Vintage 1990s Mountain Dew Bottle Cap 🍾 Willy the Hillbilly Moonshiner Twist-Off Crown NOS
Size: 1 1/4"
That is the whole origin story, and this little green crown is still telling the joke. "Mountain dew" was hill-country slang for homemade whiskey long before anybody put it on a bottle, and here is a grinning bearded fellow in a floppy hat hugging a jug lettered mountain Dew with the cork shooting up past his brim. Collectors call him Willy the Hillbilly.
And here is the part I like: I pulled this one out of a find in Jefferson, North Carolina — Ashe County, up at 2,907 feet in the Blue Ridge. Real mountain country. About as close to the actual stuff as a soda cap is ever going to get.
Vintage 1990s Mountain Dew twist-off crown cap, Willy the Hillbilly. 1.25 inches across ~ New old stock: unused, uncrimped, never on a bottle.
"Mountain dew" is old Scots-Irish and Southern slang for moonshine — "The Rare Old Mountain Dew" was an Irish song by 1882. Then Appalachia wrote its own. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a lawyer and folklorist out of North Carolina, wrote "Good Old Mountain Dew" and recorded it for Brunswick in 1928; the story goes he wrote it while defending clients charged with making illegal liquor, and his original verses were courtroom verses.
In 1935 Scotty Wiseman, of Lulu Belle and Scotty, rewrote it — new chorus, and the courtroom traded for verses about actually making the stuff. Two years later at the National Folk Festival, Lunsford liked the rewrite enough to sell Wiseman the rights outright for twenty-five dollars, the price of a train ticket, with half the royalties still coming back to him. Grandpa Jones, Glen Campbell, the Delmore Brothers and Willie Nelson all cut it. Nelson's got to No. 23 on the country chart. Grandpa Jones was Louis Marshall Jones, the Kentucky banjo man who first joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1946 and was a charter member of the Hee Haw cast in 1968, and his version of it was nationally popular right around the time the soda first came out. Dew fans go one better and tell it that when Willy talked in the old commercials, that was Grandpa Jones doing the voice. A soda got named after a bootlegging song, and the song has outlived nearly everyone who recorded it.
Barney and Ally Hartman of Knoxville, Tennessee put Mountain Dew together in the 1940s because they could not reliably get the lemon-lime setup they liked to mix with their Old Taylor bourbon, so they built their own. The Hartmans had come to Knoxville in 1931, reported at the time as being out of Columbus or Augusta, Georgia; before the end of the decade they were Knoxville's official Pepsi-Cola bottler. There is a state historical marker on Magnolia Avenue in East Knoxville now telling the story of the drink they made there. Ally's son Bernard J. Hartman later ran the family's Hartman Beverage Co., and the house Ally and his wife Polly built in Knoxville in 1956 has since been advertised for sale as the home of Mountain Dew's co-creator.
They brought it out in 1946 with a flat-out hillbilly campaign. The artist John Brichetto drew the labels: a barefoot mountaineer with a rifle and a moonshine jug. His first sketches are said to show the hillbilly shooting at a revenuer running out of an outhouse, with a pig sitting in the corner watching. Some Knoxville tellings credit Barney Hartman's own hand-drawn labels instead — both stories are still told. The slogan promised "It'll tickle yore innards… there's a bang in every bottle." The trademark came through on November 12, 1948.
Knoxville historian Jack Neely has pointed out why it worked: Snuffy Smith and Li'l Abner both arrived in 1934 and were more popular than ever by the time the Hartmans started bottling, and the Tennessee Vols were trying hillbilly imagery of their own, down to a mountaineer with a shootin' iron and a blue-tick hound named Smoky. Over in Nashville the Grand Ole Opry, with Roy Acuff, Homer and Jethro, the Delmore Brothers, Uncle Dave Macon and Minnie Pearl, was leaning into it too, blacked-out teeth and overalls and all, when the generation of performers before them would never have stepped on a stage without a suit and tie. They even called the music "hillbilly" in those days.
