The Lonesome Death of Marvin ‘Popcorn’ Sutton

The writer is the author of a book and producer of documentaries that included Popcorn Sutton.

In March 2009, the gregarious moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton took his own life at the age of 62, 10 days before he was to begin a prison sentence for practicing what he considered to be an aspect of his heritage. 

By that time, he had made quite a name for himself as a moonshiner and personality. The Wall Street Journal published an obituary summing him up as a “scrawny, long-bearded mountain man with a foul mouth” and “the embodiment of moonshiners of yore.” Those who had met him in person at his roadside store outside of Maggie Valley knew him as an affable man with a quick wit, a gift for storytelling, and a ready supply of homemade corn whiskey. 

In the years since his death, however, a remarkable transformation has taken place. His tale has taken on a life of its own and he has become larger than life, a mythic figure cut from the cloth of folklore.

Sutton was raised adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, not long after its foundation in the first half of the 20th century. His family had been in western North Carolina in the area of Hemphill and Cataloochee, as he put it in one interview, “as long as time lasted.” They had been subsistence farmers, among that part of the population who had supplied the stereotypical images of Appalachian life. He grew up pulling weeds for hogs and picking tomatoes for 15 cents an hour. His father worked odd jobs while his mother took care of the home, churning butter from the family cow to exchange for groceries in nearby Waynesville. 

There was one phone in the community at a small store, but according to Sutton, people only used it to call the undertaker when someone died. But life was changing quickly as the regional economy reoriented to tourism due to the national park. In the booming mid-century post-war economy, many middle-class Americans were out on the road for the first time, in exploration of their country and seeking—as the poet Jonathan Williams put it—“the lost America.”

The hillbilly stereotype was a well-established staple of popular media, and visitors to the region already knew the aspects of Appalachian life that (they believed) were authentic. And desperately poor sections of the mountains were willing to serve it to them. Raised at the confluence of tourism, tradition, and poverty, Sutton had a flair for performance that uniquely suited him for an independent living in the new economy.

Sutton’s father made moonshine, but so did a lot of people back then. The technique of alcohol distillation had been brought to the backcountry by Scotch-Irish settlers, although now made with indigenous corn rather than the barley it had been made from in Ireland. And it quickly became essential to backwoods life as the base of medicines and home remedies and an important commodity in its barter economy. 

After the American Revolution, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton pushed a steep tax on whiskey through Congress to repay the debts of the war, inciting a rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The rebellion was quelled in short order, but an animosity toward the government lingered, which only became more entrenched over the years as the government perennially tried to stamp out the production of untaxed whiskey. 

For the people of Appalachia, it was their God-given right to make it, and besides, they didn’t like being told what to do. Moonshine—illegal, untaxed whiskey—increasingly became a symbol of independence and rebellion in mountain culture.

By the age of 16, the naturally rebellious Sutton was already trying his hand at making moonshine, turning out “shit liquor,” by his own admission. Unsuited for life by an employer’s clock, he turned to making it full time by the age of 20. Around the same time, he picked up a fitting nickname for a corn whiskey distiller when he attacked a coin-operated popcorn machine in a bar after it stole his dime. He snatched up a pool cue and showed the damn thing what he thought about that. It cost him $50 and earned him a nickname he would use for the rest of his life.

When I met Popcorn in 1999, he was a local character of some repute in Maggie Valley. He held court at his roadside “antiques” store, a place where you could browse dusty bottles, rusted tools, and the kinds of things he loved best: cast aside, their hidden value known only to him. Although the store was mainly a place for him to interact with the public and move moonshine, he enjoyed trading and talking about the goods held there. He fetishized the tokens of poor mountain life and the kind of resourcefulness he grew up with. His favorite car was not his expensively restored A-Model but an old and battered Ford Fairmont he had bought on trade with three gallons of moonshine. He took it on forays to South Carolina, West Virginia, and Alabama, pushing it as far as it would go, curious to find out how much the old thing had left to give. 

Popcorn was a perfect inclusion to the documentary I was producing on Appalachian language and culture at the time, although nearly too perfect. Stick-thin with a bushy beard, a worn-out fedora, and faded overalls, he was a hillbilly stereotype in the flesh. In the first interview with him, however, I found him down-to-earth and genuine, as well as witty, thorny, and proud of his profession. He had one leg in the past, undoubtedly, but he used a cell phone, read the paper, and watched the local news on television every day. He was all that he appeared, but he was also more than willing to lean into people’s expectations of what a moonshiner was supposed to look and act like. It worked well for him.

Popcorn was introduced to public television by my documentary Mountain Talk, but by the time it came out in 2003 we had already made—at his instigation—a scrappy documentary called This is the Last Dam Run of Likker I’ll Ever Make. In the video, Popcorn shares his craft from start to finish, along with tales of moonshining, dirty jokes, and plenty of cursing, his engaging personality charging the no-budget video with electricity.

