“Mountain Dew” started as a song by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the western North Carolina banjo player and song collector, who had trained in law. In a spoken note he later recorded, Lunsford said he composed the words and the tune about 1920. He recorded it, singing with his own banjo, in Ashland, Kentucky, on 6 February 1928, and Brunswick issued it that year on Brunswick 219, backed with “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.”
Lunsford’s text is a courtroom story. A young man answers a charge, and his case is a list of respectable customers. A deacon drives by in his auto because his family is down with the flu and wants a quart, a doctor telephones about half past two, and a train conductor asks for “a quart or two.” Each verse comes round to “they call it that old mountain dew, and those who refuse it are few.” At the end, the judge offers to set him free if he will pay the cost. The historian Dan Pierce has suggested that a court case Lunsford witnessed in Madison County, together with a song sung by students at the Biltmore Forest School that mentioned “good old mountain dew,” gave him the idea.
The version most people know is Scott Wiseman’s. Lunsford himself credited “Scotty” of Lulu Belle and Scotty with adding “some more modernized stanzas” and putting it on a record, after which it “was re-popularized,” and he noted that the tune had stayed much the same. Wiseman paid Lunsford $25 for the rights and gave him half the royalties. Lulu Belle and Scotty recorded “Mountain Dew” in Chicago on 2 February 1939, with Wiseman on banjo, Salty Holmes on guitar, Alan Crockett on fiddle and Jack Taylor on bass. Vocalion issued it in March 1939, coupled with “When I Yoo Hoo in the Valley.” Wiseman dropped the trial. In his version a buyer leaves a dollar or two in an old hollow tree down the road and comes back to find a jug, and the chorus grows out of Lunsford’s refrain, adding “I’ll hush up my mug if you’ll fill up my jug.” As the Stanley Brothers sang it, a preacher stops for a quart because his wife has the flu, much as the deacon had in Lunsford’s text. Another verse brings in Mr. Roosevelt and the dry law, and a short uncle feels like a giant after a pint.
The Delmore Brothers recorded it as “Old Mountain Dew” in New York on 11 September 1940 (Decca 5890). Grandpa Jones cut it in Nashville for King in March 1947, issued that April on King 624 with “My Darlin’s Not My Darlin’ Anymore.” The Stanley Brothers recorded it at the King studio in Cincinnati on 14 September 1959, credited to Scott Wiseman. Carter Stanley sang lead, Ralph Stanley tenor, Bill Napier baritone and George Shuffler bass, with Ralph on banjo, Napier on mandolin and Shuffler on bass fiddle. It came out on their King album Sing Everybody’s Country Favorites (King 690) in June 1960.
