Comment on this story

Thunder Road, and the context of a legendary crack-up

by Jack Neely

It was a peculiar song that hopped onto the Billboard Hot 100 charts in September of 1958. At the height of rock ‘n’ roll and R&B and “Nashville-Sound” country, this song had nothing to do with any of that. It was a jaunty, old-fashioned, almost childlike tune about a police chase that ends in the death of a bootlegger. Also peculiar was the fact that the singer wasn’t one of the pop singers of the day, not Elvis or Frank Sinatra, or the biggest act of that year, the Everly Brothers. The singer was tough-guy movie actor Robert Mitchum.

Most startling of all to those who heard it on one of the local radio stations—WNOX or WBIR or WIVK—was that the song seemed to describe a specific event in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The song promoted a new movie called Thunder Road, which starred Mitchum as cool bootlegger Luke Doolin. Mitchum produced the movie and co-wrote the screenplay for it. Today the movie itself is as much an oddity as the song. The Motion Picture Guide recalls it as “a minor cult classic, and one of Mitchum’s more interesting (and bizarre) efforts.”

Mitchum also wrote the song he sang, “The Ballad of Thunder Road.”

In the song, he sets up a specific setting, four years earlier than his song: “On the first of April, 1954....” Then he traces the route of a moonshine bootlegger who roared out of Harlan, Kentucky, then “screamed past Maynardville,” in a southwestern arc through East Tennessee.

“Blazin’ right through Knoxville, out on Kingston Pike

“Then right outside of Bearden they made the fatal strike....”

Finally unable to skirt a police roadblock, the bootlegger runs off the road at 90 mph, and “the devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day.”

As some are disappointed to learn, that darkly odd movie diverges from the title song’s lyrics, mentioning Knoxville only in passing. The film was shot in Asheville, and set in Eastern Kentucky and Memphis; none of the film’s action is obviously set in or near Knoxville. The fatal crash appears to be somewhere in the West Tennessee countryside. Mitchum’s Knoxville stanza is missing from the part of the song that’s on the soundtrack.

Which just adds to the mystery. Mitchum wrote both the movie’s story and the song. Which came first? And why did he change the setting of the movie, or the song?

The boxes containing the daily papers of April 1954, on microfilm look just a little more worn than the others in the tray. I’ve known several who’ve looked here, in vain.

A half-century ago, Knoxville was a city of about 120,000, and shrinking. Factories, once the core of Knoxville’s economy, were closing one after another. West Knoxville ended at Sequoyah Hills. Bearden was a suburban community with a couple of residential neighborhoods and a few restaurants, drive-ins, beer joints: Dixieland, Bill’s, Zesto, the Wayside, the Spanish Gardens. Beyond Bearden, Kingston Pike was mainly a tourist route through farmland dotted with motor courts catering to long-distance tourists.

Twenty years after the end of national prohibition, liquor sales were still illegal in Knoxville, which some claimed was the biggest dry city in America; suburban country clubs and downtown nightclubs depended on bootleggers who were more prosperous than some professionals in this melancholy town. But it was more than a local trade.

The plot of the “The Ballad of Thunder Road” is at least plausible. Moonshine is a boutique item today, offered by droll party hosts and, sub rosa, by friendly countermen. Most of us indulge in ritual amounts, kind of like we take communion. However, Knoxville once had a reputation as a clearing house for industrial-sized quantities of moonshine, as Ernie Pyle had mentioned in his nationally syndicated column not quite 20 years before the movie came out. As late as the 1950s, there was still significant moonshine commerce in East Tennessee; by one 1955 survey, 82 percent of the illegal moonshine stills in America were within 200 miles of Knoxville. The FBI suspected that most of it was funneled through Knoxville, which had rail and highway connections to the rest of the country. Knoxville also had a reputation for lawlessness. In 1951, Knoxville had made Look magazine’s short list of “BAD” American cities, condemned for its “open toleration of sin.”

