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Self-described rednecks call it “Hick-Hop” – a twang fusion of rap and country music that is sweeping rural America’s mud parks and tractor-pull arenas.

So what’s up with rednecks mixing country music with black hip hop sound?

I guess we can’t be surprised since it’s a marketing bonanza for popular groups like Colt Ford, Lenny Cooper and the LACS (short for the Loud Ass Crackers) who have albums among the top 75 on Billboard’s country music chart with 1,800 Wal-Mart stores around the country stocking their records.

Average Joe’s Entertainment, a Nashville, Tenn.-based hick-hop record label has sold nearly 200,000 “Mud Digger” compilation albums and the Jawga Boyz “Down In A Holler” is rising on the charts.

Wal-Mart, according to The Wall Street Journal, have also become a way for hick hop artists to reach millions of listeners without radio or record-label deals.

Here’s how The Wall Street Journal described the Hick-Hop movement and redneck fans of hick hop.

“The music, anathema to country-music traditionalists because of its heavy drum and bass, doesn’t get much airplay on major radio stations. But the all-ages mud-park shows, which feature dancers that shimmy around chain-link-fence poles cemented onto truck beds, can draw upward of 10,000 fans. They tend to spend freely on CDs and merchandise, from moonshine to Mason jars filled with the mud used in a band’s music videos.”

“The scantily dressed crowd includes grade-schoolers, teenagers driving their parents’ farm equipment and professionals who burn thousands of dollars each week on truck repairs, only to demolish their rides again the next weekend in events like truck tug of war,” the Journal reported.

“Daisy Duke shorts, bikinis and anything camouflage are popular fashion choices; homemade moonshine and beer are on tap and truck brands tend to be American, as Colt Ford notes in his “Drivin’ Around Song”: “U.S.A., Chevrolet, Dodge and Ford, raising a little hell and praising the Lord.”

Is hick hop a fad or a hillbilly genre that’s here to stay?

What do you think?