“Blazing right through Knoxville, out on Kingston Pike, Then right outside of Bearden, they made the fatal strike. He left the road at 90; that's all there is to say, The devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day. And there was thunder, thunder over "Thunder Road", Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his load. And there was moonshine, moonshine to quench the devil's thirst. The law they never got him 'cause the devil got him first.” - Robert Mitchum, Thunder Road, 1958
Knoxville got a moment to shine in the spotlight when Hollywood hotshot Robert Mitchum produced Thunder Road in 1958. Although the movie was shot 100 miles east in Asheville, North Carolina, the opening theme brought attention to Knoxville’s Kingston Pike, a segment of the infamous “Thunder Road.”
The moonshine route’s name refers to the roar of engines escaping the grasp of authorities. Thunder Road runs from Harlan, Kentucky to Knoxville, Tennessee. Legend has it that the movie’s climax, when moonshine runner Lucas Droolin crashes his Ford coupe during an epic police chase, is based on a real Kingston crash. While many Knoxvillians recount the tragedy, there’s not much consensus on the details.
“People have grown up believing what someone told them when they were young,” Knoxville local Alex Gabbard told Knoxville News Sentinel in 2012. (1) For years he tried to get to the bottom of the Thunder Road origin story, but like many others, ultimately failed to identify it. No newspaper stories, no records, no nothing. Mitchum died without revealing his inspiration.
“It’s history,” claimed Gabbard. “To those of us who grew up in that world, it doesn’t seem like history because it doesn’t seem like so long ago, but it is. Now it’s giving way into legend.”
In the decades following its premiere, cult classic Thunder Road held the United States in a tight grip. It took over movie drive-ins, themed roller coasters at Dollywood, and even inspired a young Bruce Springsteen to write a song of the same name. But what intrigued East Tennesseeans was not just their shoutout in the theme song. Thunder
Road told an all-too-familiar story of mountain people evading (or attempting to evade) authorities in order to maintain self-reliance.
Moonshine is the name for untaxed and therefore illegal liquor. It’s sometimes called “white lightning” or “mountain dew.” Nowadays, the label is seemingly flexible. Check the shelves of any liquor store, and you might see clear whiskeys or neutral spirits labeled as moonshine. Don’t be fooled. This is just a regular licensed commercial spirit being advertised with a folkloric name.
The practice of illicit liquor making has deep roots in the Appalachian region. When Scots-Irish settlers arrived in the mountains in the 1700s, they brought their whiskey-making skills. Small farmers with vast corn harvests found a profitable drink to concoct. They didn’t call it “moonshine” then. The word’s British origin refers to the tradition of sneakily concocting liquor in the nighttime, so it wasn’t until distillers had reason to brew in secret that they used the infamous name. (2)
Appalachian farmers farther north in Western Pennsylvania launched a rebellion in 1791 when the federal government imposed an excise tax on whiskey. They “clung to whiskey as the stronghold of their households,” writes historian Steven Stoll. (3) They opposed the tax because it devalued their drink which previously functioned as an “irreplaceable source” of stability. Although the uprising mostly failed, a strong desire to independently control food commodities was established among mountain farmers.
Moonshine, real moonshine, is not legal. The home distillation of liquor is more complicated than wine or beer making because of the greater loss in tax revenue. Placing a tax on whiskey burdened Appalachian distillers by increasing the price for consumers and therefore lessening the demand.
Maybe this price increase wouldn’t have been a problem, but money was not plentiful in the southern mountain economy at the end of the eighteenth century. Most families provided for themselves using forest resources. No need to interact with outside economies. Banks were distant, and the region mainly operated under a barter system. Landowners were already being taxed on their land and livestock. They “recoiled” at this unprecedented excise on one of the few goods that could earn them cash. (4)
This lack of cash flow did not cease to be a problem in the region. Outsiders continued to interfere with Appalachian life during the 1800s and 1900s, increasingly placing locals
in a state of dependency, whether with their landlord, the lumber or coal companies they worked for, or the taxes they loathed. (5)
And the taxes weren’t the only problem. Temperance laws spread throughout the region like wildfire, eventually resulting in nationwide prohibition from 1920 to 1933. With this new crackdown on liquor, demand for moonshine hit an all-time high. Secret stills popped up every which way. With alcohol cheap and always available, homemade creation and consumption rose dramatically. (6)
Participants in this illicit economy developed creative methods of hiding and transporting their merchandise. The New York Herald wrote in 1922 about Cumberland Mountain, Tennessee local George Neff, a notoriously crafty transporter, or bootlegger. “Nary a drap of liquor in this here car,” George told the cops, who apparently pulled him over 5 times in one week. Later, to his friends, “Well, I didn’t lie to ‘em. The stuff wasn’t in the car; it was under it.” When the officers asked him about the 40-gallon jug suspended under his small car, he claimed it was “one of them new fangled gas tanks.” George carried on his way.
