The People Who Brought the Still

You might wonder where the moonshine came from in the first place — I mean the very craft of it, the knowledge, the pot still, the whole business of turning grain into liquor in a copper pot. It didn't spring up out of the Carolina dirt. It came across an ocean, in the memory and the hands of a particular, stubborn, remarkable people — and it's the same people who gave these mountains their music and half their soul.

They were the Scots-Irish — the Ulster Scots — Presbyterians from the borderlands of Scotland who'd been planted in the north of Ireland, and then, poor and proud and tired of being pushed around, they packed up in the seventeen-hundreds and poured into America. And when they got here, they didn't stop in the comfortable coastal towns. They headed for the roughest, highest, hardest country they could find — up into these Appalachian mountains — because it looked like home, and because up here nobody would bother them. Sound like anybody you've heard about today?

And they brought two things in their baggage that shaped everything after. One was the still — the ancient Scots-Irish craft of distilling whiskey, the pot and the coil and the know-how, handed down for centuries. Set that down in a land of endless corn and roadless hollows, and you've got moonshine within a generation. And the other thing they brought was the fiddle, and the ballad, and the tune — the old Celtic music of the borderlands, which married up with African banjo and other sounds in these mountains and became old-time, and bluegrass, and eventually a big piece of American music itself.

So the moonshine and the music you find all through this country — the still in the hollow and the fiddle on the porch — came off the same boat, out of the same tough, proud, independent people. Down in Franklin there's even a museum of Scottish tartans, the only one in America, keeping that thread alive. When you hear a banjo ring out of these hills, or hear tell of a still up a creek, you're hearing Scotland and Ulster, four hundred years on, still singing in the Carolina mountains.