Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World by Daniel S. Pierce

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World by Daniel S. Pierce Max Fraser Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World. By Daniel S. Pierce. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. [viii], 303. $30.00, ISBN 9781-4696-5355-6.) Like one of the Foxfire books, Daniel S. Pierce's Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World is exceptionally good with the small details. Did you know, for instance, that yellowroot or horsemint growing alongside a creekbank indicates the presence of "soft," mineral-free water—the best kind to use when making corn whiskey—while touch-me-nots are a sign of less-ideal, "hard" water (p. 9); that a "'hulled out'" 1940 flathead Ford V-8 can hold twenty-two six-gallon cases of whiskey where its innards used to be (p. 162); or that the early hillbilly singer Charlie Poole bought his first Orpheum No. 3 Special banjo with the proceeds from a moonshining operation he ran with Posey Rorer—later the fiddle player in Poole's pioneering string band, the North Carolina Ramblers? That many such morsels here are gleaned from already published sources—including the Foxfire books themselves, as well as earlier works of scholarship on moonshining and mountain culture in the rural South—may limit the number of entirely original insights offered up by Pierce's book. Nevertheless, Tar Heel Lightnin' does a fine job of being precisely what it sets out to be: a highly readable and always engaging account of the place of moonshining in the history of the Tar Heel State—or, as the book's subtitle would have it, "the Moonshine Capital of the World." And what a sizable place it is. "Indeed, one could argue," as Pierce does, "that illegal liquor production has been as important as tobacco, textiles, or furniture, an integral part of the warp and woof of the state's economic, social, and cultural fabric" (p. 7). A professor of history at the University of North Carolina–Asheville, Pierce knows this territory well (and lest you have any doubts by the end of the book, see the epilogue, which includes a photograph of the author visiting a disused [End Page 741] still site in Montreat). More to the point, he has combed through a century and a half of federal, state, and local records to demonstrate just how ubiquitous and consequential a practice moonshining has been, from the enactment of a federal excise tax on whiskey (at the time a nonissue for North Carolina's whiskeymakers, given that it was passed by Congress in 1862), to the bobo-renaissance in artisanal "so-called legal moonshine" that has become part of the contemporary scene in places like trendy and tourist-friendly Asheville (p. 3). Pierce's discussion of the complex political dynamics surrounding moonshining during Reconstruction and Redemption is particularly illuminating. Initially associated with local defiance of federal authority after the Civil War (illegal whiskey was first known in the state as "blockade liquor," in an appreciative allusion to Confederate blockade-runners [p. 25]), by the 1890s the "drunken Negro" had become a favored bugbear of North Carolina Democrats and temperance advocates alike, who began working hand in glove to push for prohibition and black disenfranchisement within the state (p. 76). Even the Charlotte Observer noted, in 1895, that it had "'not been a great while since the moonshiner was … made a sort of hero in North Carolina'"—yet, by that point, only "'the most densely ignorant or the debased'" could deny "'that the moonshiner lacks all qualities of a hero and is a public enemy'" (p. 44). Doggedly, if not always successfully, Pierce emphasizes the important and often overlooked roles that women, African Americans, and Native Americans have played in North Carolina's moonshining tradition. He attributes the relative underdevelopment of these discussions to a lack of available sources—but a more diligent scholar of race or gender might have done more with the diversity of experiences that Pierce documents...