“DINNER NOT AS ELEGANT AS WHEN WE dined before,” wrote the Reverend Manasseh Cutler in 1802 after a meal at the White House. President Thomas Jefferson’s unusual macaroni casserole, soused with flour and butter, had confused and displeased the representative from Massachusetts. Inspired by Jefferson’s travels in France and Italy, that early dish may not have much resembled today’s universally familiar comfort food—but in 1824, Mary Randolph (the wife of a cousin of Jefferson’s) published a familiar recipe in The Virginia Housewife: boil pasta, layer with cheese and butter, and bake. Southerners have followed her lead ever since. Once an indicator of wealth and luxury made with imported noodles and cheese, mac and cheese is now enshrined as one of our most democratic sides. Velveeta and chopped hot dogs are as likely to cement the noodles at a barbecue joint or church fund-raiser as Parmesan, ham, and peas. Black and white, rich and poor, we’ve made this once-exotic recipe our own.
MADEIRA WINE RANKED AMONG THE MOST popular quaffs of the colonial era, owing to both geography and politics. It was produced on the Portuguese island of Madeira, off the coast of Morocco. Steered by favorable currents and winds, ships bound for the North American colonies from Europe often passed near Madeira, making it one of the last spots for provisioning and stockpiling trade goods before the crossing.
That was the geography. The island’s wine industry was also abetted by politics: the British Parliament exempted the islands from the Navigation Acts, thanks to the marriage of King Charles II and Portugal’s Catherine of Braganza. This essentially turned the island into a proto–duty-free zone and promoted commerce with the British colonies.
Madeira wine was not known for quality originally. It improved, however, through careful cultivation and blending as demand for more refined wines grew abroad. Like port, Madeira was eventually fortified with brandy or other high-proof distillate to stabilize it during the long months in transit, rocking in sweltering cargo bays. Many found the fortified taste agreeable, among them Thomas Jefferson, who frequently bought quantities of Madeira for his cellar. But then he was posted to France, discovered superior French wine, and thereafter spurned the stuff.
With the recent interest in beverages resuscitated from the past, Madeira has been making a low-key comeback in shops and bars around the South. It’s worth sipping in a snifter or mixing sparingly in a cocktail.
WELL, HOW ARE YOU, MAGNOLIA? LOOKING pretty as ever,” my uncle always greeted a woman whose name he could not remember. (Men were designated “Coach.”) “Magnolia,” of course, speaks metaphoric volumes: it heralds the woman as a flower of the South, as mysterious and beautiful, her skin flawless; it acknowledges her fragrant allure. And that flower of the South knew full well that my uncle had no idea what her name was.
Magnolia grandiflora, a true native. Does any other flower have quite the mystique? The California poppy, the Washington cherry, the Texas bluebonnet? Not a chance. They lack a perfume as strong as knockout drops, they lack the magnitude of the creamy tight buds that open into face-size blossoms of extravagant beauty, and they lack gravitas. At the first funeral I ever attended, a full-open magnolia blossom lay on top of the gleaming, dark wood coffin. One was enough.
When I lived for many years in California, the lost scents of the South haunted me most. Anytime I returned, I’d find myself outside after dinner, listening to the screeching chorus of tree frogs and night birds, just breathing in the layers of sweet, dank, fecund air. To me, moonlight smells like honeysuckle. When I was small, my bicycle leaned behind a big mother gardenia against the red barn. Cycling reminds me of the cloying, decadent presence of those flowers that bruised brown when I touched the petals. I’m amazed when my scraggly daphne bush sends out heavenly blasts that no conjurer of scents ever came close to capturing in a bottle. Jasmine spreading around the front steps may be home for copperheads, but the narcotizing perfume rising to the porch compensates for that inconvenience.
I have all these scents and others in my North Carolina garden. When I bought this 1806 house, I acquired an immense garden of old roses. For a couple of late spring weeks, these heritage roses send out delicate whiffs. Maybe it’s the names that transport me—Comtesse de Murinais, Clotilde Soupert, Albertine, Louise Odier. Here’s the atmosphere of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu right smack in the Piedmont pinewoods. All this fragrance of jasmine, honeysuckle, daphne, gardenia, rose—our magical scents, yes, but the truest Eau de South, I must insist, remains the magnolia.
The big tree is as primitive as anything in a rain forest: leaves with undersides like suede riding chaps, tough cones, low limbs grabbing the ground and sprouting, dense roots that crowd out anything that’s trying to grow. We have two towering magnolias, one far enough away from the house that the shed piles of tough leaves don’t bother me, the other too close to my bedroom window. Though it blocks light, I love the sunlight glossing the leaves, especially when they’re dusted with snow. And on a summer night when I raise the window, the soft, waxy sweetness of the ethereal flowers suffuses the room. That’s when I think, “Why live anywhere else, ever?”
IT IS EASY TO CHUCKLE AT THE ANCIENT sailors who mistook manatees for mermaids, not to mention the biologists who (with a wink?) classified the order of manatees as Sirenia, for the mythological sirens who lured sailors to their deaths. According to the messy secondhand version we have of Christopher Columbus’s journal of his first journey to the Americas, he (translation from the fifteenth-century copier’s Spanish) “quite distinctly saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea; but they are not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits.”
Masculine as in whiskery; but unmaidenly in more respects than that. Male or female, a manatee looks like an overstuffed duffel bag, a vegan walrus, a pacifist torpedo, a boneless moose, a cross between a seal and a shar-pei dog. And yet, gender aside, a manatee is a charmer.
They’re affable animals. They are no threat to people, or even to fish. They are nuzzlers. They coexist uneventfully with alligators, except when a manatee tries to play with an alligator. Alligators don’t play. Which is not to say that an alligator will turn around and kick a manatee’s butt when a manatee does a couple of barrel rolls next to an alligator and then mouths the alligator’s foot. No, the alligator just goes like give-me-a-break and swims away. Manatee meat is tasty according to many human accounts, but to an alligator, a manatee is—I’m guessing—too big, too hey-hey-buddy, and, literally, too thick-skinned.
Alligators have no sense of humor. And as far as we can tell, fine, they can live with that. Maybe it is more of a challenge to be a manatee, to live with having neither sentient prey nor natural enemies. Watch video of somebody swimming with manatees: they are like, “Uh, hello. Are you from some other planet? Well, then, let’s nuzzle.” Manatees tend to have scars from motorboat encounters. Conceivably, they would like to play with motorboats. But motorboats kill them, and so do carelessly discarded fishing line (maybe manatees think they can unsnarl backlashes, but now I’m just kidding) and plastic six-pack things (maybe they want a beer, and now I’m not kidding as much).
