NABS ARE A LONGTIME STANDBY OF SOUTHERN gas-station cuisine: cracker sandwiches, usually orange cheese crackers with a filling of peanut butter or cheese, that come in plastic-wrapped packages of six or eight. The name came from the National Biscuit Company, aka Nabisco, which first marketed the peanut butter cheese crackers by that name in the 1920s. Although Nabisco was headquartered in the Northeast, the crackers became popular in the South, particularly in textile plants where the air was often kept warm and moist so cotton would spin better, and where the absence of labor unions meant long shifts with short breaks. A six-ounce glass bottle of soda was called a “dope,” and the snack cart where people could grab a quick bite, the “dope wagon.” A five-cent dope and a pack of Nabs provided a fast way to fuel up and keep going. Over the years, a “pack of Nabs,” along with other portable snacks such as cans of Vienna sausage, also became popular with farmworkers and fishermen, who needed something easy to carry that didn’t need to be kept cold.
Nabisco eventually stopped making Nabs, and its trademark for the name expired, but similar cracker packs are still made by Charlotte-based Lance (now Snyder’s-Lance) and Tom’s (originally made by the Tom Huston Peanut Company in Columbus, Georgia, itself now a Snyders-Lance subsidiary). While the original Nabs had peanut butter filling, Lance’s Toast-Chee, a cheese cracker with a cheese filling, and umpteen other variations also picked up the now-generic Southern nickname—which explains why you can find a pack of nabs almost anywhere, even if there are no actual Nabs to be found.
THE SPECTACULARLY REDUNDANT ACRONYM stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, founded in 1948, a lucrative family-owned business that governs and sanctions races. Bill France Sr.’s vision was that “common men in common cars could appeal to common folk en masse.” The cars look like normal (“stock”) cars, which they resemble in the same way F-16s resemble balsa-wood gliders. A NASCAR car’s engine may produce 750 horsepower and has a life expectancy of a thousand miles or less. In a race, drivers make left turns around a track (usually oval-shaped) until they complete a certain number of laps, miles, or kilometers. NASCAR traces its roots to bootleggers who transported illegal whiskey from Appalachian stills to Southern cities. They modified their cars—boosting horsepower with extra carburetors and turbochargers, stiffening the suspension, adding switches to turn off headlights and brake lights, and so on—to help them outrun the authorities. They also developed such driving maneuvers as the 180-degree “bootlegger’s turn.” Junior Johnson, famed as a bootlegger and NASCAR driver, was known for doing this and then driving straight at a pursuing police car, reasoning—correctly—that no cop wanted to catch a bootlegger badly enough to die. He started driving at fourteen, long before he could obtain a license. “I didn’t need one,” Johnson explained, “’cause I wasn’t gonna stop!”
THERE ARE NINETEEN PLACES NAMED Nashville in the United States. But only one is an actual city, one that fires the imagination unlike any other. That Nashville sits on a bluff above the Cumberland River in Middle Tennessee. State capital and home to Vanderbilt University, it has inspired many nicknames over the years—Music City, U.S.A., Athens of the South, Home of the Grand Ole Opry, and so on. These days, it’s known as an “it” city, the hot chicken capital of the world, and the setting for the popular TV series that bears its name. Oh, and a foodie’s paradise; more chefs of international renown, I recently read, are moving there than to any other city in the world.
If you’re a musician or songwriter, add another nickname to the list—Heaven. There’s no better place you could live. Over the years, Nashville has attracted Hall of Fame songwriters like Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller, John D. Loudermilk, Marijohn Wilkin, and Harlan Howard. Now rockers like the Black Keys, Kings of Leon, and Jack White call the city home, as do up-and-comers Aaron Lee Tasjan, Pujol, and Diarrhea Planet (yup, really).
When I first arrived here, in 1967, Nashville was an overgrown, sleepy Southern town whose metropolitan government had just legalized liquor sold by the drink. But still, there was something in the air, and if you were a musician, you could feel it. Bobby Bare (of “Detroit City” fame) said it best: “You’d get off that plane and immediately feel the vibe. It was like electricity. There was so much going on. You couldn’t help but get caught up in it. You’d get very creative and want to do something. It was magic.”
