Greek natives and their kin built the Birmingham restaurant scene, from barbecue joints to hotdog stands to steakhouses. Bright Star, founded in 1907, is the old guard and Johnny's is the new guard Greek restaurant.
From perches at two favorite Oxford bars, over drinks with Joe Stinchcomb at St. Leo and John “Coonie” Spreafico at City Grocery, TrueSouth asks questions about the restaurants we have come to know and love while making two previous seasons of this show. In the midst of a brutal pandemic that puts restaurants at risk, we check in on the people who steward these institutions. We take stock of what we have missed, and what we gain as they reopen. In a moment when few of us stray far from home, TrueSouth celebrates its own backyard. Even as we look to the highway, hungry for diversion, anxious for escape, what we discover when we hit the road is both sobering and inspiring.
TrueSouth explores small town visions in Brownsville, Tenn., home to Helen's Bar-B-Que, owned by Helen Turner, and City Fish Market, owned by Larry Davis. Two art projects help define the town: The Mindfield, Billy Tripp's 30-year sculpture effort that towers over downtown, and Master Barber Shop Menagerie Museum, owned by Anthony Turner. What happens when an old vision for a town fades? What new visions take hold and how do they serve a town? TrueSouth asks those questions when we land in Brownsville. Featuring music by, among others, Valerie June, born just down the road in Jackson.
We explore Columbus, Ga., and Phenix City, Ala., backyards for the base, on opposite sides of the Chattahoochee River. At the 14th Street Grill, on the Alabama side, we join owner Martha Gothard to eat half weenies, cut longways, smothered with chili and slaw, the diet of cotton mill workers past. Over in Columbus, at the back gate of the base, we gather with Rose Collins, owner of Rose’s Caribbean, for jerk pork, jerk chicken and coconut peas. She talks to TrueSouth about Saint Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, where she grew up, and what drives her to feed hungry American troops today.
Bowman, SC, birthplace and burial place of Mary Beverly Evans Edge, mother of host John T. Edge. On the Edisto River, at a fish camp like the one her father built, beneath the boughs of moss-draped oaks, Edge will reconnect with his family’s roots and face down his mother’s complicated legacy over liver pudding with grits and catfish stew with rice.
TrueSouth begins in Scott, La., the buckle on the Boudin Belt that stretches across Cajun Country. We drive rice fields that double as crawfish ponds, eating cracklings by the sack and boudin by the link. A sausage made with pork and rice, boudin is one of the most traditional Louisiana foods. Almost 50 years after the Cajun renaissance began, boudin has become a symbol of modern Cajun culture, made with new ingredients like crawfish and cauliflower and interpreted in a kaleidoscope of dishes like boudin balls and boudin burritos. Hard by I-10 just west of Lafayette, the town of Scott is the best place to understand what’s going on. At Exit 97, we meet Robert Cormier of the Best Stop, open since 1986, and Logan Kartchner of Kartchner’s Specialty Meats. We learn from Donald Link, the Cajun Country-born chef, and Barry Jean Ancelet, the professor and poet who helped lead that renaissance. We dance to live musical performances by K.C. Jones, and Lil Nathan & the Zydeco Big Timers.
TrueSouth focuses on the great state of Arkansas, and on the river that defines its eastern flank. Sometimes when the Mississippi River changes course, it leaves behind an old bend in the main channel called an oxbow. Lake Chicot, home to Lake Village, Ark., is the largest oxbow in North America. Here, we explore how that river has shaped place and people. At Cowboy’s Steakhouse, Santa Lee, the first-born son of Chinese immigrants, cooks prime ribeyes in the rear of a chain pizza restaurant. At Rhoda’s Famous Hot Tamales and Pies, Rhoda Adams and her daughter Dorothy Adams Mitchell bake half-pecan and half-sweet potato pies worth a three-hour drive. In Lake Village, we celebrate family legacies with a daughter who looks after her mother. And a son who, like his father, works to make his children proud. Local music is always foundational to our shows. This time out we crowd-sourced a number of songs from viewers. Listen out for Arkansans Greg Spradlin from Pangburn and Adam Faucett from Benton.
TrueSouth drives the rolling back roads of southern Kentucky, to gnaw pork shoulder steaks cooked over hickory fires and eat burgers fried in shallow oil. We introduce viewers to a cultural microclimate that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee line, where old traditions thrive and grown men gather in the Monroe County Marble Club Super Dome to play serious games of great skill that are compelling to watch and complex to score.
