Vintage 1990s Mountain Dew Bottle Cap 🍾 Willy the Hillbilly Moonshiner Twist-Off Crown NOS

Where Did Mountain Dew Come From? 🥃 Mountain Dew Was Invented So Two Brothers Could Cut Their Bourbon

Size: 1 1/4"

Honest - that's how it started, and this little green cap still has the joke on it. Long before anybody bottled it, mountain dew was what hill folks called homemade whiskey. On the cap a bearded fellow in a floppy hat and a checked shirt hugs a jug marked mountain Dew, and the cork is shooting straight up past his hat brim. Collectors call him Willy the Hillbilly.

I found these in Jefferson, North Carolina - Ashe County, 2,907 feet up in the Blue Ridge, real mountain country, about as close to the genuine article as a soda cap is ever going to get. They're 1990s twist-off crowns, about an inch and a quarter across, TWIST OFF printed around the skirt and a little ink production code near the edge. Every one I have is new old stock - the flutes still flared out, a smooth plastic liner inside with no bottle ring on it, never on a bottle.

🎵 A song before it was a soda

Mountain dew is old Scots-Irish and Southern slang for moonshine; an Irish song called The Rare Old Mountain Dew was going by 1882. Then Appalachia wrote one of its own. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a North Carolina lawyer and folklorist, wrote Good Old Mountain Dew and recorded it for Brunswick in 1928. The way the story goes, he wrote it while he was defending folks charged with making liquor, and the first verses were all about the courtroom.

In 1935 Scotty Wiseman, of Lulu Belle and Scotty, gave it a new chorus and swapped the courtroom for verses about the making itself. Two years later, at the National Folk Festival, Lunsford liked the new version so well he sold Wiseman the rights for twenty-five dollars - what a train ticket cost - and kept half the royalties. Grandpa Jones, Glen Campbell, the Delmore Brothers and Willie Nelson all recorded it, and Nelson took it to No. 23 on the country chart. Grandpa Jones - Louis Marshall Jones, the Kentucky banjo man who joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1946 and was one of the first Hee Haw cast in 1968 - had it out around the time the soda came along. So a soda took its name from a bootlegging song - and the song has outlasted just about everybody who ever recorded it.

🏭 Two brothers, a bourbon and Knoxville

Barney and Ally Hartman of Knoxville, Tennessee put Mountain Dew together in the 1940s because they couldn't count on getting the lemon-lime mixer they liked with their Old Taylor bourbon, so they made their own. They'd come to Knoxville in 1931 - out of Columbus or Augusta, Georgia, depending on which paper you read - and by the end of that decade they were the town's Pepsi-Cola bottler. A state historical marker on Magnolia Avenue in East Knoxville tells the story now. Ally's son Bernard J. Hartman later ran the family's Hartman Beverage Co., and the house Ally and his wife Polly built in 1956 has been advertised as the home of Mountain Dew's co-creator.

They launched it in 1946 with hillbilly all the way. John Brichetto drew the labels - a barefoot mountaineer with a rifle and a moonshine jug - and his first sketches are said to show the hillbilly shooting at a revenuer running out of an outhouse while a pig watches from the corner. Some Knoxville folks give Barney Hartman's own hand-drawn labels the credit instead, and both stories still get told. The pitch: It'll tickle yore innards... there's a bang in every bottle. The trademark came through November 12, 1948.

Knoxville historian Jack Neely points out why it caught on. Snuffy Smith and Li'l Abner had both shown up in 1934 and were bigger than ever, the Tennessee Vols were trying out a mountaineer with a shootin' iron and a blue-tick hound named Smoky, and the Grand Ole Opry - Roy Acuff, Homer and Jethro, the Delmore Brothers, Uncle Dave Macon, Minnie Pearl - was going all in on overalls and blacked-out teeth, when the generation before them wouldn't have walked on stage without a suit and tie. They even called the music hillbilly.