Manatees are called sea cows, because they are hefty, they mosey along, and they graze—on aquatic plants such as floating hyacinth, pickerelweed, alligator weed, musk grass, sea clover, and something called manatee grass, which is also grazed on by surgeonfish, sea urchins, and possibly pinfish but is particularly important to the manatee diet. It looks hard to digest.
So life for a manatee is not as easy as it looks. But manatees sleep for half the day, sinking to the bottom of the shallow, mostly fresh waters they inhabit (from Virginia to Texas), and bobbing up to the surface every twenty minutes or so, to breathe, fbluh, because they are mammals. They get pneumonia if the water is lower than sixty degrees, so they find their way to warm springs (which are dying out) and power stations. The manatee’s teeth are way back behind its prehensile upper lip, which is divided into independent halves and is used to rustle up dinner and also to communicate with other manatees, and with human swimmers, by touch. But you shouldn’t touch them anymore, because that makes them more vulnerable. They are said to show signs of complex associative learning, and to have good long-term memory.
They may weigh more than a ton. And the only reason a given manatee doesn’t live for sixty years is something or other human.
STILT-LIKE AND NEARLY SPECTRAL, MANGROVES appear to walk on water. Their dense tangles of exposed roots prop up the evergreen foliage above, which attracts hordes of nesting terns, herons, and other birds. But the real magic occurs underwater. A dendritic webbing of mangrove roots slows tidal currents, traps nutrient-rich sediments, and forms its own ecosystem of oysters and muck, crabs and baitfish, and the tarpon and redfish and snook that lurk in the labyrinth, poised for ambush.
Worldwide, there are some eighty species of mangrove, none of which can tolerate freezing temperatures, so that limits them in the United States to subtropical shores such as Florida’s Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands. There, three species of mangrove—red, black, and white—form smaller hummocks and larger islands and armor shorelines for mile after mile. They, in turn, attract a species that can’t exist in the mangroves without the help of sunscreen, beer, and shallow-draft boats: anglers intent on pulling fish from their clutches.
IN HIS BOOK Outside the Southern Myth, the late Mississippi scholar Noel Polk made as shrewd and concise a definition of Southern manners as any: that they “operate as a general commitment to niceness; they anticipate and head off if possible any sort of rupture in the fabric of whatever interaction is taking place.”
IT’S NOT ENTIRELY CLEAR HOW THE MANY riotous, drunken pagan celebrations of fertility at the approach of the vernal equinox grew over the millennia to become riotous, drunken Christian blowouts prior to Lent. But it’s fair to say that the party impulse is an organic one as the days lengthen and the planting season begins—fertility is on the brain because it is in the genome.
As it does with so many other excuses to party, the Deep South, along what we’ll call the French Gulf coast, has honed its Fat Tuesday celebrations to a fine, hot dagger point over the last three centuries. Nosing his way up the Mississippi in March 1699, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, camped at the confluence of a small bayou and the river roughly sixty miles downstream from what would twenty years later become New Orleans. It’s not recorded whether Iberville and his men got drunk or even had any wine with them on the evening of March 3—probably not. As emissaries of the king, Iberville and his brother Jean-Baptiste, Sieur de Bienville, were not enormously bibulous or extreme characters. But Iberville was enough of a churchman or enough of a pre-Lenten celebrant (we don’t know which) to mark his little bivouac as the Pointe du Mardi Gras. It was a jolly name, or at least it conveys jollity three hundred years on, but it’s a fair assumption that it wasn’t all that damned jolly around the campfire on Iberville’s expedition that evening. The French boys were roughing it in 1699 down on the Mississippi. So it’s likely that the name Pointe du Mardi Gras contains more than a dollop of gallows irony. At any rate, it’s thought that this is the first moment that the day was registered on the North American continent, if not exactly celebrated.
In 1703, one of Bienville’s original troops, Nicholas Langlois, thought that Mardi Gras would help boost spirits at the garrison in the capital of French Louisiana, Mobile. We don’t know quite how this “celebration” worked out, either. But nevertheless, Monsieur Langlois’s Mardi Gras is still considered the founding moment of organized Mardi Gras celebrations on the continent—a dozen years before Bienville and his troops even found the bend in the river that would become New Orleans. Needless to say, this fact sticks in the craw of the historically minded latter-day proponents of the holiday there, for whom Mardi Gras has become an incendiary necessity of life itself.
The message of any bacchanal with a proscribed end—especially that of Mardi Gras—is one of tolerance. For those of us who know what Mardi Gras in Mobile or New Orleans (or Galveston or Pensacola) can become, some words of wisdom from Ronal Serpas, a former New Orleans police chief, ring truest. The police are the soldiers of Mardi Gras—we celebrate, they serve. After noting that any one block on a parade route in New Orleans could hold ten thousand people, Serpas observed, with not a little understatement: “The thing about Mardi Gras is, we get the impression that quite a number of the people have been drinking.”
OF ALL THE COLORFUL AND CURIOUS SIGHTS that bombard the senses during New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebrations, none are more colorful and curious than the Mardi Gras Indians. Origins are murky, but just as white society formed parade “krewes” inspired by Roman and Greek mythology for carnival season, black neighborhoods developed social clubs named after imaginary Indian tribes—Yellow Pocahontas, Wild Tchoupitoulas, Red Hawk Hunters, and dozens more. They started parading in native-inspired costumes in the mid-nineteenth century, competing (and frequently rumbling) with other tribes. Today’s processions are raucous but generally peaceful affairs, with rivalries channeled into evermore-elaborate finery—a tribe’s Big Chief can spend a year fashioning a feather-and-bead headdress and suit so massive (a hundred pounds or more) it suggests a walking parade float. His similarly bedecked retinue includes “spyboys” who scout for rival tribes, a “wildman” who wields a symbolic spear, and a second line of musicians and revelers. Meetings on the street with other tribes lead to prideful displays of costumes and dancing, and plenty of taunting insults. You won’t spot Indians tossing beads to undergrads along St. Charles Avenue, though. Their processions mostly stick to the neighborhoods that spawned them, with starting times and places passed along by word of mouth. One could spend twenty carnivals in New Orleans and never once encounter a Mardi Gras Indian—and that would be a shame.
THE OFFICIAL SOUTH CAROLINA STATE Heritage Horses, Marsh Tackies were once common on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Around fourteen hands high and 750 pounds, they can be buckskins, bays, milkshake grullas, red roans, even blue roans. They have double manes, long tails to beat back the bugs, and hard, flinty hooves—surefooted easy keepers, with a sixth sense of getting around in the woods.
