How Hot Chicken Really Happened
Rachel Martin left her hometown for eight years, then returned to find everyone talking about a dish she’d never heard of or eaten in the Nashville of her youth: hot chicken. Today, we learn how Nashville’s signature dish stayed hidden for decades in the city’s black communities — and then suddenly became a global obsession.
Hot chicken.
It’s on the list of "must-try" Southern foods in countless publications and websites. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken Nashville-style. More than 12,000 people showed up for the 2014 Fourth of July Music City Hot Chicken Festival. The James Beard Foundation recently gave Prince’s Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish.
But although I’m a second-generation Middle Tennessean, the daughter of a Nashville native, I had never eaten hot chicken — or even heard of it — before I moved away for graduate school in 2005. I came back eight years later to a new Nashville that eats new food.
The city is growing almost faster than developers can manage. Historic neighborhoods are being razed and renewed. The suburbs are expanding. Fields are being replaced by paved shopping paradises identical to those spreading across the nation. My friends have moved to the neighborhoods we grew up avoiding. They asked me to meet them for drinks or haute Southern cuisine in places I remembered as industrial wastelands. And everyone was eating hot chicken, a food I didn’t know.
Embarrassed that I didn’t know this food everyone else loved, I turned to Google. The web was full of photographs of fried chicken slathered with a hot sauce that somehow kept it crispy, served on a bed of white bread and topped by a pickle. Then last summer, my friend Julie moved home. She called me.
“What’s hot chicken?” she asked. “Have we been eating our chicken wrong all these years?”
I asked my dad if he had ever had it. “Nope,” he said. But he taught school in the 1970s, and he remembered that some of the black teachers carried their own bottles of hot sauce. Sometimes they’d prank him by spiking his cafeteria lunch.
Was this the answer? Was hot chicken a part of the city’s history that had been invisible to me as a white woman? I asked Denise, an older African-American woman in my church who was raised in the city.
“Of course you didn’t eat hot chicken,” she said, shaking her head at me. “Hot chicken’s what we ate in the neighborhood.”
I went to the Downtown Public Library to do a very unscientific survey of what they had on hand. I sat in their second-floor reading room, surrounded by stacks of cookbooks, just to see if I could find a recipe to prove that in Nashville we didn’t choose our chicken style based on race. I walked away with several new ways to fry a chicken. One of them added some black pepper, but none of them made it spicy.
Sure enough, as I started investigating, I discovered Denise was right. For almost 70 years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville’s black neighborhoods. I started to suspect the story of hot chicken could tell me something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future.
I hate it when people date everything Southern back to the Civil War. But in this case, that’s where my story starts. That is when Nashville became a segregated city, a place where there were white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and very little shared public space.
Before the war, about 700 free blacks lived in Nashville. Their houses were clustered in small enclaves, mostly on the northern side of the city. But there were over 3,200 enslaved people of color in the city. Most of them could not choose where they lived.
Many enslaved African-Americans used the war to claim their freedom. They left their homes and moved to the edges of Union camps. The places where the freed people lived became known as contraband camps. Some of these were migrant communities following the soldiers as they campaigned. Others were permanent settlements where residents plotted streets, built wood cabins and organized churches.
Federal troops captured Nashville in February 1862. The first Southern state capital to be taken, its early capitulation meant that the city became a key Union base. African-Americans from across Middle Tennessee fled there, and contraband camps sprouted up around the military installations perched on the eastern, western and southern borders of Nashville.
After the Civil War ended, the people living in Nashville’s contraband camps had a choice: return to the places they had lived before the conflict, hoping to negotiate new contracts with the whites who once claimed to own them; strike out for somewhere new, gambling that they would find more opportunity in the North or the West; or stay in Nashville, building a new life in the growing city. Many chose to remain. Between 1860 and 1870, African-Americans grew from being 23 to 38 percent of the population.
One of the largest Union camps had been Fort Gillem, north of downtown and near where the free blacks lived before the war. When the Union Army pulled out, Fisk Free Colored School took over the grounds. Rechartered as Fisk University in 1872, it became a leading institution of African-American higher education. The wagon road through the fort was renamed Jefferson Street. A prosperous black business district grew up along it, and houses popped up around it.
Hell's Half Acre in the 1950s. Photograph from the Metro Nashville Archives.
