Convicted moonshiner "Popcorn" Sutton dead of apparent suicide

PARROTSVILLE (WATE) -- Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, who gained fame and notoriety as a moonshiner, died Monday in Cocke County, sheriff's deputies said.

According to a Cocke County Sheriff's Office spokesperson, it appeared that Sutton, 61, took his own life in his Parrotsville home.

Roarin’ out of Harlan, revvin’ up his mill He shot the gap at Cumberland, and screamed by Maynordsville With T-men on his taillights, roadblocks up ahead The mountain boy took roads that even Angels feared to tred.

Dat's Maynardville LOL. Thunder Road was a network of old highways the runners used before Interstates were built. In the East Tennessee/Eastern Kentucky region to go from Kentucky to Ashville, Memphis, or Nashvile, you almost always had to go through Knoxville as it was the major junction for those highways then and for the interstates now. The movie was fiction but the runs were real enough.

Oddly enough Newport where Popcorn was is on the other side of the valley so to speak from Maynardville. About 40 miles as the crow flies. I'm from the Maynardville side of the valley and my wife's step mom was from Newport, Bybee, and Moshiem area depending on which map you use. My wife said her Granny had a man who would come by and sell some medicine :>} That was way back in the late 50's early 60's.

When I bought my place one of the first things I found was some old plastic jugs and a barrel with ax marks in it on the back of my property. I suspect that one was operating in the 1960's and the persons doing it long ago dead. My place is real close to where I grew up. I suspect some of the people I saw walking up the road when I was a kid in the early 60's were headed there.

They need to forget about the moonshiners though and get the blasted Meth Labs. Now there is a true public danger to all. There's likely not that much shine being made anymore anyway.

BTW the Feds where Popcorn lived a few years back were also busting grandpa's for selling a rifle or shot gun at a Flea Market or if they ran too many adds in a local sales papers for such.

I think I will cruise down Kingston Pike, into Bearden and have me a drink in honor of 'Popcorn' after work today. I will, however, be traveling less than 90.

If you can get up to 40 mph between Lyons View Pike and Papermill Rd at rush hour then you have accomplished a major feat indeed LOL. I've heard of some real bad high speed wrecks at night closer into town on the pike before though. Usually going through Sequoya Hills.

I think I have read that Thunder Road was loosely based on a fatal crash during a chase in 1952, don’t remember just where or who the driver was. I have read of the exploits of Junior Johnson and Curtis Turner (who supposedly used a flashing red light and siren to run a roadblock), who were noted drivers and went on to excel on the stock car circuit. I had the privilege of seeing the stock car pioneers (Curtis Turner, Junior Johnson, Lee Petty and Buck Baker) at Darlington in 1958 ..... race was won by Fireball Roberts in a 1957 Chevy.

I grew up at the end of a similar period of whiskey making in the low country of South Carolina, corn was more profitable when sold by the gallon ..... instead of by the bushel. Most of the stills were small (intended for personal use and local delivery) hidden in the swamps and bays but there was one a few miles from us that was built under a dairy barn and their milk tanker had a partition for the moonshine. It operated for a number of years but was “busted” about 1956. By the mid 1960s “boot legging” was pretty much a thing of the past. It was eventually replaced, somewhat, by marijuana but it seemed that a different element was involved and it never had the mystic that the makers of “white lightning” had.

I am familiar with the Newport side of the valley, the Gatlinburg, Townsend area is one of my favorite vacation spots and my first cousin married a submarine sailor from White Pine (they moved back to that area after he retired). I visited them a number of times and met my cousin’s father in law a couple of times before he died. He was born before 1900 and had seen much of the era from Dark Corner to Thunder Road and afterwards ... he died in the early 1980s.

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