The Randy Sons of Nancy Whisky

Abstract

THAT OLD SONG, in both its Scottish and Irish variants, celebrates a lassie-colleen who rarely receives the scholarly attention she deserves. But, when I traveled through Mountain City, Tennessee, doing fieldwork for the LAGS project in August 1971, a good occasion presented itself to investigate the old girl and her American descendants in a serious, if not thoroughly scholarly, way. An interview there uncovered the historical remnant of a troublesome old industry and the source of a unique set of problems for American English lexicography. A 99-year-old woman recounted that, as a last resort in revenue collections, agents of the federal government supervised the operation of a whiskey still and dispensary on Stout's Creek, near Neva, in Johnson County. Before being burned to the ground by dissident neighbors around 1905, the building housed both the still and a primitive mechanism for commercial transactions. Extending out from a hole in the wall, a board made a sliding counter upon which $2.50 was placed by the purchaser, the board then being drawn in by an unseen tradesman and returned with a gallon of corn liquor. No one clearly understood the incendiary bent of the neighborswhether motivated by the impulses of temperance or free enterprise-but a casual observer might suspect a ruse on the part of journeymen moonshiners posing as federal agents. No one ever saw the operators of the blind tiger (as such an enterprise is called), and regular customers simply acknowledged they were trading with Nancy. Like the remains of that east Tennessee blind tiger, a ruined