Moonshine maker takes his own life

Published 10:06 pm Thursday, March 19, 2009

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Famed Appalachian moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, whose incorrigible bootlegging ways were as out of step with modern times as his hillbilly beard and overalls, took his own life rather than go to prison for making white lightning, his widow says.

“He couldn’t go to prison. His mind would just not accept it,” Pam Sutton said Wednesday from the Parrottsville.

Hours earlier she had buried Sutton, 62, near Haywood County, N.C., where he grew up. He went to his grave in a pine casket he bought years ago and kept in a bedroom.

Sutton — nicknamed “Popcorn” for smashing up a 10-cent popcorn machine in a bar with a pool cue in his 20s — looked like a living caricature of a moonshiner. He wore a long gray beard, faded overalls, checkered shirt and feathered fedora. He made his home in Cocke County, where cockfighting and moonshining are legend.

He wrote a paperback called “Me and My Likker” and recorded videos on how to make moonshine.

“You might say he embodied a kind of Appalachian archetype, a character trait of fearlessness and fierce loyalty to regional identity even in the face of personal persecution and stereotyping,” said Ted Olson, a regional writer and faculty member in East Tennessee State University’s Department of Appalachian Studies.

Sutton conceded he was part of a dying breed in an interview last year with actor Johnny Knoxville for a video posted on Knoxville’s “Jackass” Web site. “All the rest of them that I know are dead,” Sutton said in the clip. “I just hope and pray they don’t send me off (to prison).”

Sutton’s widow said he’d just gotten a letter to report today to a medium-security federal prison in south Georgia to begin an 18-month sentence for illegally producing distilled spirits and being a felon in possession of a gun.

On Monday, she came home from running errands and found him dead in his old Ford. Authorities suspect carbon monoxide poisoning.