✍️ Signed like a moonshiner's jug

My favorite part of the whole thing: the early labels said by Barney and Ollie - filled by, the way a man signs his own jug. And it stuck. As the drink spread, bottlers and their crews wrote their own pairs of names on the labels - Ed and Gene, Ray and Jack - and collectors figure there are more than nine hundred different early Mountain Dew bottles, a lot of that because of the names. That lasted until Pepsi came along and the names came off.

🚂 Johnson City and Marion

Charles Gordon, who bottled a drink called Dr. Enuf with William Swartz, met the Hartmans on a train and got handed a sample. They struck a deal, and in 1954 his Tri-City Beverage Corporation in Johnson City, Tennessee got the very first Mountain Dew franchise and started bottling it. Bill Bridgforth, who managed Tri-City, pushed 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 became Tip's president in 1957, and around 1961 he reworked the formula partly by taste-testing it on the people of Marion, a lot of them at the lunch counter of a Main Street drugstore. Folks in town still remember being part of it, and local lore says he carried trays of test batches around to the neighbors. Virginia's Board of Historic Resources approved a marker for Marion as the birthplace of modern Mountain Dew in September 2024, and it was dedicated May 23, 2025 on North Main Street at the old Tip address, with the mayors of Marion and Johnson City both there. Joe Ellis, who pushed for the marker, has been leading a plan for a Mountain Dew museum in the old pharmacy whose lunch counter hosted the tasting.

Marion's got a literary streak too. It's been the Smyth County seat since 1832, and in 1926 Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio - started building a house near Trout Dale in Grayson County with the money from his one best-seller, Dark Laughter, and named it Ripshin, after the creek. In 1927 he bought both of Marion's weekly papers, the Smyth County News and the Marion Democrat, and wrote for them, some of it under a character he made up called Buck Fever. He married Eleanor Copenhaver, a Marion girl who worked in the YWCA's industrial department, at her folks' house in town in 1933, and he's buried in Marion's Round Hill Cemetery.

PepsiCo bought Mountain Dew and Tip in August 1964. Pepsi's early ads used the old song for a jingle and a character they spelled Willie - the fellow collectors now call Willy. In 1969 Pepsi changed the logo to go after a younger, outdoorsy crowd, and the hillbilly came off the front. He's never stayed gone for long.

🥃 Little Chicago

Johnson City has a reputation of its own. During Prohibition it got called Little Chicago for all the bootleg traffic coming out of the mountains. Legend has it the town was one of Al Capone's distribution points, and local lore says he kept a part-time room at Montrose Court, an apartment building that's on the National Register of Historic Places today. Nobody's ever proved the Capone part, and everybody up there tells it anyway.

⛰️ Jefferson, North Carolina

Jefferson is the county seat of Ashe County, way up in northwestern North Carolina. In 1799 the General Assembly bought fifty acres to lay out Jeffersonton, named for Thomas Jefferson, who was vice president then - one of the first towns in the country named for him. The New River, one of the oldest rivers in the eastern United States, runs through the county, and the town had 1,622 people at the last count. It's the kind of country the words mountain dew came out of in the first place.

👑 About these

William Painter of Baltimore patented the crown cork on February 2, 1892 - U.S. Patent 468,258 - and started Crown Cork & Seal to make them; his first ones had twenty-four teeth and a paper-backed cork disc so the drink never touched the metal, and by the 1930s his company made half the world's bottle caps. Cork gave way to plastic, the teeth got fewer, and somebody figured out how to thread it so you could open a bottle bare-handed. That's what this is - a twist-off crown with a mountaineer and his jug. Put one in a shadow box with your soda caps, on a cap board by brand, on a kitchen shelf with the moonshine-jug pieces, or give it to a Dew drinker from the Tennessee, Virginia or Carolina mountains. Small thing, big story - and if you want to know anything else about it, just ask me. The supply is finite - once these last unused Willy caps from Jefferson are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.