Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story

Hot chicken is 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 twelve thousand 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 for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville’s black neighborhoods-and the story of hot chicken says something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city
tries to figure out what it will be in the future.

Hot, Hot Chicken recounts the history of Nashville’s black communities through the story of its hot chicken scene from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.