If you ask Neal Hutcheson how long it took him to create his book, The Moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, the answer could be two years, or it could be 20 years. It depends on the framing.
By trade, Hutcheson is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker whose works are focused on “documenting heritage in transition,” and it was the work he did on one such film—2004’s Mountain Talk about language and culture in Southern Appalachia—that introduced him to the man would ultimately become the subject of several additional documentaries: Popcorn Sutton. Hutcheson filmed and interviewed Sutton extensively about Sutton’s illegal moonshine distilling and distribution business until Sutton’s death in 2009, and it’s from those experiences that this book was created.
“The purpose of this book,” Hutcheson