Legend pegged them as descendants of horses that Spanish explorers loosed here in the 1500s. But experts rolled their eyes—pure horse pucky, they insisted. Tackies were just scrub horses, like the wild Chincoteague ponies of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, stunted by centuries of poor diet, casual care, and indifferent breeding. It didn’t matter. Tackies served their purpose as Indian ponies and Revolutionary and Rebel cavalry mounts, pulling wagons and plows, hauling the midwife and the mail, carrying high-rolling Northern quail hunters through thicket and briar, and finally the famed Pony Patrol, riding beaches looking for German saboteurs during World War II.
Eventually John Deere and Henry Ford put an end to their necessity. The tackies’ numbers dwindled and the breed seemed on a fast track to extinction, until DNA testing finally confirmed their Spanish blood. Now there’s a breed association, a registry, and a studbook, all DNA-confirmed. And their numbers are up—four hundred and counting.
THUMB THROUGH CERTAIN SOUTHERN CHURCH cookbooks and you’ll notice recipes that specify using Martha White flour. This is not an idle suggestion. If you make biscuits, piecrust, or fried chicken with something else—well, bless your heart. Still don’t believe it? Try telling your mother-in-law you prefer the store brand. See Flour.
WHEN THE BRITISH ASTRONOMERS CHARLES Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their survey of the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania (latitude 39°43'26.3" N) in 1767, little could they have known that their names would one day become synonymous with the division between North and South. At the time they were only settling a land dispute. By the 1800s, though, the Mason-Dixon Line had been stretched westward along the northern borders of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, becoming the dividing line between free and slaveholding states. Offering the country a simple line drawn between North and South, a partition in every other way so complicated and confusing, the Mason-Dixon Line has since become shorthand for the point at which the nation’s political, cultural, and social identities shift. Although the origins of the nickname Dixie for the South remain ambiguous, one theory holds that it is an adaptation of Jeremiah Dixon’s name. Surely this would have come as a great surprise to Dixon, as he spent only a handful of years in the United States. At home in England, however, it was said Dixon was fond of wearing bright red and drinking to excess, which does suggest a deep affiliation with much of Alabama.
ONE POPULAR ONLINE COOKWARE RETAILER offers a mason jar cocktail shaker for $29.95, with an exhortation to “pour on the Southern hospitality.” Keep looking around, and you’ll find every kind of mason jar barware for sale somewhere. How have we come to this? The use of these ubiquitous canning jars as a drinking vessel is as old as Prohibition moonshine. Just like putting up peaches or chowchow in the jars—which took their name from John Landis Mason, the New Jersey native who invented and patented them in 1858—home distillers put up their batches of homemade corn alcohol. While the peaches ended up in a serving dish, the jar of moonshine got passed around a circle, everyone taking a communal sip from its wide-mouth rim. Quart jars filled with iced tea or lemonade have never been a stranger to the Southern table either. Perhaps the occasional barman took it a step further and added a splash of booze. But once the cool bar kids got their hands on quilted jelly jars (quilted is the word used by the longtime jar manufacturer Ball to describe the glass bevels), the fourteen-dollar old-fashioned got a makeover. Those of us with our vintage rocks glasses can only hope it’s a passing fad.
PRESTIGIOUS, GREEN-JACKET-BEQUEATHING PROFESSIONAL golf tournament held each spring in Augusta, Georgia. See Amen Corner.
NATIVE PEOPLES NEVER HAD MUCH USE FOR the tart and bitter mayhaw, which grows wild on thorny trees deep in the swamps of Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Only when sugar came into the picture did this cranberry-sized wild cousin to apples, pears, and crabapples become a sought-after Southern ingredient for jellies, jams, and syrups. During a roughly three-week period each spring, foragers don waders and take to canoes to skim fallen red, pink, and yellow mayhaws off the water’s surface with nets and scoops. Elsewhere, commercial operations have domesticated the fruit. As development continues to decimate its wetland habitat, those farms may represent its future.
FOR A GOOD NUMBER OF SOUTHERNERS, there’s no such thing as mayonnaise. There is only Duke’s Mayonnaise, made according to the sugarless recipe that Eugenia Duke of Greenville, South Carolina, devised in the 1917. When Duke was toying with mayonnaise, it was the country’s hottest condiment: Northern and Southern diners kept it close when making salads or preparing seafood. But the mayonnaise rage eventually subsided up north, where today it might go largely unsold if not for tuna fish and egg salad. In the South, though, it was impossible to extricate mayonnaise from the region’s cuisine and Southerners’ happy memories of it. Far removed from its classical French origins, it was devoured in the South every spring in the form of deviled eggs. Summertime brought tomatoes slathered with mayonnaise and sandwiched between white bread. In the fall, there were shrimp to fry and mayonnaise-based comeback sauce to serve with them. And in winter, holiday spreads of tomato aspic with mayonnaise and mayonnaise chocolate cakes. Mayonnaise is such a constant in Southern life that at least a few Southerners want it to be part of the hereafter, too: Duke’s regularly hears from customers who want their remains forever kept in a Duke’s jar. See Duke’s Mayonnaise.
(1957–)
ROBERT FRANK “BOBBY” MCALPINE IS an Alabama-born residential architect with the sensibility of a poet. Working in a language of timber, stone, steel, and glass, he expresses the timeless qualities of Home with a capital H: sense of place, communion with nature, permanence, peacefulness, grace, hope, and fellowship. McAlpine is a great communicator who connects deeply with clients and designs to meet their emotional needs and desires. “The best house,” he once said, “is the house that looks like how we feel inside.”
McAlpine is beloved in the South because he is of the South. He cherishes history, tradition, the land, a welcoming energy, and the poignant beauty of shabbiness and decay. His work is at once rustic and tailored, nostalgic and modern. An admirer of the English architect Edwin Lutyens, who once described a home to a client as “a house you will love to live in,” McAlpine prefers rambling romanticism to symmetrical classicism. He’s less inspired by Southern architecture (Georgian town houses or Greek Revival plantation manors) than Southern people—“the way the isolation and rural context and heat of the South breed a different kind of character,” he has said. “There is a willingness in Southerners to embrace eccentricity in people, and it’s that kind of gladness and inclusion that I find most inspiring.” His homes express that inspiration in a variety of ways—a graciousness of proportion, less-formal bleeding of rooms into rooms, or the unhurried pacing of a winding entry that allows guests to decompress and drink in their surroundings. The land is always important. McAlpine’s houses—often narrow, linear, glass-filled—engage with the environment, delivering its inhabitants into the landscape.