Several other large African-American neighborhoods developed around former camps located in what is now known as East Nashville, just across the Cumberland River from downtown. Like the Jefferson Street area, these were neighborhoods filled with professionals, businesspeople and skilled laborers.
Another black neighborhood grew up a few blocks northwest of the state capital. Known as Hell’s Half Acre, it housed the poorest African-Americans in the city. It had unpaved streets and no sewer system. The city’s disinterest left the area open to trouble. It became known for saloons, prostitution and other vices. It also had some of Nashville’s oldest black churches and schools.
Over the last decade or so, the story of how hot chicken was invented has become part of local mythology, the sort of tale Nashville residents can recount with dramatic pauses and wry chuckles.
It happened this way: Back in the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression, there was a man named Thornton Prince. He was a handsome man, tall and good looking.
“Beautiful, wavy hair,” his great-niece Andre Prince Jeffries tells me. He was also a bit of a womanizer. “He was totally a ladies’ man,” she laughs. “He sure had plenty of women.”
Women handle cheating partners in all sorts of ways. Some look the other way. Others walk out. A few get even.
One of Thornton’s women got fed up with his philandering ways. He had stayed out all night and come home expecting breakfast. She wanted retribution. That morning, just like all their other morning-afters, she got up before him. And she didn’t make him dry toast or gruel. Oh, no, she made him his favorite. She made him fried chicken.
Then, she added the spiciest items she had in her kitchen.
No one knows what went into that first hot chicken. “She couldn’t run to the grocery store to get something,” Jeffries muses. By the time the bird was cooked, she was sure she had spiced it beyond edibility.
As Thornton Prince took his first bite, she must have braced herself for his reaction. Would he curse? Whimper? Stomp out?
But her plan backfired. He loved it. He took it to his brothers. They loved it, too.
The woman disappeared from his life, but her hot chicken lived on. The Prince brothers turned her idea into the BBQ Chicken Shack.
“We don’t know who the lady was that was trying,” Jeffries says. “All the old heads are gone. Gone on. But hey, we’re still profiting from it.” She pauses. “So women are very important.”
Jeffries has an easy explanation for the chicken’s popularity. “My mother said, if you know people are gonna talk, give them something to talk about,” she says. “This chicken is not boring. You’re gonna talk about this chicken.”
Jeffries tells me this sitting in a bench at Prince’s Chicken Shack, the business founded eight decades ago. She is about 70, with carefully applied makeup, a Farrah Fawcett flip and a contagious laugh. She moves a little stiffly, but she’s still the one who runs the restaurant. As we talk, she keeps a close eye on her employees, many of whom are either family members or longtime friends.
I’m at Prince’s early on a Thursday evening, so most folks are picking up to-go dinner orders. Customers file past our table. Some stop to share their own memories. They walk by us to the back of the restaurant where a plywood wall separates the dining room from the kitchen. A window has been cut in the wall, and a woman sits there, ringing up the orders. Occasionally, she yells a number and hands over a brown paper bag of food. The chicken’s grease and sauce quickly saturate the paper, so most customers grab a white plastic bag off a nearby counter. A young man is stapling strands of yellow, white and red Christmas lights around the window.
Of course, a few folks say that before there was Prince’s BBQ Chicken Shack, there was a place called Bo’s. But who wants to mess with a good story?
By the time Thornton Prince opened his restaurant, segregation governed Southern life.
Reconstruction had seemed to offer African-Americans new opportunities. Black men got the vote, and a handful were elected. Schools opened, educating children and adults alike. People hoped for land ownership and fair wages. But the abandonment of the federal government and violent opposition by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan let white Southerners “redeem” their communities. Jim Crow laws hardened the divisions between blacks and whites, making inequality part of the legal code. Lynchings, riots, rapes and other attacks terrorized black communities. Many people left the region, hoping Chicago or New York or Los Angeles would be more peaceful and profitable for them. Others fled the countryside for Nashville and the other cities of the upper South.
Jefferson Street gave black Nashvillians places where they could shop, eat, learn and worship safely. Thanks to these new migrants, the area around Jefferson Street continued to grow and prosper. In 1912, the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial and Normal School — now Tennessee State University — moved there. That same year, the city built Hadley Park, the first park blacks could use. Restaurants, music venues and speakeasies opened. Country music dominated white Nashville’s music scene, but Jefferson Street became an important haunt for jazz and blues musicians. The Ritz Theater let African-Americans watch movies without having to climb into a segregated balcony. Motels and hotels gave travelers options. Similar districts grew up at the heart of the black neighborhoods in East and North Nashville.
