As someone else with Appalachian family, they aren't secret socialists, but most of them are politically pretty disengaged and uneducated. I think treating them like they're all Klansmen or some equivalent is ridiculous.

And from a Marxist standpoint, remember that the peasants were important to those revolutions because they were the bulk of the population, but revolutionary organization should be easier with a proletarian population than with a peasant population so long as the proles aren't labor aristocrats (as many of them ended up being with the development of imperialism). Neglected backwaters aren't at a disadvantage for not being literally feudal, the feudal backwardness was an obstacle to socialist organizing.