Today’s Nashville is a far cry from that drowsy place I first encountered. Everywhere you look, high-rises are going up. Driving into town recently, I counted twelve cranes looming across the cityscape. If Nashville were a state, some joke, the crane would be the state bird. It’s said that Nashville has replaced Atlanta as the most progressive city in the South, and Austin as the fastest-growing. A thousand people move here every month, most of them young. Boxlike, modern glass houses now dot the hills surrounding downtown. This growth and demographic shift have moved some to call Nashville a “landlocked San Francisco.” But unlike other fast-growing cities, Nashville seems to be holding onto its uniqueness. As long as there’s Prince’s Hot Chicken, Brown’s Diner, Arnold’s Country Kitchen, Bluebird Cafe, Ryman Auditorium, and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville will always be Nashville.
THANK A SCORNED LOVER FOR THE PALATE-SEARING pleasure of Music City’s now-famous take on fried chicken. During the Depression, Thornton Prince, a notorious ladies’ man, came home from a night of tomcatting. His steady woman, none too pleased, fixed him a plate of fried chicken with every hot spice she could find, including peppers from her garden. One bite should change his ways forever, she thought. He chomped down . . . and loved it. From that first bite grew a business, and more than eighty years later, the rest of the country loves it, too. Imitators pop up regularly—even KFC came up with a knockoff—but none match the spirit and spice of the original: Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, still run by Thornton’s extended family in a tiny strip mall on Nashville’s eastern outskirts. Yardbird with attitude comes coated in a fat-and-cayenne sludge and straddled across cheap white bread topped with dill-pickle moons—the sides provided as comically inefficient antidotes to the pain. Prince’s ranks its offerings from mild all the way up to XXXHOT, which should be ordered by devoted masochists only.
THE 444-MILE DRIVE FROM NATCHEZ, Mississippi, to Fairview, Tennessee, would be a scenic journey regardless of its historical significance. But it’s the forested trail it commemorates, a route blazed by Native Americans and later trod by early Americans—from traders and soldiers to itinerant preachers and highwaymen—that lends it its special magic. Largely following a geographic line from the Mississippi River to the salt licks of central Tennessee, the present-day two-lane parkway contains some fifty points of access to the landmarks of old: the two-thousand-year-old Pharr Mounds near Tupelo, Mississippi; remnants of early inns and settlements; and a monument to the explorer Meriwether Lewis, who died near Grinder’s Stand, at mile marker 385.9.
(1950–1991)
I WAS A GUEST CHEF AT A FRIEND’S RESTAURANT a couple of summers ago. I had sent recipes and instructions ahead, but they weren’t really precise. When one of the cooks there asked me how to fine-tune something, I said, “Just make it taste good.” That was Bill Neal talking. Despite his reputation for being somewhat imperial at times, Bill was a boss who invited collaboration. I worked with him not at Crook’s Corner (the pioneering Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant he later opened in 1982, where I am now the chef) but at his first restaurant, La Résidence, a cool French place that he and his wife, Moreton, started in Chapel Hill in the mid-seventies. Bill and Moreton had become enchanted with everyday French cooking on a trip to Provence. That restaurant resulted from their excursion.
It was an exciting place to be. We worked our way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, then branched out to study Marcella Hazan, Simone Beck, Elizabeth David, and Diana Kennedy. We watched Julia Child on TV. We devoured cooking magazines and made excursions to big cities to eat at important restaurants and bring back ingredients we couldn’t find in North Carolina. We read Flaubert. I am speculating here, but I suspect that it was dawning on Bill then that the delicious cuisine bourgeoise he was beginning to explore had a great deal in common with the good home cooking that he had grown up with in South Carolina.
Although La Résidence’s food was French, we were viewed as a part of the wave of new American cooking that was showing up everywhere. Bill sought out farmers before we had a farmers’ market. One of Moreton’s family layer-cake recipes entered the dessert list. The menu was seasonal from day one. While we began with a traditional basic repertoire, Bill often reminded us to also think of the kitchen as a laboratory. To be open to new ingredients and new ideas. Things were not hidebound, either. Our cooking was home cooking, so if tarts weren’t quite round or the mirepoix was irregular, that was fine. It was okay if homemade looked homemade. Things just had to taste good.
In the early 1980s, Bill and Moreton divorced. She stayed at La Résidence while he started Crook’s Corner with his friend Gene Hamer, taking over a beer-and-barbecue joint down the street. Bill jumped into Southern cooking with both feet. With the help of supportive local residents and some well-timed national publicity, he quickly showed the food world that Southern cuisine was not the cooking of The Beverly Hillbillies. He knew that the Southern dinner table is a treasure with countless splendid things to offer us.
Sadly, Bill died young, in 1991, my first friend to become a victim of the HIV epidemic. His legacy remains, though. It waxes and wanes from time to time, but it never goes away. Looking back now, I feel very lucky indeed to have worked in a kitchen that afforded me such creative luxury. Things learned there went way beyond recipes. See Shrimp and grits.