But the city developed a “pyramid” zoning code, which meant that land was zoned according to its perceived value. Property zoned for residential use was of higher value, and so it was protected from the incursion of commercial interests. Property zoned for commercial or industrial use could be used for single-family dwellings, but at any point, a developer could come into the middle of the neighborhood and start building anything he or she desired.
Most white neighborhoods were zoned as residential areas. African-American neighborhoods were zoned as commercial and industrial properties.
In 1949, the city administration claimed 96 acres in Hell’s Half Acre. They justified it by saying they would rid the city of vice. The plat included six historic African-American churches, a business district, schools and other sites of community life. The city replaced the neighborhood with the State Library and Archives, a large office building, a six-lane parkway, terraced parking lots and green space. They announced that they would replace the rest of the neighborhood with a planned municipal auditorium and private development. Few provisions were made for the people who lost their homes.
There was “a view that Nashville had held for some time that suggested that one of the major problems with downtowns was people,” former Mayor Bill Purcell explains to me as we look out the window of his high-rise downtown law office. “That if you could eliminate the people, then the city would be successful. … They banned vices; they banned activities that they felt were detrimental to civic life, and they banned residential living.”
Urban redevelopment accelerated over the next several decades, and it bore down upon other black neighborhoods around the city. The 1954 Federal Housing Act offered to pay up to 90 percent of the cost if Nashville would raze unwanted buildings and replace them with superhighways. The city planners cleared the edge of East Nashville for a new interstate. They emptied another 400 acres for warehousing and industrial use. Another highway was routed through Edgehill, a lower-income, predominantly minority community. Black leaders began worrying that urban renewal would become “Negro removal.”
New suburban developments popped up just outside the city’s limits. The interstates proved to be effective walls between the new developments and the city’s centers. Neighborhood covenants controlled who could buy the houses, and so these areas were up to 98 percent white. Nashville grew increasingly segregated.
Over the past 80 years, Thornton Prince’s hot chicken business has wandered through black Nashville. The first BBQ Chicken Shack sat at the corner of Jefferson Street and 28th Avenue, near Tennessee A&I’s campus and just down the street from Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church.
From the beginning, the restaurant was an unusual place. It was not the Princes’ primary source of income. Thornton had a farm. His brothers worked for the post office or at other restaurants.
“It was just a little substitute to try to get over,” Andre Jeffries tells me. “Try to get some more bills paid.”
Since they had other jobs, they opened the restaurant after their workday ended and they stayed open later than any other restaurant in town: midnight during the week and until 4 a.m. on the weekends.
“That’s one tradition that I try to keep, being open that late,” Jeffries says. “It’s grown on me. I’m a night owl now.”
Because the restaurant was a late-night place, Jeffries and her siblings didn’t grow up eating there.
“My father would bring it home and put it on the stove on Saturday night,” she remembers. “When we’d get up on Sunday morning getting ready to go to Sunday school and then to church, I’d always see that little greasy bag on the stove. Hey, we were tackling it because he wouldn’t bring more than one or two pieces, and that would make us mad.”
After a few years, the Chicken Shack moved downtown into Hell’s Half Acre and close to the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry in its heyday.
“When he drove to the Opry on Saturday nights, he could smell something really wonderful but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from,” said Lorrie Morgan, the country singer and daughter of George Morgan, a Country Music Hall of Famer who was a regular on the Opry stage from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, in the cookbook “Around the Opry Table.” One night, he tracked the smell to the BBQ Chicken Shack. He loved the food and the hours. Pretty soon, the Opry stars were headed there after every performance.
Segregation complicated the restaurant’s new popularity. The Princes needed a place to seat their white celebrity clientele without alienating their black customers. They constructed an ingenious compromise. They built a separate room for their white guests, but it was at the back of the building. Whites walked through the main dining room and the kitchen to reach it.
“It was quite a nice room. … We sat out front on these benches,” Jeffries says as she rubs an unpadded white booth that looks like the church pews I grew up sitting in. “I don’t know how old these benches are, but I remember them when I was a child, and I’m almost 70 years old.”