“The Last Run,” as it is typically known, was only available on VHS copies sold by Popcorn himself, out of his store or the trunk of his car, but it circulated far and wide. Popcorn drew the attention of producers as far away as Boston and California and soon appeared in more professionally executed programs on national channels like CMT and History. He began receiving and accepting invitations to run moonshine at heritage festivals in the region, where he not only made moonshine in public but offered high-proof samples to spectators (invariably to the alarm of festival organizers).

The laws around distillation have loosened considerably in the past decade—and home distillation was recently made legal by a federal judge in Texas for the first time in more than 150 years—but at the time, Popcorn flouted laws that had been in place his entire life. He bragged openly about making “wikky” better than anyone, and drew the spotlight to an illegal craft, but he was far more calculating than one would guess. He mitigated the risks by making his product in public under the banner of heritage, which gave his moonshining an aura of wholesome innocence, while simultaneously bestowing the credibility of an outlaw in a culture where outlaws are admired. 

Out of the public eye, he turned out vast quantities of the stuff at his home in Cocke County, Tennessee, where the local officials and law enforcers were among his closest friends. He had in fact relocated from western North Carolina to eastern Tennessee because he thought circumstances were more conducive to his activities, while keeping a public face in Maggie Valley. He liked to say he had “dual citizenship.”

By the time he gave me access to his world—and his remarkable home and moonshine operation outside Parrottsville, Tennessee—he had three large stills that he ran in rotation, two of them around 800 gallons each and a third at 1,750 gallons. He heated them on unleaded gasoline, stored in a gas tank made from an old hot water heater and vaporized in homemade burners. Along with jars and sacks of grain, the still house usually held a couple thousand pounds of sugar, which is flammable (and explosive in the right conditions). 

Watching him light the stills in a shack filled with gas fumes so thick that my eyes burned, it was all I could do to hold my ground. He would crouch before the still, smoothly adjusting the flow of gas as flames shot out and curled the hairs of his beard. “You can’t be scared of it,” he said. 

Popcorn not only sold half-gallon jars of moonshine to tourists for $25 each, but he moved hundreds of gallons at a time through bootleggers. In “The Last Run,” he recounts a story in which a man asked him, “You got any liquor?” He replied, “You bring me an 18-wheeler and I’ll bust the damn tires on it.” He also made money from the VHS tapes of “The Last Run,” a self-published book called Me and My Likker, posters, and other merchandise. In the end what he was selling was himself. 

Popcorn’s fame grew in the mid-2000s, and he found himself flush with cash. He built a new home on his rented property in Cocke County and decorated it with bawdy knickknacks, antique prison locks, and old farm tools. He papered the ceilings with dollar bills. He bought an $8,000 banjo that he could barely play, though he looked great holding it. He also bought himself an elegant casket that he displayed in his living room. He even made photos of himself inside of it, stretched out and grim. 

Popcorn was transfixed by death, at least his own, although he talked about it as casually as forecasting rain. In “The Last Run,” in 2002, he says, “When I’m gone, the damn liquor’s gone. And I’m just about gone. In five years, there won’t be no more moonshine liquor. And I’ll be dead before then anyway, so it don’t matter.” He was not even 60 when he began laying out money for his funeral expenses. By 2006, he had purchased a coffin and paid in advance for funeral services. He also bought a granite footstone and placed it by the front porch, where the world could contemplate his immortal parting words: Popcorn says fuck you.

Although Popcorn never lost his spark, he was indeed deteriorating. In 2004, as he set up a still for a heritage festival in Pigeon Forge, he trembled uncontrollably and had to rest often. He was diagnosed with hypertension and put on a host of medications that he said did “not much more than taking rat turds.” At the same time, he was steadily becoming more famous. Willie Nelson made a special effort to meet him, inviting Popcorn onto his tour bus outside the Cherokee casino. On another occasion, Earl Scruggs did the same and signed Popcorn’s expensive banjo. 

By that time, Popcorn had made a name for himself as a personality and could have coasted on his reputation. He could have left behind the legal risk, stress, and punishing work of producing his illegal product. He could have—for instance—opened his property as a moonshine museum, selling gifts and mementos of heritage, holding court and telling stories. He had already shown more than enough business acumen to make it work, though he scorned inconveniences like licenses and taxes. But he was a moonshiner and an outlaw; he never gave any other route a moment’s consideration. As his health zeroed out, it was clear that he was going to push the story a little further, just to see how far it would go.

On April 24, 2007, a faulty wiring box ignited a fire in the still house. There were dried-out timbers, sacks of grain and sugar, and gasoline to feed the flame and the fire was instantly out of control. A massive column of black smoke rose over eastern Tennessee. Neighbors called the fire department, and the commotion attracted a deputy sheriff on patrol. From the wreckage of his still site, officers recovered three large stills and 37 half-gallon jars of moonshine.