The son of a sawmill boss, McAlpine grew up in the timber country of southwestern Alabama and eastern Mississippi. Blessed with a preternatural knack for architecture, he was sketching floor plans by age five. He was twelve when he received his first quasi-commission, to draft a set of plans for a ranch house for a family friend in Aliceville, Alabama. After graduating from Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, McAlpine and partners set up shop in Montgomery. Known simply as McAlpine, the firm has designed hundreds of homes across the South and beyond, and later opened offices in Nashville, Atlanta, and New York. Several former McAlpine acolytes have branched out and opened their own firms. One is the Charlotte architect Ken Pursley, who says, “Bobby doesn’t intellectualize his buildings. So many people who work in a traditional palette follow rules and regulations, reference books and maxims handed down from architects like Palladio. Bobby looks at things more from a human or emotional aspect. How a space feels is more important than if it’s traditionally right or wrong. That comes from his being in touch with himself and the human condition.”
USUALLY ADORNED WITH A WAVY BLACK line that represents the Mississippi River, these kiln-fired, Mississippi-made treasures in cobalt blue, jade, and nutmeg brown are made priceless by the hands that crafted them. Lee McCarty (1923–2015) and his wife, Pup (1926–2009), learned to throw clay while attending Ole Miss in the 1940s. When Pup enrolled in a pottery class, the full roster of football players intimidated her. So Lee joined her, and they cottoned to the craft. A few years later, William Faulkner even invited them onto his Rowan Oak property to dig clay. In the early 1950s, Lee’s aunt gave the couple access to her old mule barn in Merigold, and the pair transformed its wooden frame into a home and studio, where visitors would stop by for a dish and leave with new friends and a piece of Mississippi history. Classically unadorned, with clean straight lines and glazed in hand-mixed custom pigments, the earthy delights are cherished by home cooks and the Smithsonian alike.
(1917–1967)
IF EUDORA WELTY, HARPER LEE, AND Flannery O’Connor make up the varsity squad of twentieth-century Southern female writers, then Carson McCullers is the one who didn’t even try out for the team—she was too busy smoking cigarettes behind the gymnasium. Known for an emotional artistic intensity, McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, but moved almost constantly throughout her life, with multiple stops in France, Italy, North Carolina, and New York, among other places. The tumultuous relationship she shared with her husband, Reeves, included one divorce, one remarriage (to each other), numerous separations, and suicide attempts for both, including one in which Reeves tried to convince McCullers to kill herself with him. Before she was even thirty, McCullers suffered a series of strokes, only the start of a lifetime of poor health and physical pain. Throughout it all, though, she managed to produce some of the century’s most sensitive and celebrated fiction while befriending and working with leading artists and thinkers of the time, including Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, who adapted her work for the stage. McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, published when she was twenty-three, is often listed as among the twentieth century’s finest, though The Member of the Wedding, published six years later, may be her defining masterpiece.
THE MEAT-AND-THREE IS A MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY restaurant adaptation of the groaning-table dinner that fueled farm laborers at midday. A vegetable-driven meal, dependent on links between the farm and the table, it’s a harbinger of country life, cooked and served by and for city folks.
As Southerners moved from farms to cities, entrepreneurs transformed the midday meal, moving service from kitchen tables and dinner tables to simple cafés where factory workers ate fried pork chops and hoecakes between shifts and office workers ate noontime plates of turnip greens, stewed squash, and field peas with snaps. Out of that rural-to-urban transition came the meat-and-three, which often translates as one meat and three vegetables, plus cornbread and iced tea.
The term describes a broad range of cooking. In and around Charleston, South Carolina, red rice and okra stew are common. On the western fringes of the South near Austin, Texas, country fried steak shows up often. In Louisiana, Cajun restaurants specialize in rice and gravy-based dishes. The name varies, too. In Louisiana and Mississippi, the term plate lunch is more common. Country-cooking restaurants, owned by whites, serve meat-and-threes. So do soul food restaurants, owned by blacks. Since the 1990s, the meal, although still called a meat-and-three, has frequently been rendered as a meat-and-two. Banana pudding, made with store-bought vanilla wafers, is a common meat-and-three dessert, served by the scoop in small melamine bowls.
Nashville is the capital of meat-and-three culture. Hap Townes, one of the progenitors, began selling lunches from a wagon there in 1921. At first he sold hot dogs and other quick-service foods. But his clientele of college students and factory workers soon clamored for a taste of the homes they’d left behind. By 1946, when his son, also known as Hap Townes, opened an eponymous café in the shadow of the local baseball stadium, the menu had shifted to the form we now recognize. Some credit the Townes men—who cooked excellent country fried steak, fried corn, stewed raisins, and stewed tomatoes—with coining the name and codifying the style of service.
Meat-and-three cafés (the term often applies to the restaurant as well as the meal) are democratic institutions. Today customers at Arnold’s Country Kitchen, the Nashville inheritor of the Hap Townes legacy, include the homeless who crowd into a nearby shelter, lawyers who make the trek from downtown, and white-tablecloth chefs who see connections between what they attempt at night and the food Arnold’s cooks each day. A cinder-block café with a steam-table line along the back wall, Arnold’s simmers fat butter beans, bakes pan after pan of macaroni and cheese, and cooks cornbread to order on a flattop. Quick service from that steam table belies the long cooking time and deep knowledge required to execute many of the dishes.
In the contemporary South, meat-and-threes serve as places of communion, where customers dine on the foods their forebears cooked. Angelish Wilson, who ran Wilson’s Soul Food in Athens, Georgia, explained her relationship to customers this way: “I’ll cook like your grandmama and treat you like one of my own.” Addie Williams, who once worked the U-shaped lunch counter at the downtown Atlanta Macy’s department store, went a step further. She graded her regulars. If a customer cleaned his plate, she marked his ticket with an A. Minor infractions, including unnecessary reaches for saltshakers and orders that didn’t include sufficient green vegetables, could result in a C or D.
These humble cafés do more than satisfy cravings for nostalgia. Like barbecue joints and fried-chicken bunkers, meat-and-threes connect the South’s past and present, linking the region’s farmscapes and cityscapes.
IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN WHY I LOVE Memphis so much. The traffic can be horrendous, the weather’s muggy, and racial mistrust often hangs heavily on the air. And I have to admit, parts of town are rough on the eye. Out East, there’s a thoughtless sprawl that goes on forever—a Redlobstered, Olivegardened, La Quintasized land where not very long ago there was nothing but cotton fields. When you survey the Bluff City’s history, you see much heartache. Yellow fever epidemics, race riots, riverboat disasters, and that seismic event that still shapes the city’s sense of itself, the flash point by which any understanding of Memphis must be gauged: the MLK assassination.
Still, I love the place. I love Memphis, I guess you could say, in the way that you love a brother even if he does sometimes puzzle and sadden and frustrate you. Say what you want about it, it’s an authentic place. I was born and raised in Memphis, and no matter where I go, Memphis belongs to me, and I to it.