“Black people have never been segregated from the Caucasians,” she continues. “Caucasians separated us. … As far as segregation is concerned, that is a Caucasian problem.” She claps her hands together and shakes her head. “Have mercy!”
The BBQ Chicken Shack was in the middle of the Hell’s Half Acre urban renewal project. The Princes relocated. Their new space was too far from town. They moved again, choosing a block building at 17th and Charlotte, the heart of a black community north of downtown. It sat “just about where the Krystal’s is,” Jeffries clarifies for me.
Desegregation was a two-edged sword for many African-Americans. Racism severely limited their lives and opportunities. They had poorer school systems and fewer good job options. They were prohibited from moving into the best neighborhoods. They were denied loans and mortgages. They were expected to treat all whites with deference, even as they were mistreated. Any challenge to this system was punished with violence.
At the same time, segregation gave African-Americans even more reason to develop separate businesses and community centers. Black schools, churches and businesses became sites of resistance where the next generation learned about black heroes and black history. The BBQ Chicken Shack might not have lasted if it hadn’t first been fostered within Nashville’s black neighborhoods.
In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools had to desegregate. They could have announced a timeframe for it; instead, the justices said desegregation had to happen with “all deliberate speed.”
Many communities used that wishy-washy language to push desegregation off or years or even decades. In Nashville, a young black man named Robert Kelley walked past all-white East High School, over the Cumberland River and through downtown to all-black Pearl High School. His family filed a lawsuit in 1956, arguing the city should open East High to him. The Rev. Henry Maxwell filed a similar suit because his kids were bused from south of Nashville to the other side of the city, a 45-minute ride. To settle these cases, the courts announced that beginning in the fall of 1957, Nashville public schools would desegregate one grade per year in what became known as the “Nashville Plan.”
The school board gerrymandered the school districts so that only about 100 black first-graders were eligible. Nine enrolled. White “segregation academies” and white flight further undermined efforts to integrate the schools. Seven years later, fewer than 800 black students were in formerly all-white schools. Black teachers and principals faced demotions or layoffs as the city consolidated the system.
The next stage in Nashville’s civil-rights struggle happened in February 1960. A few weeks earlier, students in Greensboro, North Carolina, had sat at a downtown lunch counter and demanded service. Inspired by their example, students from Fisk, the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Tennessee A&I organized similar protests in Nashville. Black shoppers boycotted downtown businesses.
Two Civil Rights Movement icons — C.T. Vivian and Diane Nash — led demonstrators to Nashville City Hall on April 19, 1960. Photo from the Jack Corn/Archive library file.
Local civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby headed up the team of lawyers defending the arrested students. His house was bombed in mid-April, though no one was injured. In response, several thousand protesters marched from Fisk to downtown. The mayor met them on the courthouse steps. Diane Nash, a Fisk University student who would help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, demanded, “Mayor West, do you think it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?”
“Yes,” he replied. He added, “That’s up to the store managers, of course.” The Tennessean left out his addendum in its coverage. The “Whites Only” signs came down.
Compared to many other cities, desegregation was relatively peaceful in Nashville, but this may have been because residential segregation and urban renewal had already separated the races from each other. Official, or de jure, segregation may not have seemed as necessary when interstates and building codes had ensured blacks and whites would not live, study, eat or work together.
When Thornton Prince died, his brother Will took over. His wife Maude ran the business when he passed.
Prince’s first real competition happened because the family had a falling out with their cook, Bolton Polk. In the late 1970s, he left to open his own place, which he named Columbo’s Chicken Shack. He served his own version of hot chicken. He added his wife’s chess pies and potato salad. This launched a new debate among generations of hot-chicken devotees. Which restaurant had the better food? Which had the hotter chicken?
The first Columbo’s was near Prince’s in the same black neighborhood off Charlotte Avenue. Polk eventually moved his business just across the river from downtown Nashville. That was where former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell first encountered the dish.
“As soon as I had this hot chicken I knew it was unlike anything I’d ever had,” he says to me. “It was one of the best things I ever had.”
