Nashville Scene 12-22-22

With her family’s signature dish now a global sensation, the longtime matriarch behind Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack is a cultural ambassador for Music City

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

NASHVILLIAN OF THE YEAR ANDRÉ PRINCE JEFFRIES

CITY LIMITS

GOP Lawmakers Aim to Criminalize Drag Shows Where Children Could Be Present 7

‘The attack on drag shows is one more attempt in a long line of attempts of “othering” LGBTQ people in order to gain electoral advantages’

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

Sarah Needed an Abortion. Her Doctors Needed Lawyers. ........................................ 8

‘If you have healthy people who are worried about getting pregnant, we’ve created a culture of fear’

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

Pith in the Wind 8

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog Homeless Memorial Highlights Low Life Expectancy, Need for Affordable Housing 9 This year the state outlawed camping while more local funding was introduced

BY HANNAH HERNER

11

COVER STORY

Nashvillian of the Year: André Prince Jeffries

With her family’s signature dish now a global sensation, the longtime matriarch behind Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack is a cultural ambassador for Music City

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

CRITICS’ PICKS

Drew and Ellie Holcomb’s Neighborly Christmas, Off Broadway: An Improvised Musical, Wick-it & KDSML, Holiday Classics: Die Hard, Austin Hoke Performs the Works of Bach for Cello, Kennyhoopla and more

22

FOOD AND DRINK

My Dinner With Audrey 22 An in-depth look at the elevated Appalachian cuisine of Sean Brock’s Audrey

BY KAY WEST

Booze Hound: Big Red Bow at Jane’s Hideaway 23 The new East Side location has saved you a seat at the bar

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

YONIC

Christmases

BY MARY LIZA HARTONG

BY SUSANNAH FELTS AND CHAPTER16.ORG

PRINCE Is a big 9-month-old puppy who still has a little learning to do, but he is so SMART and eager to please. His hope is to go home with an active family or person who will enjoy playing with him and going for walks/ runs/hikes. He stayed in a foster home for a bit, and they said he absolutely LOVED going for hikes. He also loves to give hugs. Prince is housebroken and dog friendly, too. His play style is classified as goofy and rowdy. And he’s always doing something silly to make people laugh. You really need to meet him today at NHA! Call 615.352.1010

DOES ‘CHOICE’ MEAN WE HAVE NO CHOICE IN GOV. BILL LEE’S TENNESSEE? TENNESSEANS DESERVE BETTER!

“Tennessee faces … a $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion yearly shortfall in infrastructure expenses, according to studies by TDOT and the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations,” reported The Tennessean on Dec. 15. “Projected road costs far exceed revenues generated by the various fuel taxes in place in Tennessee, the primary way the state funds highway projects.”

As a potential strategy to address this problem, Gov. Bill Lee and his administration are discussing the conversion of carpool lanes into toll lanes. But instead of saying they are creating toll lanes where Tennesseans will pay to use the lanes, they are calling them “choice” lanes. The administration claims the “choice” lanes could allow drivers the “choice” to speed by regular traffic when they are in a hurry.

Some folks may be in favor of “choice” lanes, believing them to create a faster lane, particularly in rush-hour traffic. But this seems off, doesn’t it?

The same Dec. 15 Tennessean article quotes Tony Dutzik, “a senior policy analyst, focused on transportation and energy with the Frontier Group,” which is “part of the Public Interest Network, a liberal-leaning, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization.” “Tolls provide people with an option in the short run, but what transportation researchers have found is people adapt to traffic,” said Dutzik. “The minute the congestion begins to ease up on the highway, people begin to shift their patterns, and it causes traffic to reemerge, and often it doesn’t help but just causes bottlenecks to move to different points.”

Tennessee Lookout’s Holly McCall recently wrote a piece titled “In Gov. Bill Lee’s Tennessee, ‘choice’ means you have no choice.” Writes McCall: “Tennessee’s lawmakers believe in choice, alright: They choose when you can have a choice about your health care, your kids’ education and now, if they are successful, how and where you drive.” McCall, who is from Chicago, has experience with toll roads. She writes: “The choice you get with toll roads [is] to pay the toll or to get fined if you don’t. If you are averse to forking out cash to drive on a public highway you already support through taxes, you have the choice to meander along rural back roads on out-of-theway routes to your destination.” McCall adds that “some high-priced, outsourced marketing firm” likely told the governor that “the word ‘choice’ sells better than ‘toll roads.’ ”

A good spin on negative news can sometimes change the way that news is received. A blog post about positive spin on Grammarly.com recommends presenting solutions instead of problems — to “state what you want, not what you don’t.” I believe the governor and his administration have followed similar advice in replacing the word “toll” with the word “choice.” Except in this case, they’re stating what they think Tennesseans want. The implication is

that Tennesseans will have a “choice” regarding using traffic lanes — so that’s what they’re saying, rather than that we will have to pay a toll.