I love the way that wherever you are in Memphis, you hear the dirge of trains. I love the way in winter, the dead magnolia leaves, having lost their sheen, tumble and clatter in the wind. I love the tang of pit-house smoke, and the sound of blues that seems to ooze from the city’s every pore. I love the rambling old houses in Central Gardens when the azaleas are in garish bloom, and the offbeat energy lately emanating from new-old haunts like the Cooper-Young neighborhood and the recently revitalized Overton Square.
I love the downtown skyline at night, as seen from Arkansas, with the old deco-Gothic towers silhouetted against the sweltering night, and the thirty-two-story glass and steel pyramid anchoring the north end. (Originally built as a sports arena in a shape meant to evoke the original Memphis on the Nile, the massive pyramid reopened as the mother of all Bubba tabernacles—a Bass Pro Shops superstore.)
And I love the way the Mississippi River looks beside the city, with the big steel bridge whose upper structure forms a mighty M over that great torrent of gravy, all brown snarls and snags and whirlpools, that river that is our river, the river—strongest, widest, swiftest. People from Memphis are known as Memphians, and that seems somehow right. Shades of amphibian, rubbery beings of the water and mud, life-forms that start out as one thing but morph into something else. We came from the river and to the river we shall return.
The thing about Memphis is that it’s pleasingly off-kilter. It’s a great big wack job of a city. You go there and you can’t believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There’s an essential otherness. When you look at an image by William Eggleston, a Memphian and one of history’s greatest fine-art photographers, you get a sense of what I’m talking about: warped perspectives, angles that make you question your assumptions. Looming tricycles, screaming neon, beehive hairdos spun into high art. “I am at war with the obvious,” Eggleston has said.
Or if you had hung out with the late Civil War historian Shelby Foote, another Memphian, and the first writer I ever met, you’d have caught a glimpse of the same thing. Here was a man of meticulously cultivated crotchets. He demanded Pet Evaporated Milk in his coffee. He was an avid watcher of As the World Turns. He spoke in a terrific accent, full of custardy lilts and Delta diphthongs, and wrote with antique writing implements in a cryptic hand all his own. For twenty years, he worked in a musty grotto-like study in the rear of his house on East Parkway, scratching away at his American Iliad, five hundred words every day for nearly twenty years, until he reached Appomattox. “Ah spec Ah’m bout thru now,” he said, and the trilogy was done.
Memphis produces these people. It’s like a factory for original souls. And those it does not produce, it pulls into its voracious tractor beam. Musicians, especially: Rufus Thomas, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Isaac Hayes, Roy Orbison, Al Green. Skinny Elvis, and Fat Elvis, too.
It’s always been that way. For two hundred years, all the pathos and pain of the Mississippi River, all the eccentricity and excess, seemed to splash upon the city’s musky cobblestones. Steeped in the mean dreams of cotton, it was a place that celebrated a touch of insanity: high rollers, riverboat captains, mountebanks, snake oil salesmen, redneck wizards, roisterers, wrestlers, cotton brokers, Pentecostal preachers, inventors hopped up on some invisible vapor, some indigenous psycho-vibe, that could be sensed but whose existence could be neither measured nor proved. John Hiatt captured it just right in “Memphis in the Meantime,” when he sang:
Maybe there’s nothin’ happenin’ there
Maybe there’s somethin’ in the air
Before our upper lips get stiff
Maybe we need us a big ol’ whiff.
It’s a city of dreams and dreamers, many of them failed ones, but not always. A guy comes along and says, Let’s take black music and white music and put ’em together. You’re crazy, they say, and so Sam Phillips goes and does it. Genius. A guy comes along and says, Let’s buy a fleet of airplanes and create a service that delivers packages overnight to anywhere in the world. Insane, they say, so Fred Smith goes and does it. Absolutely positively. A quixotic young doctor moves to Memphis in the early sixties with the idea of curing a nearly always fatal disease—childhood leukemia—and soon a research hospital opens in the slums north of downtown, named for the patron saint of lost causes. The breakthroughs that Dr. Donald Pinkel and his staff chart soon put St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital on the world map as a place that attempts the impossible.
This thing about Memphis: Is there really a there there, or just a belief in the thereness? I can’t precisely say, and I’m afraid if I delved any deeper, it would kill the very thing itself. That’s how fragile it is. Like a frog on dry land, it can’t stand too much direct light or desiccating heat. Like some of Eggleston’s photos, it’s unanalyzable. You can’t define it or bottle it. You can’t explain or parse it. You just have to go there and get a whiff for yourself.
EVEN IF THE FRIED CHICKEN ON THE FUNERAL-CLEAN dining room table is just so, and the beans are tidily snapped, and the cornbread is sliced so there isn’t a stray crumb on the serving dish, you’re bound to have a big old mess of greens. From the Texas Gulf to coastal Carolina, mess doesn’t imply disarray: it’s a counting term, most commonly applied to meat and vegetables that defy easy quantifying. The expression apparently traveled across the Atlantic, since the Dictionary of American Regional English traces it back to 1697, when someone in Massachusetts wrote about enjoying “a Mess of English Beans.” But it found its foothold in the South, where eaters got in the habit of serving up messes of peas, coon, and stewed catfish. So how much makes a mess? The late Florence King, an author and columnist whose people came from Virginia, wrote, “Everybody knew that it meant a dozen or a pound, unless, of course, it meant a bushel or a peck, or, in the country, a truckload.” It’s a slippery definition because, in most cases, a mess is what it takes to feed whoever’s expecting to be fed.
AN ICE-COLD BEER IS THE COOLING COUNTERPOINT to hot and spicy Southern cooking—but the beer cocktail called a Michelada turns that equation on its head. Invented in Mexico, the Michelada starts with an icy beer mug that’s “dressed” (the sides coated with lime juice, the rim dipped in salt), with spicy condiments then dumped into the bottom of the mug before beer is added. Mexicans like celery salt, Maggi seasoning, and Cholula hot sauce, while some American imbibers prefer to mix the beer with a little Bloody Mary mix. Instead of cooling relief while you’re eating spicy food, a Michelada adds zip when you’re eating plain foods, like cold boiled shrimp or a dozen raw oysters on the half shell.
MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL
A MAN WALKING AN INVISIBLE DOG. A DRAG queen named the Lady Chablis. Minerva, the voodoo priestess. These are only a few of the unforgettable Savannah residents populating John Berendt’s 1994 true-crime best-seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Recounting the eight years Berendt spent living in Savannah, much of it following the shooting of a male hustler named Danny Hansford by Jim Williams, a world-renowned antique dealer, “the Book,” as it’s known in Savannah, has sold more than five million copies and spent more time on the New York Times best-seller list than anything ever published (216 weeks). Williams was acquitted after four trials, providing more than enough drama for any narrative, but the real magic in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil lies in its beguiling depiction of Savannah itself. By evoking the city’s charms so adroitly, Berendt unleashed an influx of attention on Savannah, not to mention hundreds of thousands of tourists. The Times noted, quite prophetically, that it “might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to call a travel agent and book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.”
NEW ORLEANS IS NOTABLE FOR HAVING A deeper bench than the average city when it comes to adult beverages. But the Crescent City also has entire phyla of cocktails generally unfamiliar to less enlightened precincts. So it is with the breakfast cocktail. While other cities make do with the overly garnished Bloody Mary or the anodyne mimosa on joyless Sundays, New Orleans has a long, inviting list of delicious drinks to accompany the Eggs Sardou any day of the week.
The milk punch stands at the head of this class. A colonial-era drink that sees a spike during the modern holiday season, it’s really a class of drink rather than a specific tipple. It may be made with just about any spirit (rum, brandy, whiskey), which is shaken with milk or cream and brightened with a bit of sugar, vanilla, and nutmeg. It’s distantly related to eggnog but more refreshing and gossamer, and will not menace anyone with the phlegmy consistency of its eggy cousin.
At some of the more ambitious cocktail bars of late, you may find on the cocktail list a clarified milk punch, which is nearly transparent. This is alarming to traditionalists, but delicious to all.
IT’S OKAY THAT YOUR MIND JUST AUTOMATICALLY flashed to Bull Durham. The Costner/Sarandon/Robbins classic remains the cultural gold standard of the thick, humid minors, an evocatively frozen-in-time world of bus transport, fetchingly goofy promotions, dollars-a-day paychecks, and the undying hopes and dreams that baseball unfailingly conjures. If anything, Bull Durham skewed a little flashy and fancy-pants; minor-league Southern ball is populated mostly by teams with chuckle-worthy names—Biloxi Shuckers! Montgomery Biscuits!—that fall somewhere between evocatively throwback and as cheesy as concession-cart nacho dip, and their stadiums are all boiled peanuts and paper beer cups and other details you imagine might not have changed all that much since the twenties. Technically speaking, games are played and somebody keeps score, but the action mostly lopes along lazily in the background of Sunday afternoons sweltering enough to slow down time. For fans, they aren’t so much “games” as background bat cracks, ball-into-glove sound effects, sporadic cheers. Frankly, the home team could be playing the Shorebirds or Crawdads or Jumbo Shrimp or whomever out there; for most of us in the stands, that time-warp afternoon is the whole point.
ALABAMA’S ONLY SEAPORT HAS ALWAYS been a place apart—semitropical, exotic, graced with rich historical and architectural legacies. Indeed, one antebellum traveler declared Mobile the most distinctive American city he had seen, a sentiment echoed by the London Times reporter William Howard Russell in 1861, President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, John Dos Passos in 1943, and Henry Miller two years after that. “Mozart for the mandolin” was what Tropic of Capricorn’s author said exactly. That just about nails it, in my opinion. Mobile was founded by the French in 1702, sixteen years before that other city on the Mississippi. Mardi Gras started here in 1703, and it’s still going strong. It’s okay if most Americans don’t realize that, though we will quickly let them in on the secret. As we like to say, we do Mardi Gras for ourselves, sans the raunch, whereas New Orleans does it for the tourists. Think of Mobile as New Orleans’ better-behaved older sister. Less energetic, somewhat understated, and a little formal. But still intriguing, like a woman who has held her beauty, has seen a slice of life, and has some pretty colorful stories to tell. Better company at table than in a bar.
It is all too easy to misread Mobile, however—to see her as a bastion of conservatism in love with Old South traditions and embarrassing politics. Those elements are certainly present, mostly dating from World War II, when the city’s booming shipyards attracted thousands of poor upcountry Protestant whites—“barbarous Baptists from the north,” as one local writer put it. But to really know Mobile, you have to get down into her seams, smell the sweet earth, salt air, and gumbo, stroll down Dauphin Street from Broad to the river, take delight in a riot of white azaleas blooming in a yard or in the orange blaze of trumpet vine spilling down a courtyard’s ancient brick wall. Mobile also has more than her share of characters mixed in with the scenery, smells, and God-fearing working folk, and always has. There’s the statuesque tattooed woman with vivid dyed hair who gambols down Dauphin every morning no matter the temperature; the black transvestite who painted his house pink in the heart of a historic district; the Asian woman who shucked all her clothes when her restaurant kitchen got too hot and kept right on working in bamboo sandals; and the buttoned-up lawyer who once accepted Spanish pieces of eight as his legal fee from a hard-bitten Gulf shrimper. Mobile is all these things and more, including a battleship and a world-class garden and lots of shiny commercial endeavors the chamber of commerce likes to brag about. But fundamentally, she’s an old soul, eminently worth knowing.
(1911–1996)
THE FATHER OF BLUEGRASS MUSIC, WILLIAM Smith Monroe was the youngest of eight children born on his family’s farm near Rosine, Kentucky. He was fond of describing himself as “a farmer with a mandolin and a high tenor voice.” This is like saying George S. Patton was an army officer who sometimes used bad language. Monroe was a peerless singer, songwriter, mandolin player, bandleader, and musical revolutionary. Although he didn’t single-handedly invent bluegrass, he caught the baby when it came out, and he defined what remains the standard bluegrass lineup—mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar, and stand-up bass. He and incarnations of his band toured relentlessly for decades, often driving hundreds of miles to play, then driving hundreds more through the night to the next gig. And Lord help the musician who couldn’t keep up onstage. Almost every player who spent time in the band—such as Earl Scruggs on banjo and Lester Flatt singing and playing guitar—not only was up to the task but went on to achieve stardom on his own. Monroe once described bluegrass this way: “It’s got a hard drive to it. It’s Scotch bagpipes and old-time fiddlin’. . . . It’s blues and jazz and it has a high lonesome sound. It’s plain music that tells a story.” It was, of course, anything but plain. As early as the mid-1940s, Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys were famous for their breakneck tempo, tight arrangements, and intricate, piercing vocal harmonies.
THOMAS JEFFERSON’S HOME OUTSIDE CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that draws 500,000 visitors a year. There may be no presidential pad that better reflects the restless intellect, quirky obsessions, and moral contradictions of its owner. See Jefferson, Thomas.