By 1980, it was time for a new generation of Princes to take over the restaurant. Andre Prince Jeffries was a recently divorced mother of two. Her parents had been helping her raise her daughters, but her mother was dying of cancer. Her parents worried that Jeffries’ job in city government would not be enough for her to care for her children on her own. Great Aunt Maude decided Jeffries should take over Prince’s. Her mother told her to accept the offer.
Jeffries renamed the restaurant.
“I took out the BBQ because this was never barbecue,” she says. She also decided it was time to relocate. “When I took over, it seemed like every weekend we were getting robbed.”
In 1989, Prince’s Chicken Shack moved to its current location in East Nashville. It’s in a strip mall that gentrification hasn’t touched yet. On one side of it is Entrepreneur Clothing. On the day I visited, a deep bass rhythm pumped through the open door onto the street. Next to that is a customer-less Chinese restaurant and a nail salon. The parking lot is potholed, and when Prince’s is busy, guests bump their way to an unpaved lot next door. The area is best known for prostitution and drug deals.
“You’ve got to earn the respect of the guys around here,” Jeffries says, shrugging.
Cash only at Prince's.
She talks about the memorabilia that used to be in the restaurant. Many pieces have been stolen, including photographs of her family, plaques and awards given to the restaurant, and a set of autographed plates from the celebrities who frequent Prince’s. Jeffries had hoped to move the restaurant again, somewhere nicer and newer.
“We were supposed to move to 10th and Jefferson, but a lot of politics got involved,” she says a little sadly. A new baseball stadium was planned for the area. “If I had it my way, we’d have a shack-type building but upscale on the interior with a big old potbellied stove in the center of it,” she tells me.
“My mother always said, if you have what people want, they will make their way to your door,” Jeffries says, patting the table in front of her. “You can tell, this is certainly not an upscale bird place. This is my little hole in the wall, but people have made their way here from all over the world. All over the world.”
Columbo’s was also trapped by the improvements happening around Nashville. In the late 1990s, Nashville won an NFL football team. The Houston Oilers became the Tennessee Titans. Columbo’s sat right where the new football stadium was supposed to go. Bolton Polk closed his restaurant, and he died before he could reopen it.
The public projects accelerated in the late ’60s. I-40 was built in 1968, and it cut through the heart of Jefferson Street. Because the city had zoned the region as commercial and industrial, black homeowners had few protections or ways to resist.
“We thought that we were saving the city,” former Mayor Purcell explains to me. “But that wasn’t going to save the city. There is no city that has been successful merely as a collection of suburban places.”
"When the interstate was built, there were no exit ramps," Reavis Mitchell, a historian at Fisk University, told The Tennessean. Fifty percent of Jefferson Street’s residents moved. One hundred twenty businesses closed. “All those major vital things within the inner city were blocked off. North Nashvillians were suspicious to why they were being isolated and wondered if the interstate project was in response to the marches and sit-ins.”
Demolition continued into the 1970s. Developers pitched ideas to tear down more of the historic neighborhoods, replacing them with public housing, industrial warehouses and strip malls.
“I was still not sure about Nashville, and I’m not sure Nashville was sure about Nashville,” Purcell says. “It was not clear what we wanted to do. … There was a history and a practice of believing that if you did not have it here, we could go to Chicago or New York or Atlanta to buy it or see it or do it.”
This was the Nashville of my childhood. Downtown was a handful of honky-tonks catering to tourists who wandered about, dazed by rhinestones, whiskey and country cover bands. Then came the lawyers’ offices, banks and insurance corporations, which emptied as soon as business hours ended. Ringing all of that were strip clubs, car lots and interstates.
The first big preservation fight occurred when a plan emerged to tear down historic Second Avenue and replace it with a skyscraper. The economy was not strong enough to support the development, and the preservationists won. People started debating whether progress meant erasing or celebrating the past.
“It’s all well and good to want to be the Athens of the South and to be a center of learning, but it’s the city’s obligation to ensure that it’s so,” Purcell says. “A city has to be safe, the whole city, not just parts of it or neighborhoods in it.
“By and large, this is the late ’80s now, downtown Nashville was suffering from Nashville’s own decision that the future of downtowns was not certain and certainly not required,” he summarizes.
We’re talking in the conference room of his law firm, which overlooks downtown.
“We had made periodic efforts to salvage what we had and other competitive efforts to knock down and replace what we had.”