IT’S PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAT THE CLARIFICATION of this term offered by the late comedian, Georgia native, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard: “Naked means you ain’t got no clothes on. Nekkid means you ain’t got no clothes on and you’re up to somethin’.” In 2011, nekkid earned a measure of immortality: an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
(1933–)
HE WAS RAISED BY HIS GRANDPARENTS TO do exactly what he does now, just like his “little sister” Bobbie, who is actually two years older than he is. The elder Nelsons, Alfred and Nancy, had emigrated from the hardscrabble hills of Northwest Arkansas to the blacklands of north-central Texas with their sixteen-year-old son, Ira, and his new sixteen-year-old wife, Myrle. Back in the Ozarks, Alfred was a blacksmith by trade, but he and Nancy were better known as singing schoolteachers who would take over a church or school and teach a community to sing, using the hand-sign shape-note method. Ira and Merle’s marriage fell apart and they went their separate ways, leaving behind a daughter and a son. The grandparents taught Bobbie piano and took her to singing conventions. The younger Willie took to guitar and riding his bike across the county line to hang out around the jukeboxes in honky-tonks. The Nelson kids became the featured entertainment at school and at the Abbott Methodist Church. As teenagers, they were the core of a Bob Wills–style Western swing band that performed regularly on KHBR radio. Willie had his own all-female fan club that bought him stage wear and a graduation suit.
As adults, Willie and Bobbie headed in different directions. Willie struggled, working as a disc jockey, selling Bibles and vacuum cleaners, doing whatever he had to do to get by while pursuing a life in music. He finally achieved success as a songwriter with a burst of country hits in the early 1960s—“Hello, Walls,” “Family Bible,” “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Night Life.” But Willie wanted to be the star, not just the writer, and his songwriting royalties underwrote his performing aspirations for the next ten years. Meanwhile Bobbie married, divorced, married again, and found satisfaction playing Hammond organs in restaurants and at trade shows, working her way down to Austin, where she worked piano bars as well as Hammond demo gigs. One of the regulars at her weekly gig at Mike & Charlie’s was University of Texas football coach Darrell K. Royal, the most popular man in Texas, who was already hip to her brother’s music.
Willie’s run as a Nashville recording artist lasted a decade, including a couple of top-ten country hits, a stint on the Grand Ole Opry, frequent television appearances on The Ernest Tubb Show, two albums for Jerry Allison at Liberty Records, thirteen albums for Chet Atkins at RCA Records, and one outlier single, “I Never Cared for You,” for Fred Foster at Monument Records. He did themes, like his album of all Texas songs. He did introspection, covering Beatles ballads, passing as country-folk and dressing like a lounge singer rather than a Nudie-suited hillbilly. He did twisted, as in “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye,” based on a newspaper clipping about a romance that ended in murder, taking the killer’s point of view. He could go deep and spiritual, as with the splendidly cosmic album Yesterday’s Wine.
Nothing really stuck. He kept plugging away but seemed destined to eventually suffer the fate of most country talents: selling insurance or cars, or buying a nightclub. Instead, one Christmas Eve, his home in the hills north of Nashville burned down. His band and extended family found shelter at a bankrupt dude ranch outside of Bandera that his Texas booking agent knew about. They started playing Floore’s Country Store honky-tonk in nearby Helotes every week and played golf at the dude ranch high on LSD. Within a year, Willie and his band discovered Austin, where little sister Bobbie had been hanging. Along the way to Willie Nelson and his Family band becoming a thing, a rocking, hard-driving jam band powered by two drummers and two bass players, Bobbie rejoined her brother to play piano.
That was more than forty-five years ago. Since then, Willie blew up into the one-name superstar, the voice of Texas, champion of the family farmer and of weed, and an icon of American music with enough tracks in the can to release new product into the twenty-second century. But Willie wouldn’t have achieved what he did without that stealthy, slight woman in black with the long blond hair at the piano, by his side. Bobbie keeps it all balanced. Willie’s bus doesn’t pull out of the gig until she’s on it. They’re doing exactly what Alfred and Nancy taught them to do all those years ago.