This is my favorite piece of the whole story. The early hillbilly labels read "by Barney and Ollie" — as in filled by Barney and Ollie, exactly the way a man signs his own jug. And the custom stuck: as the drink spread, bottlers and their crews put their own pairs of names on the labels. Ed and Gene. Ray and Jack. Collectors reckon there are more than nine hundred different early Mountain Dew bottle varieties, and the name in the blank is a big part of why. It ran that way until Pepsi came into the picture and the names came off.
Charles Gordon, who with William Swartz bottled a drink called Dr. Enuf, met the Hartman brothers on a train and was handed a sample. Gordon and the Hartmans made a deal, and in 1954 his Tri-City Beverage Corporation in Johnson City, Tennessee got the very first Mountain Dew franchise the Hartmans ever issued and started bottling it. Bill Bridgforth, who managed Tri-City Beverage, reworked the flavor toward citrus lemonade in 1958 — and Dick Bridgforth later wrote a book-length history of the brand.
Then the Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia bought the rights. William H. "Bill" Jones had taken over as president of Tip in 1957, and around 1961 he refined the formula partly by running taste tests on the people of Marion, a lot of them over the lunch counter of a Main Street drugstore. Townspeople still remember taking part, and local lore says he carried trays of test batches round to neighbors' houses. Virginia's Board of Historic Resources approved a state historical marker for Marion as the birthplace of modern Mountain Dew in September 2024; it was dedicated on May 23, 2025, on North Main Street at the old Tip address, with the mayors of Marion and Johnson City both there. Joe Ellis, the local man who pushed for the marker, has also been leading a plan for a Mountain Dew museum in the old Main Street pharmacy whose lunch counter hosted the tasting.
Marion has a literary side too, and it is a good one. It has been the county seat of Smyth County since 1832, and in 1926 Sherwood Anderson, who wrote Winesburg, Ohio, put his Dark Laughter money into a farm near Trout Dale, over in Grayson County, and built a house there he named Ripshin, after the creek running through the property. In 1927 he bought both of Marion's weekly papers, the Smyth County News and the Marion Democrat, and wrote up the town's colorful characters under a made-up name, Buck Fever. In 1933 he married Eleanor Copenhaver, a Marion native who worked in the YWCA's industrial program, at her parents' house in town, and he is buried in Marion, in Round Hill Cemetery.
PepsiCo bought Mountain Dew and the Tip Corporation in August 1964. Pepsi's early ads leaned on the old song for a jingle and on a character they spelled Willie — the grinning mountain man collectors now call Willy. In 1969 Pepsi changed the logo, chasing a younger, outdoorsy crowd, and the hillbilly came off the front of the brand. He has never quite stayed gone.
The town that first bottled it under franchise has a reputation of its own. During Prohibition, Johnson City picked up the nickname "Little Chicago" for its bootlegging traffic out of the Appalachian Mountains. Legend holds the town was one of the distribution points for Al Capone, and local lore says he kept a part-time room at Montrose Court, an apartment building that is on the National Register of Historic Places today. Nobody has ever proved the Capone part, and everybody up there tells it anyway.
Jefferson is the county seat of Ashe County, high in northwestern North Carolina at 2,907 feet. The General Assembly bought fifty acres to lay out "Jeffersonton" in 1799 and named it for Thomas Jefferson, then vice president — one of the first towns in the country to carry his name. The New River, one of the oldest rivers in the eastern United States, runs through the county. It was 1,622 people at the last count. That is the sort of country the words "mountain dew" came out of in the first place, and it is where this cap was sitting when I got to it.
William Painter of Baltimore patented the crown cork on February 2, 1892 — U.S. Patent 468,258 — and started the Crown Cork & Seal Company to make them. His original had twenty-four teeth and a thin cork disc with a paper backing so the drink never touched the metal. By the 1930s his company was supplying half the world's bottle caps. Cork liners gave way to plastic, the tooth count came down, and somewhere along the line somebody worked out how to put a thread on it so you could open a bottle with your bare hand instead of hunting for the church key. That is what this one is: a twist-off crown with a plastic liner, printed with a mountaineer and his jug.
Small thing, big story. If you want to know anything else about it, just ask me — happy to pick it up and look again.
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