Bootleggers in souped-up cars did sometimes take police on high-speed chases through town. We know that much. But it has long been taken as a matter of faith that “The Ballad of Thunder Road” is a literal description of a real bootlegger’s cracking up in a specific spot on Kingston Pike, near Bearden. Specifically, a bootlegger who crashed into an electric substation, just like in the movie. Some recall an electric substation on the west side of Bearden Hill, near the intersection of Papermill Road and Kingston Pike, a spot which would be a logical place for a police roadblock. A lot of folks say they know somebody who knows somebody who remembers the fateful accident vividly. But finding the actual witnesses has proven to be maddeningly elusive. Several researchers that I know of have tried, and failed to nail down names and dates.

Lenoir City writer Alex Gabbard researched the question some years ago for his book, Return To Thunder Road. In the original edition, he cites an anonymous source, Deep Throat style, who claims to remember details of a bootlegger crashing into the electric substation just west of Bearden Hill. But in the second edition of that book, the source seems to have backed off, leaving many of us to wonder whether Luke’s fate was more history or fiction.

But just for fun, I went back and looked at the allegedly fateful first days of April 1954. If there’s no record of a bootlegger’s spectacular crash, there’s some interesting color, and some peculiar coincidences.

That week is not the week to look at if you’re looking for evidence of the serenely tranquil ‘50s. History and nostalgia are like oil and water in general, and 1954 sounds a lot better in our elders’ memories than it does in the actual newspapers. (If anyone ever finds out when “the good ol’ days” were, let us know.)

On April 1, 1954, the dailies included unsettling news. IT COULD HAPPEN HERE, trumpeted the News-Sentinel. IT wasn’t the hazard of bootleggers wrecking their cars into electric substations. IT was the threat of an H-bomb attack. Both dailies carried a diagram the government released of an all-too-plausible scenario: a direct H-bomb hit on Oak Ridge, remarking that half of Knoxville would be obliterated by the blast, and that the poison cloud would reach well past Jefferson City.

Things were troubling all over. A report from Vietnam, where the French seemed to be slowly losing the war to the Communists. The subheads in a reporter’s first-person story tell it all: “This War Is Different... Turgid Mess Nauseates.” The report ends with the coda, “There is no end in sight.”

Those April 1 issues carried news of a DOA at Baptist Hospital: a clerk at Knox County’s Maloneyville correctional facility, shot in the chest. The accused killer was not a rogue prisoner, but his own supervisor. It would be only one of 23 murders in Knoxville that year, and nowhere was safe. A couple of months earlier, a local broker had been shot in the head while golfing at Cherokee Country Club.

At the Watauga Hotel on Gay Street, a 42-year-old sheet-metal worker was found dead, a suicide by hanging. A young single mother who had just dropped her young daughter off at a South Knoxville school, barely escaped abduction by a stranger who pounced on her from the bushes. A woman alighting from a bus on Kingston Pike had her foot crushed by a passing car. A teenager accused his 42-year-old mother of being the kingpin of a ring of thieves and bootleggers in the Ritta and Mascot communities. And two Knoxville men were charged with statutory rape. (That’s all; in 1954, the newspapers discreetly omitted details of sex crimes. People might get scared.)

Even bookstores weren’t safe. Junius B. French was heading up the Knoxville Board of Review, an anti-pornography watchdog committee. A newspaper reporter went out to see how Mr. French’s committee was working, and dropped in a Gay Street bookstore where paperbacks were “stacked almost to the rafters.” Of them, “fully 90 percent of the pocket-sized novels we examined bore lurid covers depicting sex, crime, or violence.” Some “told of sex orgies or of parties in which perversion was practiced.”

The board was more successful in banning the new Jane Russell movie, The French Line, which Gay Street’s Riviera Theater had planned to show; in the movie, the buxom star reportedly danced in a bikini. But it was powerless to control the drive-ins beyond city limits. At the Lite Drive-In, on Alcoa Highway, was Gilda, the Golden Queen of Burlesque, in The ABC’s of Love—with a classic second feature, Reefer Madness.

If we don’t have a record of that particular fatal car wreck, we have records of others. In the first three months of 1954 alone, a total of 17 people had been killed in car wrecks in Knox County.

