Instead, facing the verdict and ill health, he was found dead by Ms.

He was convicted in 2008 and was due to report to prison Friday, his widow, Pam Sutton, told the Associated Press. Sutton insisted on earning a living the old-fashioned way, and in 2007, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives busted him with 850 gallons of moonshine, stored in an old school bus on his property. Other moonshiners have gone legit and cashed in a former Nascar driver and moonshiner now offers Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon in Southern liquor stores. Sutton put a modern spin on his vocation, appearing in documentaries and even penning an autobiography, “Me and My Likker.” Souvenir shops in Maggie Valley sold his video, “The Last Run of Likker I’ll Ever Make,” and even clocks with his image on them. He helped decorate the $155-a-night Moonshiner suite at the inn with some still hardware. He picked the banjo and serenaded guests on the inn’s porch. He was a familiar figure at the Misty Mountain Ranch Bed & Breakfast in nearby Maggie Valley, N.C., wearing faded overalls and with a back stooped, he said, from decades of humping bags of sugar into the hills. But he was well known as a distiller around his native Parrottsville.

He mostly kept out of trouble after that, though friends say his nickname came from an unfortunate encounter with a balky barroom popcorn machine. Sutton had brushes with the law, and was first convicted of selling untaxed liquor in the early 1970s. “This is something that legitimately is an expression of the culture of this region,” Mr. The practice goes back to the Scots-Irish, who brought it to the New World, and it wasn’t illegal until after the Civil War, says Dan Pierce, chairman of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Sutton learned the family trade from his father. I read this while eating breakfast today, and love the imagery that this story conveys.Ī scrawny, long-bearded mountain man with a foul mouth and a passing acquaintance with copper tubing and kettles, Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton seemed the embodiment of moonshiners of yore.īrought up in rural Cocke County, Tenn., identified as one of four “moonshine capitals of the world” in the corn-whiskey history “Mountain Spirits,” Mr. That is why I bring to your attention this great remembrance of Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton from this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. UPDATE WITH “POPCORN” SUTTON VIDEOS…CLICK HERE-watch his old-fashioned memorial service.Īs I have stated before, I love a well written, and memorable obituary.

Popcorn sutton me and my likker .pdf