McCall also points out that Gov. Lee and his administration use the word “choice” in other less-than-stellar ways. She notes that the term “school choice” “has become shorthand for ‘charter schools,’ a passion of Lee’s.” But “his idea of ‘choice schools’ may be the Hillsdale College-backed charter schools pushed by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, who opined earlier this year that teachers ‘come from the [dumbest] parts of the [dumbest] colleges.’ ” McCall further fumed that when it comes to reproductive health care, the word “choice” in Tennessee does not apply since the implementation of Tennessee’s “trigger law,” which took effect 30 days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal abortion protections laid out by Roe v. Wade

When hearing the word “choice” from Tennessee lawmakers, perhaps we need to be skeptical. In most instances “choice” is a tremendous thing — but when the word is bandied about to make us feel better about negative information, it’s not so tremendous. I’m with McCall, who writes that she would “prefer lawmakers who would shoot straight about our options and lack of them.”

Because I believe that as Tennesseans, that’s the least we deserve.

Bill Freeman

Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post, and Home Page Media Group in Williamson County.

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In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016

PHOTO: HAMILTON MATTHEW MASTERS

BILL LEE

Journey across space and time. Fire and flood. Riots and ruins.

Teeming with luminous colors, surreal forms, and evocative symbols, the works of art in this exhibition visualize the deep human desire to develop “theories of everything”. And while they can be appreciated on a strictly aesthetic level, layered stories upon stories await your exploration. We invite you to immerse yourself in an interdisciplinary artistic experience that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video.

Installation view of Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood, 2022, Frist Art Museum. Photo: John Schweikert. © Matthew Ritchie

CITY LIMITS

GOP LAWMAKERS AIM TO CRIMINALIZE DRAG SHOWS WHERE CHILDREN COULD BE PRESENT

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

This article was first published by Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

It was trivia night at Tribe, an LGBTQ club in Nashville, and drag queen Tracey Ottomey was quizzing the crowd on pop music, Christmas movies and Queen Victoria. At the same time, pop music videos — widely available on YouTube and other platforms — played on screens around the bar.

One audience member couldn’t help comparing the two forms of entertainment on offer: The music videos were “much more sexual” than the drag trivia night, he said.

Minors aren’t allowed in bars, but Republicans in multiple states are deeming drag shows as inherently sexual or obscene, pushing measures that would make it a crime to perform them anywhere children might be present.

Supporters say enacting such restrictions is just common sense, a way to ensure that kids are not exposed to material that isn’t appropriate for them. “My bill just says you can’t do sexually suggestive or explicit entertainment where kids are going to be present,” says Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, a Republican and one of the most powerful elected officials in the state. “It boggles my mind that we’re even having to have this conversation.”

But LGBTQ advocates say attacks on drag shows are the latest salvo in a yearslong effort by GOP legislators to marginalize them. They point to recent bans on transgender athletes playing on sports teams, restrictions on classroom discussions of gender and prohibitions on gender-

confirming health care for minors, among other examples.

Chris Sanders, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, says the push in Tennessee and elsewhere is an effort to “put us behind closed doors.”

“They can say that we are inherently adult entertainment, so we should not be viewed by the general public, that there is a corrupting influence,” Sanders says. “There may be electoral gains out of that, but there’s also social control.”

David Trowbridge, an assistant political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University who has studied debates over LGBTQ rights, says the politicians targeting drag shows could be inspired by sincerely held beliefs, a desire for electoral advantage or some mix of the two. But he predicts the moves will alienate many voters even as it motivates others.

“A lot of these issues contain the same rhetoric and argument, with a slightly different spin in the context,” Trowbridge says. “It would seem to me that the attack on drag shows is one more attempt in a long line of attempts of ‘othering’ LGBTQ people in order to gain electoral advantages.”

Advocacy group the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation says legislators in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Montana and Texas have filed or publicly discussed plans to propose drag show legislation. The group also tracks an increasing number of significant threats, including armed protests, against drag performances.

Majority Leader Johnson filed his bill the day after the midterm elections. His legislation would define drag shows as an “adult cabaret performance,” classifying them with topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic

dancers and strippers. It would prohibit “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or [a] similar entertainer” from performing on public property or where it “could be viewed by a person who is not an adult.” Johnson says he filed his bill after seeing videos of drag performances in Tennessee. He cited “five or six” videos that recently have appeared on social media, describing the content as “something that I think any reasonable person would consider to be explicit or inappropriate for kids.”

In one video from a Pride event in Chattanooga, a child is seen touching the tail of a performer’s Little Mermaid costume. Pride organizers later said the performer was assigned female at birth, and that the organization had received death threats in the wake of the video. In another video from Tennessee Tech University, a performer sheds religious clothing in what one conservative activist said was “a dance clearly meant to mock Christians.”

Johnson adds that filing the bill on the first day he was able to has “nothing to do with the degree of priority,” but he does consider a public drag ban “a very important issue.”