Purcell beckons me to the window. He points out the places where there was once a garbage incinerator, derelict buildings and empty lots, right in the heart of the city.
“Only about 900 people lived downtown,” he says.
Before Bolton Polk passed, he taught his nephew Bolton Matthews to make his chicken. Polk never wrote down his secrets, and his nephew has supposedly followed his example.
“He’s the only one that fixes the recipe,” his wife and business partner Dollye Ingram-Matthews told an interviewer with the Southern Foodways Alliance. “I can just tell you parts of it are probably made from pepper bomb spray.”
Ingram-Matthews made hot fish. In 1997, they combined their secret spicy recipes and opened Bolton’s Spicy Chicken and Fish in a small, low concrete block building on Main Street. It’s a block from East Park, where the annual Hot Chicken Festival happens.
“I think it’s popular in Nashville because there are a lot of people living today that had ancestors stuck on pepper,” Dollye Ingram says. “Maybe they had hypertension and couldn’t use salt, so they used pepper instead. … A couple of generations like that, and you know you just got the clientele for hot and spicy chicken.”
Then came perhaps the oddest venture in the hot-chicken story, hotchickens.com. It was started in 2001 when the Internet felt new. It wasn’t a hot-chicken delivery service; it was a restaurant. And yes, .com was part of the name and even on the building’s sign.
The restaurant was founded by country music stars Lorrie Morgan and Sammy Kershaw. Morgan learned to love hot chicken by eating it with her father, George. Food writer John T. Edge described hotchickens.com as “a gingham-trimmed fast-food outlet that … reflects the peculiar Nashville geek-in-a-cowboy-hat zeitgeist.” Debts from the restaurant eventually drove Kershaw into Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Their marriage ended in mutual restraining orders. Morgan tried again, underwriting Lorrie Morgan's Hot Chicken Cafe inside a gambling resort in Alabama. That effort attracted a governor's office investigation.
When I came back home in 2013, Nashville was more than 10 percent larger than it had been when I left less than a decade earlier, and it’s surrounded by communities that have grown by as much as 44 percent.
The tourist strip is busier and glitzier than ever. High rise condominiums have popped up among the business buildings. A new symphony center hosts concerts, speakers and community events. The Nashville Convention Center and the Music City Center draw thousands of people to town every weekend. The Bridgestone Arena seats close to 20,000 people and is home to the Nashville Predators hockey team, which has shocked their hometown and become a competitive club. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the Titans these last few seasons.
Even more surprising to me, my friends live in East Nashville, a region of the city I remember as having a few antiquated businesses, many abandoned houses and large public housing complexes.
East Nashville’s development was partially Mother Nature’s fault. Tornadoes struck Nashville in April 1998. One of them swept through downtown. Another one devastated the neighborhoods of East Nashville. Three hundred homes were destroyed. A Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team formed to make suggestions for how to redevelop and rehab that quadrant of the city. They recommended creating public/private partnerships, building infrastructure tying the neighborhoods to downtown, creating design guidelines and encouraging investment.
“The two greatest treasures East Nashville offers are its diversity and authenticity,” they wrote in their final report. “Throughout the nation, new ‘neo-traditional’ communities are being planned and developed in the hope of replicating the feeling that this community offers.”
Today, East Nashville’s crime rates are falling. New magnet and charter schools are commandeering the public school buildings. Some historic homes are being carefully restored. Others are being razed and replaced with new, high-priced developments. Restaurants and coffee shops and boutique clothing stores form the heart of new, trendy business districts catering to a hipster crowd.
The improvements are billed as helping the entire community, but they are coming at a cost to the people who have lived there for generations. Many of them are getting priced out of their homes. Some of the black residents whose ancestors first settled East Nashville are being forced into the suburbs where whites used to live. Others are ending up in overcrowded, low-income pockets of the city.
In this era of change and loss, residents and visitors alike are anxious to celebrate what is historic about the town. Hot chicken has become shorthand for the area’s various traditions, a de rigueur part of being from here.
Hot chicken has left the neighborhood. But new restaurants specializing in the dish are popping up across town.
“They’re like pizza places, all over,” Andre Jeffries tells me. “Everywhere you look, there’s a new one opening.”
