Tar Heel Lightnin'

How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World

Daniel S. Pierce

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781469653556
• eBook ISBN: 9781469653563
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: North American History

From the late nineteenth century well into the 1960s, North Carolina boasted some of the nation’s most restrictive laws on alcohol production and sale. For much of this era, it was also the nation’s leading producer of bootleg liquor. Over the years, written accounts, popular songs, and Hollywood movies have turned the state’s moonshiners, fast cars, and frustrated Feds into legends. But in Tar Heel Lightnin', Daniel S. Pierce tells the real history of moonshine in North Carolina as never before. This well-illustrated, entertaining book introduces a surprisingly varied cast of characters who operated secret stills and ran liquor from the swamps of the Tidewater to Piedmont forests and mountain coves. From the state’s earliest days through Prohibition to the present, Pierce shows that moonshine crossed race and economic lines, linking men and women, the rebellious and the respectable, the oppressed and the merely opportunistic. As Pierce recounts, even churchgoing types might run shipments of “that good ol' mountain dew” when hard times came and there was no social safety net to break the fall.

Folklore, popular culture, and changing laws have helped fuel a renaissance in making and drinking commercial moonshine, and Pierce shows how today’s producers understand their ties to the past. Above all, this book reveals that moonshine’s long, colorful history features surprises that can change how we understand a state and a region.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. White Lightnin’
• 1. Whiskey’s “Golden Era” in North Carolina
• 2. From Distiller to Blockader to Moonshiner
• 3. Normalizing the Moonshiner
• 4. A “Dry” State
• 5. Modern Moonshine
• 6. North Carolinians “Hard at Work Making That Stuff That Splits the Heads of Many”
• 7. Chasing the Moon
• 8. National Prohibition in North Carolina
• 9. Moonshine Kingpins and Moonshine Capitals
• 10. Prohibition, Moonshine, and North Carolina Culture
• 11. 1941 to 1970—The Heyday of the Moonshine Syndicate
• 12. The Road to Thunder Road
• 13. North Carolina Moonshine, NASCAR, and the “Bootlegger Tracks”
• 14. The End of an Era
• 15. Moonshine Revival
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• A Note on Sources
• Index