Mountain Spirits

from the foreword:
The making, the drinking, and the marketing of corn whiskey are deeply enmeshed in the rural and pioneer Southern mystique, much more deeply than perhaps many Southern social historians have been aware. The fiery beverage has been rooted in the lives of the people in the Appalachian South for over two and a quarter centuries—and long before that in the lives of their ancestors in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Over its broad sweep, the history of corn whiskey is really a story of pioneer America, beginning in the mid-1700s with the settlement of the eastern seaboard interior by thousands of hardy immigrants from Europe and Great Britain—particularly the Ulstermen, the "Scotch-Irish." The immigrants brought grain whiskey with them as they carved a new nation "beyond the Blue Ridge," down the great valley from Pennsylvania through Virginia, in to the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, and through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. The history of corn whiskey is also the saga of a poor but proud and striving people, fighting not only against the seemingly insurmountable odds of the frontier, but also against what they considered to be unjust government interference.

After retiring from a career as a public relations representative with Lockheed Martin Corporation, Joseph Earl Dabney currently enjoys a career as a writer, author, and speaker. Dabney has written three other books: More Mountain Spirits; Herk: Hero of the Skies; and Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine, which was named Cookbook of the Year by the James Beard Foundation for 1999.