FOR A HOT AND STICKY WEEK IN JULY, VISITORS descend on Philadelphia, Mississippi, for the Neshoba County Fair’s mash-up of quintessential Southern experiences. There, you can wager on a horse race from the bed of a pickup truck, hands wrapped around deep-fried corn dogs and fresh-squeezed lemonade. Democrats and Republicans alike turn up to kiss babies and do some good ole tree-stump politicking. Competitors cakewalk for layered caramel and chocolate masterpieces. And concertgoers rush across the red-clay track with their lawn chairs to beat one another for a front-row seat to the nightly shows. But the best part is the hospitality. Rural farmers first began meeting in 1889 on the site, which holds brightly colored family-owned row houses built to accommodate the kinfolk who would return year after year. Those visiting for the day (or staying outside the property) are made to feel like part of the conversation—literally. Don’t be surprised if you’re invited up to chat over a glass of tea on a porch swing or for a late-night sing-along.
NEW ORLEANS IS THE GALÁPAGOS OF American culture, which is to say that while the rest of the nation has come to look like much of the rest of the nation, New Orleans has not. Although its citizens may slurp as much Starbucks and scarf as many Subway sandwiches as other Americans, the city’s identity remains connected to more historic staples, like coffee with chicory (a nineteenth-century favorite still available today) and po’boys (long sandwiches on crusty bread treasured as much for their audible crunch as for their taste). Much about the city has evolved and modernized in recent decades—architecture, music, cuisine—but change rarely occurs without someone first setting an anchor in the past.
New Orleans was colonized in 1718 by the French, who occupied a bend near the mouth of the Mississippi River on a natural levee where a band of Quinipissa Indians once lived. The French showed little aptitude for colonizing; following various colonial wars and geopolitical intrigue, in 1763 they signed the place over to the more efficient Spanish. Under Spanish rule the city nearly burned to the ground, twice—in 1788 and 1794—and its core, now called the French Quarter, assumed much of its present-day form in the rebuilding. In 1803, the United States acquired New Orleans along with a considerable backyard (the Louisiana Purchase, extending to present-day Canada). Americans set about shaping the city in their image but faced a setback around 1809 when a massive influx of French-speaking refugees arrived from Cuba, forestalling Americanization by a generation or two.
All this is to explain why in large part the city is not like the rest of America—it was built not on English cultural bedrock, as so many other North American coastal cities were, but atop a Creole collage. What’s more, geographic remoteness further enhanced the sense of remove from the continent. For decades, New Orleans was essentially an island, reached predominantly by ship from the Gulf of Mexico or flatboat down the Mississippi.
Although in the twentieth century it acquired the nickname the Big Easy, New Orleans has never been particularly easy. It suffered from periodic outbreaks of tropical diseases, including yellow fever in the nineteenth century. Levees would occasionally fail and flood the city. Hurricanes regularly blasted it. It was also a hub of a massive slave trade in the nineteenth century, and after emancipation, like much of the South, it embraced Jim Crow apartheid.
Despite it all, much of New Orleans’ unique culture has persisted and thrived. It was the cradle of jazz around 1900, and many of the popular early songs are still played by young musicians in boisterous brass bands—albeit now with a funk or hip-hop overlay. Bands of African Americans still mask as flamboyantly feathered “Indians” in the spring, as their great-grandparents did, forming neighborhood tribes who take to the streets to enact arcane rituals of power and respect. Foodways that appear fleetingly in other communities have worn deep ruts here, like a mule cart that’s traveled the same trail for three hundred years; residents speak the language of gumbo, and red beans and rice, and bread pudding. Any new permutations first pay respect to their forebears. New Orleans remains a city of rhythms and rituals, of call and response, a place where the audience is as integral to a performance as the act. It’s not uncommon to come upon a parade with no spectators, because everyone decided it was more interesting to join in.
This is also a city where the unseen plays as important a role as the visible. Note that the French Quarter is bordered by Canal Street, on which no canal was ever built, Rampart Street, on which a rampart was never constructed, and Esplanade Avenue, along which few ever promenaded. (The remaining border is the Mississippi, which often expresses a desire to be elsewhere.) Among the most important of the invisibles is residents’ profound connection to the city. When New Orleans flooded so painfully in the wake of Katrina and the levee failures in 2005, it was rebuilt despite cries from the hinterlands that this made no sense. More than a decade on, it’s clear that the most important elements in the rebuilding have been New Orleanians’ deep love for their city and their general disregard for those who don’t understand that. When an interviewer in Los Angeles asked the jazz legend Terence Blanchard, who had evacuated there, if he planned to return to his flooded hometown, Blanchard replied, “Sure. Because I can’t stand your music and I hate your food.”
This could serve as a motto for the ages.