The craze for hot chicken started in 2007 with the first Hot Chicken Festival. Mayor Purcell was stepping down after two terms. He still went to Prince’s regularly, referring to it as his second office. He urged his friends and colleagues to try hot chicken, though when he brought new customers to the restaurant, he would pull Jeffries aside. “He’ll tell us to give it to them hot, don’t give it to them mild. You don’t know if he’s their worst enemy or what!”
Purcell also set Prince’s up with free advertising, making them the face of the new hot-chicken trend. “Why?” Jeffries asks. “Because he knows I have to pay my bills.”
Purcell was looking for a way to celebrate the city, which was approaching its bicentennial.
“Hot chicken is truly our indigenous food,” he explains. “It seemed a way to convene the city around something special to us, worth celebrating but also allowed everybody to participate.”
He founded a festival committee, and they decided to put the festivities in East Park, which is near the entrance to East Nashville. This meant it was close to downtown, but it wouldn’t be swallowed up by other events happening in the city.
“And I was the mayor,” Purcell adds, with a little smirk. “East Park was close to where I live.”
The festival quickly grew in popularity, introducing people to the dish. Hot-chicken cooking contests became part of events around the city. New hot-chicken restaurants were founded, most of them run by young white men in popular gentrifying districts.
Isaac Beard was the first of the new generation of hot-chicken restaurateurs. He opened Pepperfire Chicken in 2010.
“I believe I was born to do something with hot chicken," he told food columnists Jane and Michael Stern. “I am a hot-chicken evangelist.”
The most successful of these new ventures is Hattie B’s, owned by Nick Bishop Jr. and his dad Nick Sr. The first Hattie B’s opened in 2012 in Midtown, right in the heart of a new, hip area.
“Hattie B’s is almost in both Music Row (the area where country recording studios are located) and the campuses of both Vanderbilt and Belmont Universities, making it a much nicer area than Prince’s seedy strip mall,” food blogger Dan Angell wrote of his visit there. “The idea of being in a more protected area was appealing to us, and since you can’t go through Nashville without having experienced hot chicken, Hattie B’s was the choice.” Soon, the Midtown location had a loyal following. They opened a new spot on the edge of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood once known as the Nations, which developers are trying to force us to rename Historic West Town.
I asked Andre Prince Jeffries if she’s worried about losing her customers.
“My customers, they try all these different places that are popping up,” she says. “They come right back here. Might take ’em a little while, but they come back to the real thing. They tell me all the time, ‘You still got it.’ ’Course that makes me feel good. Have mercy.” Her only question, she insists, is which family member will take the restaurant next.
Yes, I have now eaten hot chicken. I decided to start with the original, so I got a leg of Prince’s the day I interviewed Andre Jeffries.
It was getting late, so I took my food to go like most of the other customers. By the time I placed my order, someone else was sitting in my booth. I stood along the wall, waiting for my food and balancing my recorder bag on my feet. A B-grade horror flick played on a flat-screen TV suspended on the wall across from me. I watched a plastic dinosaur chase stranded castaways down a beach.
Jeffries saw me standing there. I heard an argument start up in the back. She told them to rush my order. “But she just got here!” a woman said. “No, she’s been here for over an hour,” Jeffries replied. A young man came out with my sack of food a few minutes later.
There are people who order their chicken so hot that Jeffries sends them home to eat it in private. There are people who go with chicken one notch down. They sometimes ask for wet paper towels to lay over their eyes. Food reviewers warn hot-chicken newbies to wash their hands before using the restroom or touching any other sensitive body parts.
If you want to read the graphic details of what absurdly hot poultry can do to a person, what happens to your body when you eat food so spicy that you shouldn’t be seen in public, well, I’m a wimp. I grew up in a household where adding garlic made a dish spicy. I ordered my chicken mild. I added a side of coleslaw, figuring I could use it to cut the heat.
It was very good fried chicken, moist and crispy at the same time, but it was warmer than I like my food. While I’d love to talk more with Andre Jeffries, I’m not sure I’ll ever be the hot-chicken devotee so many Nashvillians have become.
One day in graduate school, I went to a meeting at the Center for the Study of the American South. The speaker had spent the past year photographing the U.S./Mexico border, recording the terror and danger faced by undocumented workers who fled their homelands for the opportunities the United States represented.