SINCE 1917, THE CHATTANOOGA BAKERY IN Chattanooga, Tennessee, has been turning out daily supplies of this sweet convenience-store staple. As the story goes, the treat’s inventor, Earl Mitchell, happened upon the idea for his chocolate-coated graham-cracker-and-marshmallow sandwich after asking a Kentucky coal miner to describe his ideal snack; the miner outlined what would become the Moon Pie in a portion “as big as the moon.” (The standard size measures in a bit smaller at approximately four inches in diameter.) A century on, Moon Pies have become entrenched in Southern culture: there are Moon Pie festivals and eating contests from Bell Buckle, Tennessee, to Bessemer, Alabama; during Mardi Gras, parade krewes throughout the South have a penchant for tossing out miniature versions from their floats; and each New Year’s Eve, the city of Mobile, Alabama, drops a twelve-foot-tall lit version as the clock strikes midnight.
BOOTLEG WHISKEY—ALSO KNOWN AS SCRAP iron, white corn, white moon, old tangle-foot, and a host of other aliases—has been a beloved nectar of Southern swamps, hills, and hollers since 1791, when the government put a steep tax on distillers large and small. Transforming corn and rye into a more portable, profitable product was deemed a God-given right. Several hundred hill folks loaded up their squirrel rifles and took after the revenue agents. After several dustups with the militia, the aggrieved reckoned discretion a better solution, and began brewing by the light of the moon, when wood smoke from the still was all but invisible; a guerrilla war ensued, and there is a steady market to this day. The boys who ran the loads down the mountain in souped-up jalopies became the first generation of NASCAR drivers.
As high as 190 proof, smooth shine is like liquid fire with an aftertaste of popcorn. Rough shine will eject glass eyes, snap suspenders, and stop your watch cold. You can help it some by throwing in sliced peaches, apples, or cherries. The government tells you it’s all poison. Not so fast. As an Appalachian folk song from the 1920s and ’30s puts it: “They call it that good old mountain dew, and them that refuse it is few. I’ll shut up my mug, if you fill up my jug with that good old mountain dew.”
THE MOSQUITO IS THE DEVIL’S HOUSE PET. When Satan lost his footing and fell from heaven, God let him retain a few powers to better test our faith, and the mosquito was one of them. You won’t find that in the Scriptures, specifically, but it’s implied, the same way it’s implied that having more than seven cats is a sin. The existence of the mosquito is proof of God’s existence; it serves no other purpose. I’ve spoken to experts and they assure me that our ecosystem would do just fine without a mosquito in it, that it essentially has no function. And yet it’s the most dangerous animal on the planet. Your chances of incurring death-by-mosquito are ten thousand times greater than getting trampled by a herd of stampeding possums. Many people assume the opposite is the case. Not so.
A mosquito is disease on wings. Malaria, yellow fever, West Nile, dengue fever, and most recently the Zika virus are all spread, generally and principally, by the mosquito. They’ve been around for about fifty million years, without really changing, like a Twinkie.
In the light of all this death and microscopic mayhem, the fact that they can also kill a backyard cookout may seem a small thing to the non-Southerner, but the truth is that in the South there are four seasons: fall, winter, spring, and mosquito. So small as to be almost invisible, so crafty and fast it is often unkillable by the human hand, it stalks us. It is inescapable.
Dangerous assassins, these weeds of the insect world. But insanity is also a mosquito by-product. This can be caused by the one mosquito—a single mosquito—that slips through a teeny tear in your window screen and, right after you turn off the light, finds the path to your ear. That’s how it was for me on so many hot and humid summer nights in Alabama. I grew up poor. Our window screens were made of asbestos and the mercury we drained from old thermometers we found in the town dump. Mosquitoes flew in with impunity, and a mosquito with impunity is a scary thing. It feels empowered. It comes at you with an aggressive confidence—élan. How it finds the ear itself is a mystery; some scientists say it may remind them of the Jurassic caves they used to live in. Regardless, the mosquito (Spanish for “little fly”) is drawn to the ear and in the dark of the night is virtually indistinguishable from the darkness. It’s under these conditions that insanity occurs.
No one would be happier than my uncle Merle (who lost his right arm to the mosquito—such a long story) if we could rid ourselves of each and every one of the maleficent infidels. But we can’t; it’s literally impossible. So how do we protect ourselves? I own anti-mosquito bracelets; I spray myself with poison. I’ve purchased a flock of dragonflies and bought a huge outdoor fan of the kind normally used to cool down nuclear reactors. Everything helps but nothing works. Like Taylor Swift, mosquitoes are a fact of life.
A COLLOQUIAL TERM FOR CRAWFISH, ACKNOWLEDGING their propensity to burrow in swampy bottomlands and take on a silty taste when not properly cleaned before cooking. See Crawfish.
GENERATIONS OF TOURISTS IN NEW ORLEANS have “discovered” Central Grocery & Deli, the old-world market just up the street from Café Du Monde. Taking a respite from the crowds and hustle of the French Quarter, they duck into this shop lined with jars of jam and boxes of tea, and they purchase a paper-wrapped muffuletta, the sandwich created here by a Sicilian immigrant named Salvatore Lupo in 1906. Rather, they buy a quarter wedge of one of the substantial round loaves of the same name filled with striated layers of deli meats and cheeses and topped with a punchy variation on giardiniera called olive salad. Then they find a bench in a quiet spot and dig in. Little do they know this impulse dates back to the creation of the muffuletta, when the city’s central farmers’ market stood nearby. Lupo noticed that the mostly Sicilian farmers would buy the meats, cheeses, olive salad, and bread, then sit down on a crate and spread these precarious picnics on their laps. How much easier to layer it all in a sandwich.
FRANKLY, I HAVE NEVER ATTENDED A MULLET festival myself, and cannot know what passions such an event engenders. Still I find it troubling that someone at the 2014 Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival in Niceville, Florida, threw a full beer can that hit a featured attraction, the country singer Dustin Lynch, in the face. On YouTube you can watch Lynch, undaunted, peering into the crowd and saying, “I want to come to your workplace and throw [stuff] at you, man.”
You can see where that could lead. “Mommy, Mommy, why is the man in the big hat throwing [stuff] at the Jiffy Lube man? Can I throw [stuff] at the Jiffy Lube man?”
And here’s what people will be thinking: that’s about the kind of trend you’d expect from a celebration of the mullet. The “lowly” mullet, as it is so often called, the “humble,” the “much-maligned” mullet. Time for reassessment, folks.
Traditionally, of course, what people throw during a mullet festival is mullet, and not at anyone, but for distance, and charity, and an occasion to drink beer. Famously, the Flora-Bama Lounge, on the Florida-Alabama line, draws some thirty-five thousand people annually to its Interstate Mullet Toss. The all-time record, 179 feet, could be seen as a tribute to mullet aerodynamics.
