Contributor Kelley Libby visits a shape note sing event in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Sometimes this style of singing is referred to as Sacred Harp. That’s because there’s an old tunebook called The Sacred Harp, and most shape note singers use it, especially in the deep South.

Episode 12 - Shenandoah Valley Shape Note Singers

Eudora Welty was one of the South’s most beloved writers, and her fiction is still a study in detail and dialogue and wit. Her settings were often Southern, but her themes were universal. Eudora won multiple awards in her lifetime, including a Pulitzer in 1973 for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. She passed away in 2001.

The audio you hear of Eudora in this episode is part of Bill Ferris' recent book The Storied South, which is a collection of interviews with iconic writers, musicians, historians, photographers and artists. 

I first featured Bill in Episode 10, and we talked extensively about his 40-year career and how the South has perfected the art of storytelling. 

In this episode, Bill returns to tell us about his close friendship with the famous Southern writer. 

Episode 13 - Remembering Eudora Welty

“Folks started talking about the New South after the Civil War," says Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina. "Where we are now is the newest of the New Souths, the Newcomer South.” Tom speaks about the ever-evolving South, especially as it relates to food, from a booth in El Pulgarcito, a Honduran-Salvadoran-Mexican restaurant in the eastern part of the city. 

Episode 15 - The Newest New South

Hugh Acheson is one of the most celebrated and influential chefs in the country. He has three restaurants in Athens, Georgia: The National, Five and Ten, and Cinco y Diaz. Empire State South is one of the most popular places to dine in Atlanta and his new restaurant called The Florence is set to open in Savannah in May. 

Hugh is a two-time James Beard Award winner, once as a chef and once for his cookbook, A New Turn in the South. You may have seen him on television competing on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters or as a judge on the show Top Chef. 


Episode 16 - Hugh Acheson

Sean Kelley is a journalist, and in this show, he begins telling us about raising a couple of pigs so that he could slaughter them and eat them and just learn about that entire process firsthand. 

Episode 17: To Eat A Pig, Pt. 1

In the last episode, we met Sean Kelley, a writer who had set out to raise a couple of pigs for the sole purpose of butchering them himself. He was so adamant about that mission that he even named the pigs Lunch and Dinner. This episode pics up at the point where Dinner had grown to be over 300 pounds and Sean was finally ready to slaughter her.

Episode 18: To Eat A Pig, Pt. 2

Hunter Lewis is the executive editor at Southern Living magazine. Before that, he had stints at the publications Bon Appetit and Saveur. In this episode he discusses writing and cooking, Eastern North Carolina whole hog barbecue and the agricultural renaissance that is feeding the way people cook in the South. 

Episode 19: Hunter Lewis

Vivian Howard is the chef at Chef and the Farmer in the small Eastern North Carolina town of Kinston. She also "co-stars" with her husband Ben Knight on their Peabody Award-winning PBS show “A Chef’s Life.”  

Episode 20: Chef Vivian Howard

For years, at historic plantation sites across the South, the focus was on the big house and not on the slave cabins. But cabins like that are now being resurrected on the grounds of Montpelier, James and Dolley Madison's home in Virginia.

Episode 21: Resurrecting Slave Cabins

This track called "Fawn" was recorded at the live music and storytelling event Authentic Us Presents "An Evening with Josh Vasa & Sanyasi" held in Birmingham, Alabama at the Desert Island Supply Company.  

#AuthUsStories Presents "Fawn" by Sanyasi

It’s hard to talk about moonshine without evoking winks and smiles. It carries a mystique. If you own some, you whisper about it. If you don’t, you can bet someone you know does. It’s probably stored in the back of their freezer.  

Moonshine also carries a certain romance. Because the truth is, there’s a story sealed in every Mason jar of the stuff. 
 
Those stories are still celebrated in Wilkes County, NC, where old time bootleggers and retired revenuers met to swap tales.  They told about fast car chases, witty judges, and big still busts. There was a lot of laughter. 


Moonshiners and the Men Who Chased Them

Mo Rocca on Political Party Conventions and Public Radio Groupies

Tanner speaks with James “Ooker” Eskridge, a waterman who has lived on Tangier Island, Virginia, his whole life. Ooker talks about being the Chesapeake Bay island’s mayor (population 450), the dwindling interest in working in the seafood industry, and the island’s distinct Cornwall, England-tinged accent.

Episode 3: Ooker on Tangier Island

Authentic South is a sound-rich, storytelling platform that explores the South's culture through food, art, music, land, literature and characters. Hosted by writer and storyteller Tanner Latham, the episodes feature everyday people doing and wrestling with extraordinary things.

Authentic South

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