He apparently committed suicide about a month ago after being sentenced to 18 months for making illegal whiskey and carrying a weapon. His wife said he was depressed, and died of asphyxiation sitting in his then-running Ford Fairlane in the garage. She recalled that he got the car in trade for three jars of white lightning and painted it John Deere green and yellow.
The History Channel Featured him in a documentary about Appalachia, demonstrating the plying of his craft. He wrote a book called Me and My Likker about moonshining, which was published in 1999.
He has a daughter who is working up a book about her dad, although she lives in New England, is an educated historian, and seems to have only discovered her dad's career as an estranged adult. Was she adopted or something?
Popcorn Sutton was revered by many in the hills for carrying on a long tradition of home whiskey-making that dates back to the British Isles. And also for carrying on a long tradition of resistance to government authority that likewise originates in the same. The Scotch-Irish who settled the Appalachian mountains had been screwed by the British for generations and developed an ingrained sense of disdain and distrust for official authority. This was deepened by the experiences of the last century and a half, which saw the South ruined and then looted in the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction Era. After those horrors had passed, scores of (largely) Northern industrialists swindled, cheated, and strongarmed poor mountain farmers out of their land in pursuit of the timber on the hills and the coal beneath them. Coal operators then kept their workforce in Third World conditions and used local politicians to oppress the masses. See the film Harlan County, USA for more on the long and heinous Dirty War that ensued over labor issues in the Appalachian coal industry.
Speaking of Dirty Wars - I see dramatic parallels between Southern history and Latin American history. They both share histories of slavery, plantation agriculture, large-scale poverty, the political caudillo tradition, deep and distinctly syncretic religious traditions, and the social dislocations of declining economies based in primary-sector production. Only in the South can American whites feel history as a constant source of personal pain, embarrassment, defeat, and chagrin the way that many in other parts of the world can and do. Bitterness and weak national egos, stemming from histories of defeat and colonizations, make for the likes the tensions between India and Pakistan. Yankee Americans cannot really identify with this, with the notable exception of racial minorities. Here's a great book dealing with that body of theory:
Sutton was making bootleg hooch - an arguably less-than-noble endeavor - but he was carrying on a long tradition. Scotch farmers in the Old World had customarily made whiskey out of their surplus grain in order to have a salable market good they could trade for cash. This practice was carried to colonial North America, where it fell under taxation. The tax was especially hated since most colonial-era Americans were poor farmers, and making homemade liquor was their primary source of formal income, i.e. cash flow. Remember how taxation was a big issue in the American Revolution? The Whiskey Tax was one of the hated stipulations forced onto colonial citizens by the British Empire. After the Americans won a shocking victory over mighty Brittania, they set up the U.S. government and set about taxing and regulating things for themselves. But whiskey-making farmers wanted none of it.
In 1794 President George Washington had to send thousands of militia men to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania where distillery-running farmers were refusing to pay the tax and harassing tax collectors. This had the unintended consequence of pushing moonshine-production to places and locales beyond strong federal control - namely the frontier and the mountains. In the 1790's the frontier had barely gotten over the Appalachian mountains and the tradition of hillbilly moonshining was begun.
Weak and often-compromised local law enforcement and a culture of fierce independence, coupled with deep and enduring regional poverty, kept moonshining alive in the mountains for centuries. And it still goes on. A buddy of mine offered me nip of White Lightnin' last summer.
In the twentieth century marijuana has become a major export of the mountains - some argue it is the largest cash crop in the state of Kentucky, and many a poor rural community finds itself today bedeviled by methamphetamine production, prescription drug abuse, and the like. In Wise County Virginia Oxycontin painkillers have been completely banned from medical use due to a raging local trade in the little white pills. "Coal miner cocaine" is a local nickname.
Popcorn Sutton spent his life plying a trade that has all but disappeared from our culture. Sure people do go blind from drinking bad moonshine, but hey he made a livin' at it. And his defiance to the Man, and the folk-hero status he received for such, speak volumes about his the socio-historical context into which he was born. The Asheville Citizen-Times posited him as being perceived a casualty of the yet-unended Civil War, persecuted by Yankee aggression dating back to the bloody tyranny of Abe Lincoln. Neufeld's article argues that in the Reconstruction era staunch Unionists were handed jobs as 'revenuers' charged with enforcing taxation for the newly created Bureau of the Internal Revenue - forerunner of the modern IRS. Thus, he writes, a folklore of crooked - and foreign-aligned - revenuers and the battle to elude them by local whiskey-makers was born. This version of the story places the moonshining tradition a little later than the one outlined above, which I gleaned from a University of Virginia website (which I cannot seem to find).
But either way, Popcorn Sutton is dead - and so are most people who know how to make things by hand, whiskey included.
Here is a website with a bibliography of articles celebrating the late moonshiner as a cultural symbol of resistance to domination by outsiders. If the theory outlined above about the South as a defeated colony holds any water, we might think of ol' Popcorn Sutton as a Tennessee version of the Zapatistas.
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