It's apparently not correct to call it the "original" reference in any case:
> I, too, was confused to hear this new version of an old bit of folk wisdom, and went to check up on it. The Oxford English Dictionary finds derogatory usages for redneck—when defined as “a poorly educated white person working as an agricultural laborer or from a rural area in the southern United States, typically considered as holding bigoted or reactionary attitudes”—much earlier than 1921: 1891, 1904, 1913. What gives?
[...]
> This history of disputation around the uses of the term is what’s most interesting here, and it’s also what resists a “just-so” story about the word’s origins. Catte pointed me to a 2006 article by historian Patrick Huber in the journal Western Folklore that she said formed the basis for her own interpretation. Huber’s argument—that redneck, in the 1910s through the 1930s, sometimes meant “Communist,” or at least “a miner who was a member of a labor union,” especially one on strike—made it clear that this usage was a strategic reclamation of a word that had been used as a slur. Some union organizers, Huber found, used red bandanas and the term redneck as a way to culturally integrate groups of white, black, and immigrant miners—who were often set against each other by owners eager to divide labor’s power—into a single identity. Because miners often wore red handkerchiefs to protect their faces and necks from coal dust, the bandana was a symbol of labor that was universal among ethnicities and races.
Wikipedia's citation from 1893 says the term comes from sunburns on farmer's necks which would predate any supposed communist symbolism.
"poorer inhabitants of the rural districts ... men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin stained red and burnt by the sun, and especially is this true of the back of their necks"
Frederic Gomes Cassidy & Joan Houston Hall, Dictionary of American Regional English VOL.IV (2002) p. 531. ISBN 978-0674008847
For me personally, as a non english native speaker that never even lived on an english speaking country, the term redneck was always self explanatory: it comes from the sun burns on the necks of white farmers. To think anything other than that is the origin for the term is just stupid. Makes the whole claim by that guy to have been tested and having an "off the charts" IQ seem very dubious.
> I, too, was confused to hear this new version of an old bit of folk wisdom, and went to check up on it. The Oxford English Dictionary finds derogatory usages for redneck—when defined as “a poorly educated white person working as an agricultural laborer or from a rural area in the southern United States, typically considered as holding bigoted or reactionary attitudes”—much earlier than 1921: 1891, 1904, 1913. What gives?
[...]
> This history of disputation around the uses of the term is what’s most interesting here, and it’s also what resists a “just-so” story about the word’s origins. Catte pointed me to a 2006 article by historian Patrick Huber in the journal Western Folklore that she said formed the basis for her own interpretation. Huber’s argument—that redneck, in the 1910s through the 1930s, sometimes meant “Communist,” or at least “a miner who was a member of a labor union,” especially one on strike—made it clear that this usage was a strategic reclamation of a word that had been used as a slur. Some union organizers, Huber found, used red bandanas and the term redneck as a way to culturally integrate groups of white, black, and immigrant miners—who were often set against each other by owners eager to divide labor’s power—into a single identity. Because miners often wore red handkerchiefs to protect their faces and necks from coal dust, the bandana was a symbol of labor that was universal among ethnicities and races.
https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/redneck-origin-definition-...