SOME OF THE SOUTH’S CLAIMS TO UNFETTERED greatness are debatable—for example, it is theoretically possible, if unlikely, that there is solid college football in the Midwest. But few would argue that anyone is better than Southerners at coming up with nicknames. Research has proved that only 25 percent of Southern-born adults go by their given Christian names (editor’s note: no, it hasn’t, but it’s probably close). As evidence, we’ve assembled a short list of Southern nicknames that includes, but is not limited to, Bunny, Porkchop, Bubba, Butterbean, Toot, Pip, Jude Rose, Vivi, Petty, Willow, Bow Legs, Ace, Gidget, Kitty, Cookie, Sissy, Scooter, Lady Bird, Kay Kay, Ty Cobb, Hoof, Chick, Doodle, Coach, Ladybug, Jug, Doc, Sweetness, ’Toine, Benmont, Bear, Hoke, Sweetie Pie, Shug, Skeeter, Gator, Hawg, Snake, Cricket, Nugget, Chunk, Sugar Pie, Sugar Cake, Cake Sugar, Cake Pie, Dink, Peanut, Boss, Rocky, Topsy, Daisy, Bailey, Sonny, and Dale Jr.
WHEN AN ILLUSTRATION OF A NOISETTE ROSE by the French botanical artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté began circulating around Europe in 1824, the American-bred bloom, you might say, went viral. “Perhaps no new rose was ever so much admired as this,” wrote Thomas Rivers in the 1877 edition of The Rose Amateur’s Guide. “. . . Parisian amateurs were quite enraptured with it.” The first class of rose the United States ever introduced, the Noisette blossomed from a friendship between a Charleston, South Carolina, planter named John Champney and Philippe Noisette, a French-born botanist. Sometime between 1800 and 1814, Noisette gave Champney, his Charleston neighbor, an ancient Chinese variety of rose called Old Blush. Champney crossed that with a Rosa moschata (or musk rose), christening the result Champney’s Pink Cluster. He presented one of those back to Noisette, who then hybridized it to create the first Blush Noisette and sent a seedling to his brother in France. Parisian rapture ensued. The fragrant climbing flowers—now with more than a dozen variations—remain popular worldwide, but especially in the South for their resistance to disease and tolerance for summer swelter.
UKRAINIAN IMMIGRANT NUTA KOTLYARENKO never hung his cowboy hat in the South. He began his career in the 1930s by making G-strings for burlesque performers in New York City. In the forties he changed his name to the easier-to-pronounce (and market) Nudie Cohn and opened Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in Hollywood, California. But when he started fashioning Western-style suits of neon fabrics adorned with flamboyant swirls of embroidery and rhinestones, Nashville’s top country-music acts quickly became his biggest and flashiest customers. George Jones, Marty Robbins, and Glen Campbell were fans, and Porter Wagoner’s entire performing persona became synonymous with the suits. The unapologetically outrageous style became a rare sartorial bridge between traditional country and sixties counterculture—Nudie’s custom suit for the Georgia-raised rocker Gram Parsons, featuring embroidered marijuana leaves, a naked woman, and a cross, ranks among his most iconic. Not long after Nudie died, in 1984, his longtime former head tailor, Manuel Cuevas, set up his own shop in Nashville, where stars from Marty Stuart to Jack White have made sure that there will forever be a place in Southern style for expertly tailored excess.
THE NUTRIA IS A COMMON WATER-LOVING mammal of the South whose known aliases are coypu, river rat, and swamp rat. The formal designation is Myocastor coypus, from the Greek for “mouse-beaver,” although “mouse” is probably being kind. It looks more like a rat. A rat the size of a pit bull.
The rodents are native to South America, and penned nutria were introduced in Louisiana for their fur in the 1930s. But they soon went walkabout and thrived in the marshlands. The nutria is today common along much of the Gulf coast and has moved much farther inland. It dislikes freezing weather—its sad, scraggly tail is easily frostbit—but in milder winters will push north and extend its range. It’s also found in North Carolina, Tennessee, and the Delmarva region.
The nutria is rarely beloved, for several reasons: its unlovable snakelike tail; its disconcertingly large orange-yellow incisors; and its habit of chewing up marshes and burrowing into and weakening embankments, including man-made levees. People have launched many efforts to control them, including attempts to rebrand nutria fur as socially acceptable for the fashion conscious, and designers such as Billy Reid and Michael Kors dabbled with it. Big-time chefs have been recruited to popularize dishes made with its high-protein and low-cholesterol meat, but with limited success. In both cases, consumers remained largely unpersuaded that they would not, in fact, be wearing or eating rat. Louisiana’s statewide bounty program has shown some success, however. Hunters get paid five dollars per tail, and in 2016 some 349,235 tails were cashed in, notably reducing, for the moment at least, the acreage impacted.
