It would be the last place in the world you'd expect a beatnik to end up. But the rest of the 1960s keep encroaching on Hooterville when the other Hootervilles of America at the time were free to live in the 1950s at least until the 1970s.
At any rate, Dennis Hopper is a beatnik, and specifically, on this show, that means he doesn't believe in work, just crashing in other people's places and living off of them. A parasite, to be precise. Hopper doesn't LOOK like a beatnik, he is a conventionally dressed well groomed young man. And he wants to send for Bobbie Jo when he gets to New Orleans. Kate gets this, and also knows that it is likely Hopper's character will forget all about Bobbie Joe once he leaves, so the point is probably moot. She can say something to Bobbie Jo, which would do nothing, or she can show him up to her and knock him off his pedestal.
Watch and find out what happens this. This was the first episode of Petticoat Junction for 1964, a year when everything changed. And strangely enough, Dennis Hopper spent his entire career playing the outsider, when he wasn't playing somebody who was straight up criminally insane.