He was back on television that night, and several times more in the months ahead, as news stations out of Knoxville followed his court appearances and continuances. In July 2007, Popcorn received a $3,000 fine and two years probation for possession of moonshine, with an additional six months probation for possession of a still. Popcorn was undaunted. By the time he was sentenced, he had already rebuilt his operation, even bigger than before. 

This time around, the authorities were keeping tabs. An undercover officer earned Popcorn’s trust and purchased several hundred gallons of his moonshine. In the second major bust in as many years, state and federal agents raided his property and seized 1,700 gallons of moonshine. An attorney for the United States wrote: 

What aggravates these circumstances even more is the fact that Sutton was on probation in Tennessee state court for felony possession of untaxed liquor when the present offense was committed. This probation did not stop or even slow Sutton’s illegal activities. … Sutton seems to be proud of his disregard for the law and no sentence thus far has deterred him from his continuing criminal activities.

In January 2009, I asked Popcorn how he thought things would go. “I won’t see no time,” he said. That was good to hear, and I thought his connections had come through for him, but then he pointed his finger beneath his chin like a gun. “When I was young, I could build time,” he said. “I’m too old now to build time.” A few days later, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, minus 10 days served. 

On March 16, the week before he was scheduled to report, while his wife was out shopping for groceries, he took his own life. His body was found in his favorite car, the one bought with three jars of moonshine. Had he reported to prison and done his time, he would have been home by his 64^th birthday.

Since that time, Popcorn has been celebrated as an icon of Appalachian culture. His likeness peers down from street murals in Nashville, Knoxville, and Asheville. At least 20 ballads have been recorded in his honor, telling a spirited story in which he was “born with a Mason jar in his hand.” An annual Popcorn Sutton Jam has become a major music and food festival in East Tennessee. Popcorn is more well-known today than he ever was in his lifetime, and he has admirers around the world, but along the way he became public property. 

Immediately after the news of his death, a variety of tales about Popcorn took root in the region. In one of the most prevalent, he faked his death to elude authorities. In a competitive narrative, he was killed for his “fortune.” Over the past 15 years, nearly every exploit in the history of bootlegging has been attributed to him, up to and including the invention of NASCAR. 

Descriptions of him in online commentary, by people who never met him, depict a remarkable character, free-spirited and living off the land without any of the complications of modern life, fighting all those who would interfere with his God-given rights. And many go further, into outright veneration, describing him as “smarter than any damn one of us,” “one of the last real men left in the world,” and “the best man there ever was.” The person I knew has been completely subsumed in this mythmaking enterprise.

I do think Popcorn’s transformation into a folk hero is interesting and worthy of study. Within it are themes that run through centuries of Appalachian history. But lately the narrative has taken a much more simplistic turn that speaks largely to the present political moment. Plainly stated, as it often is, the story goes: the government killed Popcorn Sutton. 

From this perspective, Popcorn is a case study in the evils of faceless government bureaucracy and its consequences for our life and liberty. Here was a simple, honest man who wanted to live free and by the guidance of his own conscience, who was hounded and shaken down for the collection of a few tax dollars, and who simply ran out of options in the end. He was, in short, a martyr. “Those feds were no better than animal poachers,” one man comments on YouTube. Another says, “Popcorn was the one they picked, just like Waco, Ruby Ridge.” 

The truth is that Popcorn chose a path that would bring him into continued conflict with the law, especially toward the end, when I believe he felt he had little to lose. I’m not defending the priorities or fairness of the justice system, just underscoring the fact that Popcorn—who spoke reverently in his book of old-time moonshiners like Lonzo Sutton, who had been caught seven times—wanted to play this game, evidently to the end. 

Popcorn pushed his luck as far as he could, perhaps only to see how far that was, played his hand down to the last card, flipped the bird, and left the building. His final act underscored the willfulness, hardheadedness, agency, and intention that had defined his entire life up to that point. I don’t believe he would have wanted to be remembered as a victim, ground down and defeated by the state, or a martyr in someone else’s agenda. The man I knew held the reins of his destiny and wanted everyone to know it. 

When one considers how the internet has recruited and galvanized a global, albeit niche, fan base for Popcorn Sutton, the tragedy of his death is at least tempered by a kind of immortality that the ancient Greeks understood. His story goes on without him, into the annals of folklore, wherein, as Joseph Campbell observes, “the names and figures of the great and little heroes of the world act irresistibly as magnets to those floating filaments of myth that are everywhere in the air.”

Neal Hutcheson is the author of The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton and has produced numerous documentaries on Appalachian culture, including the Emmy award winning The Last One with Popcorn Sutton.