But no, the preferred way to toss a mullet is to wad it up and throw it like a softball. Does anybody toss trout? No. Or tilapia, even? In recent years tilapia has become the fourth-most-popular fish in America, even though it is no less of a bottom feeder than mullet—and indeed many tilapia imported from China have been fattened up on chicken doody. Yet when I mention to people that I am writing about mullet, so many respond by saying, “Does anybody ever eat one?”
You damn right. A specialty of the very nice Spring Creek Restaurant in Crawfordville, Florida, is a very nice dinner of fried mullet, caught in local waters from the establishment’s own boat. In St. Petersburg, Florida, Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish has been largely mullet-based since 1951. And yet here is one of the first things I learned from elder relatives, fishing for croakers and whiting in North Florida. One of us accidentally caught a mullet (it can happen, although mullet, essentially vegetarian, aren’t big biters). Can’t eat that, I was told. Good only for bait.
It’s not a pretty fish. Its face is too small. Where you can almost imagine a redfish breaking into a smile (not in a boat, though), a mullet’s face amounts to big bug eyes and little squinched-up sucky lips. A mullet’s body is sleek but also swarthy. Generally its colors (mullet comes from the same Indo-European root as melanin, dark pigment) resemble those of the old, piratical Oakland Raiders.
And we must not fail to mention the mullet hairstyle, short in front, long down the back—inspired, conceivably, by the little-face-long-body look of the fish. The New York Times a few years ago reported that the mullet coif had become fashionable, but come on: these are highly modified versions. The fish’s image is never going to be improved by that of the ’do. At one point the state of Florida, which officially changed the name of the dolphinfish to mahi-mahi so potential eaters wouldn’t associate it with Flipper, tried to change mullet’s name to the Spanish, lisa. Didn’t catch on. A mullet doesn’t look like a Lisa.
It doesn’t need to. It is high in heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Because it doesn’t eat other fish, it is low in mercury content (and lots of game fish eat it, so it’s good for them). It reproduces rapidly, so it’s sustainable. A fish (a Mediterranean staple for thousands of years) for the twenty-first century!
And it inspired Man and Mullet: An Elegy for a Lost Way of Life, by Alan Ryle Frederiksen. Michael Swindle in his own good book Mulletheads calls Frederiksen “the Melville of mullet.” This vertiginous portrait of old-school gillnetters grappling with a school of running mullet—a great knot referred to collectively as he—indeed evokes Moby-Dick. To appreciate it is to dive in and get lost, but here is the knot:
Fish on the move; surface appeared to come alive with escaping mullet . . . fused into a mass . . . like acrobats leapfrogging one another but with this difference: now hundreds in the air formed a solid wall of lunging bodies. The conglomerate melded . . .
And here, inside one mullet: “. . . deftly one removes the black membrane covering the fatty belly, then greases hands and fingers in the oozy substance reborn of the leafy detritus—black mangrove (gopherwood)—ancient tree planking Noah’s Ark . . .”
Try to find a copy. I also recommend Googling “mullet gizzard.”
SOUTHERN ARISTOCRATS HAVE SPENT CENTURIES trying to coax fine wine out of fickle grapes of foreign origin. Meanwhile, the rest of us have settled for a few muscadine vines in the backyard. Come rain, come snow, come crushing heat and humidity, the South’s native grape persists as it has for millennia. Protected by a leathery hull, the antioxidant-rich muscadine’s sweet pulp makes superlative jams and jellies. Even its tough exterior is good for something: simmered until tender, it stars in old-fashioned hull pies and cobblers. As for muscadine wine, for the most part it tends toward cloying and unpleasantly strong. Ask around, though, and you just might locate one of those amateur vintners renowned in his small town for taming the early-fall harvest. Imports will never have such hard-won character.
FIRST LET’S GO BACK IN TIME. MAYBE 1977 or so. Upon driving into Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on one of the country roads that got you there, you would have passed a sign welcoming you to THE HIT RECORDING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. An unlikely boast for this little town nestled in a dry county on the banks of the Tennessee River in Northwest Alabama. The Muscle Shoals Area (as the region is generally referred to) is actually four connected but separate small towns and their surrounding areas. Sheffield, Tuscumbia, and Florence each have their own unique flavor (and separate governments), but as most locals can scarcely tell where one ends and another begins, it’s understandable to clump them together. And unlikely as it might have seemed, during Muscle Shoals’s heyday in the sixties and seventies, more million-selling records did in fact come out of that little burg than anywhere else on the planet.
Percy Sledge made “When a Man Loves a Woman” there. It went on to become one of the most successful singles of all time. Classic soul records from Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Bobby Womack, and Clarence Carter all came from the tiny studios in town, especially Fame Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound (which was actually in neighboring Sheffield). The Staple Singers had number-one hits with “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself.” Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bob Seger are just a few of the other artists that made classic records there. The Rolling Stones came down to record “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” right before flying to the West Coast to play a festival at Altamont.
I grew up in Florence and came of age during the lean times of the eighties. My father is David Hood, who was one of the founders of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which played on many of the legendary hits. Unlike many of his peers, Dad stayed and has made a living the best he could during the very tough years that followed. I played in and around the area for years before finding some success in Athens, Georgia, with my band Drive-By Truckers. My partner in that band, Mike Cooley, grew up in Tuscumbia, and through the years several other Shoals natives have contributed to our music. In 2004 we returned to the Shoals to record our album The Dirty South, and a couple of years later made a Grammy-nominated album there with the soul legend Bettye LaVette.
Times have changed in the years since that early heyday. But there has been a renaissance in the community that in many ways goes far beyond what was there before. Legal liquor was voted in a few decades ago. Downtown Florence has been revitalized and is actually a tourist destination, lined with prosperous restaurants and shops. The world-famous clothing designers Billy Reid and Alabama Chanin are based there, and their success has further bolstered the area. Hollywood came calling and made an acclaimed documentary about the music scene. Fame Studios is still in operation, and a nonprofit was recently formed to restore and reopen Muscle Shoals Sound Studio with the help of a generous grant from Dr. Dre and the music company Beats.
Local artists have revived the music scene, too. John Paul White had a number-one album with his former band Civil Wars and has since moved back home to start a successful recording studio and label, releasing hit records from St. Paul & the Broken Bones, Dylan LeBlanc, and his own acclaimed solo record. Grammy winner Jason Isbell, who grew up in the area and still retains deep roots there, is fast becoming one of the most successful artists in the world. The members of Alabama Shakes grew up just twenty-five miles or so down the road in neighboring Athens, Alabama, and have gone on to win Grammys and release a number-one album. They’ve ushered in a new chapter in the musical legacy of my hometown.