Family History

Robert Mitchum sings a version of "Thunder Road," a movie he starred in as the outlaw driver.



It's a song that always makes me think of home. My family was not tightly involved in the moonshine trade, but my grandfather -- who was a welder -- did make moonshine stills during Prohibition, as it coincided with the Great Depression and still-welding work was the sort of thing people would pay for when there wasn't much other work to be had. He and my father also worked on the Tennessee muscle cars, and all other sorts of automobiles, that might have transported the stuff.

Mostly, though, it's the geography of the song: Asheville, the Cumberland Gap, Knoxville's Kingston Pike, and the mountains in between them. On the other side of the family, my mother is from Bearden. I get over there from time to time to see my favorite cousin. They're definitely not moonshiners, mom's folk: I think they're all teetotaling Baptists. But it's a connection in the song, all the same.