Bootlegging was a major municipal issue in 1954. On the third of April 1954, Mayor George Dempster boasted that major bootleggers had been “forced to move their headquarters outside the city.” The same day, a 1953 Lincoln was stopped in a speed zone, and one Charlie Hall of Knoxville, where a glass of wine was illegal, was found to be carrying 50 cases of whiskey. He was fined $2. Not much compared to the loss of the confiscated whiskey.

On the second of April 1954, police joined a high-speed chase on Clinton Highway. Two men were racing down the highway at speeds of well over 100 mph. Police collared only one of them. Among Knoxvillians of a certain age, illegal racing was epidemic. After midnight the following night, four teenagers were arrested for racing on a blocked-off two-mile stretch of Chapman Highway. One of them was clocked at 90.

Perhaps the strangest coincidence of all was a perfectly legal event that happened on the fourth of April 1954. Bootlegging has always been cited as the evolutionary origin of stock-car racing. The connection between Thunder Road and NASCAR is acknowledged on both sides. Some of the early champions of NASCAR had day jobs, or night jobs, as bootleggers.

As it happens, what was billed as the first NASCAR event ever held in Tennessee was held on the fourth of April 1954—at the Broadway Speedway, the half-mile track just north of Fountain City. The fabulous purse of $2,000 drew champion stock-car racers from seven states. The champ that day was Bobby Myers, of Winston-Salem, N.C. (The NASCAR pioneer was killed in a race three years later.)

As for Mitchum himself, on the first of April 1954, he was nowhere near Knoxville, and leading a very different life from that of Luke Doolin. He was in France, at the Cannes Film Festival. He actually appeared in the Knoxville papers that April 5, concerning an embarrassing but not altogether unpleasant incident; a voluptuous British starlet named Simone Silva grabbed Mitchum and posed for photographers as if the two were lovers. As he tried to be a good sport about it, she dropped her scarf-like top, and hugged Mitchum, topless as camera bulbs popped. Mitchum’s wife was present, and unhappy about this development.

Later that year, Mitchum would work with a former Knoxvillian who was working as a screenwriter on a new movie, A Night of the Hunter. Though James Agee was reportedly intoxicated for most of the period when Mitchum might have been around him, maybe the errant author offered Mitchum some lively stories about his hometown. Agee, whose family was from LaFollette, would have been familiar with the route from Corbin through Maynardville, and he’d likely heard some stories.

That’s just speculation, but so is everything else connected to this story. Gabbard attempted to reach Mitchum for his book, to find out what his inspiration for the specific times and places mentioned in the song, but without success. Robert Mitchum died in 1997 without ever explaining where he came up with the details in the song. A recent biography mentions his inspiration for the song, but only its tune. It was, he said, an old Norwegian folk-dance tune his mother used to sing to him.

He could have gotten most of the geographical details off a map, of course. In those days, Bearden was a separate town, and indicated as such in national atlases. But the phrase “Kingston Pike” mainly just shows up on local maps; on national and state maps, it was just highway 11/70.

We do know, via the colorful 2001 biography, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care,” that Mitchum had been considering what he called a “moonshine adventure,” and in a rare fit of scholarly research, spent some days scouring ATF files in Washington and later, on location, in Asheville, supplementing his research with interviews with law-enforcement officials. My colleague Brooks Clark, who once researched the available sources for a feature story in another publication a couple of years ago, told me he thinks it was in these interviews that Mitchum learned how to pronounce Bearden and gathered certain details of a bona fide bust: just not necessarily one in Bearden on April 1, 1954. One West Knox Countian, John Fitzgerald, says he remembers a similar crackup a half-mile farther west, near Morrell Road, involving a bootlegger named Tweedle-O-Twill. Clark has learned since the publication of his article that some readers believe that Tweedle-O-Twill was one Buddy Mathis.

I’ve done my part, and I’ve joined the researchers who have failed. Maybe someday, someone will nail down the true identity of Luke Doolin, and the circumstances of his Kingston Pike death. Was it based on a true story with specific details Mitchum learned from federal agents, or, by framing it as if it were a specific story, was he just pulling our legs? I don’t know, but I sometimes wonder if he tipped us off with one line:

On the first of April....

April 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 14 © 2004 Metro Pulse