The hillbilly is back!

Posted by Dr. Tom Hanchett, staff historian on January 9 2010

Yesterday at Reid's Grocery next to Levine Museum, I saw an old feller I hadn't seen since I was a kid.  The Mountain Dew hillbilly is back in the soft drink case.

Mountain Dew is a great instance of people taking a negative regional stereotype and turning it into a point of pride. When bottlers in the Tennesee mountains around Knoxville and Johnson City developed a citrus soda spiked with caffeine and orange juice back in the 1950s, they named it after a slang term for moonshine. The soft drink didn't have illegal alcohol in it, but the caffeine did give it a right good kick.

Bottle logos played to the national fascination with moonshining. Willy the Hillbilly hugged his clay jug of 'shine, while lower on the bottle a barefooted moonshiner with a rifle chased a rival up a mountain into an outhouse (that's an outdoor bathroom, young people). A happy pig looked on in surprise.

There's an old principle that only Polish people are allowed to tell Polish jokes, and the same thing held for those Southern mountain bottlers playing the country hick. Customers across Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas LOVED Mountain Dew -- its taste and its image. And in 1964, the Pepsi Cola company bought the brand from its originators and took Mountain Dew to an adoring nation.

Somewhere along the way, Pepsi's New York marketers got cold feet about Willy the Hillbilly.  In the 1970s he disappeared, and in recent years Mountain Dew marketing has featured hyper-caffeinated skateboarders and the like.  The formula changed quietly at about the same time. High fructose corn syrup replaced more expensive sugar in Mountain Dew, and in every other U.S. soft drink as well.

Fast forward to 2009. Imported soft drinks from Mexico, still using sugar, are catching on with soft drink connoisseurs (yes, there are such people). A couple of rogue bottlers in West Jefferson, NC and Charlottesville, VA, are finding success with sugar-formula Dew in glass bottles.  So Pepsi rolls out two limited-time-only specialty drinks with sugar, Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback.  The only problem is that for some inexplicable reason they tinker with the Dew formula, leaving out the orange juice and one or two other things. It tastes BLEAH!

December 28, 2009 they try again. This time they get the taste right.  And they ditch the subtle (characterless) 1970s logo from the first roll-out and instead put Willy the Hillbilly proudly on the bottle.

It seems to be working. When I went back to Reid's less than 24 hours later, all the Mountain Dew Throwback had already flown off the shelves. I'm looking for more -- let me know if you have any leads.  Pepsi says they'll only be making it for eight weeks.

Nice as it is to feel the smooth taste of sugar (less "angular" than high fructose corn syrup) and to see old friend Willy, all is not yet completely right with the world. The new labels leave off the outhouse and the pair of hillbillies and the mountain chase.  And that happy pig is nowhere to be seen.