It was the spring of 2008, and North Carolina was in the throes of an immigration debate and newly awakened by the pending nomination of Barack Obama. Issues of race and equality were on our minds, but we were also historians. We could all riff on the discouraging realitiesof modern America, like the fact that public schools were more segregated than they had been at any time since 1965 and income inequality was growing. Our conversation grew increasingly cynical.
Then William Ferris chimed in. Ferris is a noted folklorist whose wife is a prominent foodways scholar. He is one of those public intellectuals whose lists of achievements should make him terrifying, but he has a deeply kind streak that makes him a student favorite.
Ferris said that the popularity of Mexican culture encouraged him. He pointed out that Mexican restaurants are growing ubiquitous, and in each establishment, customers met people affected by the immigration debate. Maybe restaurant-goers would get to know their servers, fall in love with their food, dance to the music they heard playing over the sound systems and thus learn to empathize with immigrants.
At the time, I vehemently disagreed with him. It was the only time I dared to do so. I used the African-American experience as my example. “Whites have eaten fried chicken for centuries now,” I remember saying. “Segregation still exists.”
But these days, I find myself hoping he was right. Is the hot-chicken craze helping Nashville create a new history? Or is hot chicken being stripped of its cultural meaning as it’s moved out of the neighborhood? Can a simple chicken dish be trusted with healing the divisions that have taken generations to form? Or will it become nothing more than Nashville’s newest hipster trend?
The 9th Annual Music City Hot Chicken Festival happened on July 4, 2015. It was an unusual Independence Day for Tennessee, with a high of only 82 and an almost guaranteed chance of rain. Diehard hot-chicken lovers still braved the weather, ducking under golf umbrellas or into the beer tents when rain started falling.
I showed up for the mid-morning parade that kicks off the day’s official events. I was supposed to be meeting a guy for a first date. I was counting on Andre Prince Jeffries’ theory, that this chicken would give us something to talk about. But as I got out of my car, I got a text from him saying he would be late. Then I realized I had forgotten my umbrella. It seemed an inauspicious beginning to the both relationship and the day.
I found a seat on a low concrete wall along the parade route and started making notes about the folks around me. Though the crowd’s racial demographics didn’t match East Nashville’s neighborhoods or even the numbers in Nashville generally, it was the closest thing to a mixed gathering I’ve seen in Nashville (outside of a sporting event).
But very few individuals mingled with anyone other than the people they came with. I wondered if that was partly because the weather kept numbers low. Groups could sit comfortably distanced from everyone else.
The parade was what Momma would call “homegrown.” Two police on motorcycles led it followed by a small brass band. The rest of the parade was made up of: four antique firetrucks which judiciously chirped their sirens, trying to show off for the crowd without scaring the babies; a series of municipal candidates and their supporters who hurled candy at bystanders; a couple of local businesses with people tossing beads out the door of their company vehicles; one home-converted topless wood-paneled station wagon labelled #TheDoose that carried a handful of very cool looking 20-somethings; and three tatted-up members of the Nashville Rollergirls, who whipped in and out of the other groups.
After the parade, I walked back through East Park to the main stage, where the Shelby Bottom String Band was entertaining the crowd, filling time until Bill Purcell stepped on stage to say a few words.
“We’re going to play Bill’s favorite,” the lead singer told the crowd. They started in on a Merle Haggard classic:
Eating rainbow stew with a silver spoon
Underneath that sky of blue
We'll all be drinking that free bubble-up
And eating that rainbow stew
Purcell wasn’t ready when they were finished the song, so they soldiered on through another couple of numbers.
My guy showed up about the same time Purcell did. We wandered around, looking into our various options. Lines had started forming in front of each of the hot-chicken tents. He told me he lived down the road from the new Hattie B’s in the Nations and ate there all the time. I told him the story of Prince’s founding.
The line for Prince’s stretched the length of the green, past the lines for Hattie B’s and Pepperfire and Bolton’s. At the end of the green, the queue took a sharp turn, wrapping around Prince’s competitors.
A curious thing was happening. Folks at the back of the Prince’s line stayed in their groups, chatting with the people they came with. But by the time they reached the bend in the queue, they were running out of things to say to their friends. They stood, arms crossed and hips cocked, staring into space.
But after a few more minutes of waiting, they started talking to the others in line around them, telling strangers the story of when they first tried hot chicken and trading insider knowledge of what to order from the other hot chicken joints.
