfield family (of the Hatfield-McCoy feuds) and lived in Jackson until he was 17 years old. He married Mamaw in Jackson in 1947 when they were teenagers. Soon after, they moved to Middletown, Ohio.

Mamaw and Papaw came to be married, Vance tells us, through having an affair, while Papaw was dating another woman. Mamaw, at 13, became pregnant, heavily influencing their decision to depart for Ohio. Their baby died after living for less than a week. Meanwhile, Papaw began his job at Armco, a steel company that “aggressively recruited in eastern Kentucky coal country” (27).

Vance expounds on “two major waves of migration from Appalachia,” (28), due to large corporations, like Armco, offering good pay, steady work, and the desire to move the employee’s extended family with the employee—a key selling point to Appalachians. The first of these migrations occurred as World War I ended; the second was after World War II, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “In the 1950s,” Vance says, “thirteen of every one hundred Kentucky residents migrated out of the state” (28). Mamaw and Papaw, among many others in Vance’s extended family, were part of this migratory flow.

Vance concludes the chapter by illustrating the cultural differences Appalachian emigrants often faced, when moving north and mixing with Midwesterners, who, generally, were calmer, quieter, less violent, and drank and swore less than their new, hillbilly neighbors.