TrueSouth drives the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, to dig for ramps along a creek bed and stoke the fires in a smokehouse by the highway. Allan Benton, proprietor of Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville, Tenn., cures and hickory smokes bacon and ham that have earned their place on the kitchen tables of working folks across the South, and on restaurant menus across the nation. If you know artisan Southern goods, you know the scent that perfumes the air when his pork hits a cast iron skillet. But there's a bigger story to tell here. Our crew goes home with Allan to get to know his wife Sharon and their children and grandchildren. We learn to bake biscuits with Sharon (and yes, we include her recipe). And to stir up a good gravy. More important, gathered in their kitchen, we get to witness the love and hard work that binds a man and a woman to their family, and their community.
TrueSouth lands in Jackson, Miss., to witness the drive and hustle and belief that a creative class of risk takers and change makers now brings to bear in this capital city. The Jackson we celebrate faces down problems, including a summer crisis that left the city without safe water for six weeks, but those problems do not define this city. Instead, we celebrate the work of artists and musicians and chefs whose commitment to excellence make Jackson a magnet for Mississippians who regard creativity as an engine for progress.
TrueSouth rides shotgun with Tommy Tomlinson, author of The Elephant in the Room, as he returns to Brunswick and St. Simons Island, Ga., where he grew up. Tommy joins the TrueSouth crew to walk the beach, play pinball, take in a baseball game, and reacquaint himself with the foods of his youth. Those foods represent family and pleasure for Tommy. Because he's fighting to control his weight, they also represent a kind of peril.
TrueSouth zigs and zags across the region, from Kentucky to Tennessee, from Mississippi to Alabama to Georgia. To make TrueSouth, the crew plans in the winter and films in the spring. All year long, though, they scout, in search of great restaurants and great stories, because there’s always something new, and there’s always something old that’s new to them. TrueSouth invites viewers to join the scout trip as the crew feasts across the belly of the South, plotting for seasons six and seven while filming season five. On the bus, they make U-turns and wrong turns and crank Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. Curiosity called them to exit 17 on I-20 in the piney woods of Alabama, near the town of Livingston, where an Indian restaurant in a long-haul truck stop shares an off-ramp with a steakhouse that bakes perfect caramel cakes.
TrueSouth season six begins in a bathhouse in Hot Springs, Ark., an odd and endearing resort town tucked in the Ouachita Mountains, west of Little Rock. Mobsters once caroused here. Major league teams traveled here for spring training. Hot Springs began as a spa. Scalding hot water, pushing up through those mountains, still draws pilgrims. To understand this city, we visit with actress Joey Lauren Adams, who recently moved home from California to Arkansas. She explains the town’s no-judgement attitude and introduces us to the pageant of characters who live and work here. Musical performances highlight local and regional artists: Willi Carlisle plays banjo and accordion on the streets; Sad Daddy records a live performance in the Venetian Dining Room at the Arlington Hotel.
TrueSouth travels The Black Belt of Alabama, southwest of Tuscaloosa, to eat barbecue and witness what art makes possible. Visiting York, Gainesville, and Gee’s Bend, we eat pig tails and pork ribs with pitmasters who bridge the gap between craft and art. Join us as we ferry the Alabama River to talk with modern artists who make extraordinary quilts from ordinary castoffs. Watch and listen as China Pettway and Mary Ann Pettway of the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective piece together a story of freedom won. Walk the streets of York with Marguerite Hinrichs, director of the Coleman Center for the Arts, to learn how the work of art drives change.
In search of Old Florida, we walk the ice boxes at Kyle’s Seafood to survey the catch and eat smoked mullet on the bed of a pickup. We drink beer and talk about home at a beach bar with local author C.H. Hooks. And we line up for a table at O’Steen’s Restaurant to dunk fried shrimp in a datil pepper sauce that burns bright like a beach sunset. Traveling this 16th century city, we explore the tensions between past and future. The shrimp boats that worked the Atlantic Ocean are mostly gone. Tourists drive the economy. Now, another crop is on the rise. Datil peppers, long associated with Menorcan people, are the next generation symbol of this place.
TrueSouth drives into Dublin, Ga., a postcard small town off the interstate between Savannah and Macon, with a courthouse square hot dog joint, a seven-decade-old soul food café, and a big story to tell about what it takes to face down the toughest of foes.
TrueSouth concludes with a special behind-the-scenes episode that tears across the region, from Florida to Georgia, through Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas, on a scene-by-scene search for the stories that define the South.