The federal and local police struggled to contain the moonshine problem. Not only did mountain ingenuity stump them, but the geography of the region interfered too. “Mountaineers are as scattered as the hills are scattered,” one officer told the Herald. “The moonshiner’s game is a lone one.” (7)
But in reality, this usually wasn’t the case. Distilling families, households, and neighbors, although sometimes in competition with one another, often formed organized resistance, working together to outwit their pursuers.
But this is not to say that moonshining communities were incredibly inclusive. In the 1890s the “white cap” club emerged in Wilkes County, Tennessee. This gang of moonshiners sought to protect each other from federal agents, “convinced that federal and local liquor laws threatened to destroy their livelihood.” Loosely based on the organizational structure of the Ku Klux Klan, the white caps also terrorized local Blacks “in an attempt to maintain white supremacy.” Black Appalachians did participate in moonshining, though, and had for a long time. (8)
Perhaps the most infamous moonshiner of Hancock County, Tennessee, Mahalia “Big Haley” Mullins was a mixed-race woman known for her lawlessness and enormous size. In 1899, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a story on one of the many unsuccessful arrests of Mahalia. When deputies found the felon in her Cumberland cabin, their seizure was interrupted by her young daughter, who whispered in her mother’s ear, “I’ll go tell the crowd,” referring to Mahalia’s other dozen children. Knowing they would be outnumbered, the officers withdrew. (9)
When Mahalia died in 1898, newspapers across the country gave a nod to her legendary status. “Not too big for death,” reported the Asheville Citizen-Times, claiming Mahalia was a “650 pound” mother of 18 who could not be captured by the police “on account of her size and the isolated location of her home.” (10) Bridgeton Pioneer wrote that there was “no way to get her down the mountain.” (11)
The story was clearly sensationalized, with many reporters even speculating that she had been murdered by neighbors envious of her successful moonshine business, which she took over after her husband died. “Was this great woman murdered?” asked the Inquirer. If so, the reporter predicted the mountains would “witness bloodshed” as “the tribe always avenges an injury to one of its members. (12) The use of “tribe” perpetuates an anti-Appalachian and frankly anti-Black narrative that paints the family as primitive and backward.
Stereotypes synonymous with Appalachia, like the rugged mountaineer or isolated hillbilly, are evident in moonshine discourse. According to the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, the hillbilly image is a “lanky, black-bearded, white male who lives in a cabin in the mountains with an outhouse out back. He wears a battered slouch hat, totes a shotgun, and a jug of moonshine, and holds little regard for the law, work, cleanliness, or book learning.” (13)
The fountain drink Mountain Dew (have you made the connection yet?) drew from this mold for its advertising campaigns for years. “Drink Mountain Dew,” they said. “It’ll tickle yore innards!” Mascot Willy the Hillbilly was always depicted with his trusty jug and tattered plaid ensemble. Willy served as comic relief, and he never wore shoes.
Despite the hyperbolized tales surrounding moonshine, its role as a regional commodity cannot be reduced to a story of drunken mountain folk running from the law.
Moonshining represents resistance and rejection of laws not suited to meet the needs of the mountains. This idea garnered particular relevance after prohibition, as concerned Appalachians and Americans at large questioned the stability of their civil liberties. (14)
As foreign entrepreneurs crept into the forest and mountain landscapes to enrich themselves from the abundance of natural resources, the people of Appalachia did what they could to hold on to their subsistence. Even flying down Thunder Road, the moonshiner’s game was a serious one.
Sources
1 Matt Lakin, “Echoes of Thunder,’” Knoxville News Sentinel, June 24, 2012, 10S.
2 William E. Ellis, “Moonshine,” Tennessee Historical Society, October 8, 2017.
3 Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 2018), 125. 4 Stoll, Ramp Hollow.
5 Stoll, Ramp Hollow.
6 Bruce Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle Over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
7 “In the Moonshine Belt Where Every Clump of Bushes Hides A Still,” The New York Herald, April 23, 1922, 10.
8 Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists.9 “Was This Great Woman Murdered?,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 12, 1899, 27. 10 “Not Too Big For Death,” Asheville Citizen-Times, September 19, 1898, 1.
11 “Famous Moonshiner Dead,” Bridgeton Pioneer, September 22, 1898, 7.
12 “Was This Great Woman Murdered?,” 27.
13 Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell, eds., Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2006).