In Texas, some Republicans recoiled in June when videos of a Dallas event described as a family-friendly drag performance surfaced on social media. In one clip, a performer dancing to a Diana Ross song accepts cash from children sitting with their parents or guardians. Critics also note a neon sign that says, “It’s not going to lick itself!”

Republican state Rep. Bryan Slaton says videos from a Dallas “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event prompted his pledge to file legislation in the upcoming session that would ban drag shows when minors are present. Through a spokesperson, Slaton says his bill would “protect young children from this sexualization.” Another Texas bill would place new restrictions on drag performances by labeling any commercial enterprise that hosts one as a “sexually oriented business.” The bill defines a drag show as “a performance in which a performer exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment.”

In Arizona, a to-be-filed proposal from Republican state Sen. Vince Leach would bar minors from attending any drag performance. In Michigan, House Republicans announced a plan to give parents the power to sue public schools that host drag shows, despite being unable to identify an instance where that had happened. Idaho Republicans reportedly have a draft bill that would ban drag performances in public places ready to file in January. And a prefiled Montana bill is titled “prohibit minors from attending drag shows,” though no other details are available.

Mac Huffington has been performing in and producing drag pageants and events in Nashville and around the country for more than two decades. She has seen drag grow in popularity during that time, including via RuPaul’s Drag Race and weekend drag brunches. And Drag Story Hour, founded in

2015 in San Francisco, now organizes events around the country that feature “storytellers using the art of drag to read books to kids in libraries, schools and bookstores.”

Huffington says the Tennessee bill restricting drag “would be devastating to our world,” because “it’s a world where we can be who we are without judgment.” She and Sanders both argue that describing drag as inherently illicit or sexual is inaccurate.

“It’s not drag that makes something adult entertainment,” Sanders says. “Putting on a lot of makeup, a wig, and dancing or lip-syncing, that is not inherently adult entertainment.”

Adds Huffington: “There’s nothing sexual about lip-syncing.”

One result of these legislative proposals could be harassment of trans people, Sanders says, “because the way the state views trans people would not be far from the [bill] language of male and female impersonators, unfortunately.”

The push to ban drag shows in part or in full took on new meaning Nov. 19, the week after Johnson filed his bill, when a shooter killed five people at an LGBTQ club in Colorado the night of a drag queen’s birthday party. Attorneys for the suspect say in a court filing that their client, who has been charged with bias-motivated crimes, is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.

“LGBTQ Americans are reporting feeling unsafe, and there is documented evidence as to why,” says GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “Extremist politicians have to stop using anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to score points and stoke fear.”

In addition to legislative proposals, GLAAD is also tracking protests and threats against drag performances, including six in Tennessee in 2022, more than nearly any other state. In September, a drag show in Memphis was canceled after armed protesters showed up. Drag shows in other cities in the state also have been canceled in recent months in response to outrage from local officials.

Diskin Cider, a Nashville bar that hosts drag brunches, said in a statement last week that “a small group of organized extremists congregated outside of our building to openly express their opposition to drag” over the weekend. The company said it had preemptively hired security “due to a national influx of hateful rhetoric.” In recent weeks, drag shows in other states have been met by right-wing protesters, some of them armed. GLAAD has tallied at least 124 protests and “significant threats” to drag events this year.

“We’re always nervous and afraid, even before the shooting,” Huffington says. “At this moment, we know we have to be more unified. We know we have to get the message out there.”

Sanders’ group is weighing its options after Murfreesboro officials said they would deny the group permission to host the Murfreesboro Pride Fest again in 2023.

“We will not accept any policy that labels drag as inherently adult entertainment, and we’re absolutely going to stick to our First Amendment rights on this,” Sanders says.

Tennessee’s Sen. Johnson says the Colorado shooting had not made him reconsider his plans for the legislative session. “It’s terrible what happened there, but that doesn’t

‘The attack on drag shows is one more attempt in a long line of attempts of “othering” LGBTQ people in order to gain electoral advantages’

DRAG EXTRAVAGANZA AT NASHVILLE PRIDE FESTIVAL 2022

PHOTO: HAMILTON MATTHEW MASTERS

mean we shouldn’t do what we think is best in Tennessee in order to try to protect children from adult-themed, sexually explicit entertainment,” he says.

The Republican lawmaker was unopposed in the general election but faced a spirited challenge from a conservative activist in the GOP primary. Sanders suggests the primary challenge could have inspired Johnson’s new focus on drag shows.

Sanders and Ellis, the GLAAD president,

SARAH NEEDED AN ABORTION. HER DOCTORS NEEDED LAWYERS.

contend that the push by Johnson and other lawmakers to label drag shows as sinister will result in the demonization of queer people.

“It’s abundantly clear that something has to change in our politics and media to reject harmful rhetoric that leads to reallife violence,” Ellis says. “Everyone, including LGBTQ people and youth, should know they are accepted and safe.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

By 8:15 p.m., pictures from an ultrasound gave doctors two sets of information. First, the pregnancy was indeed ectopic. And second, Sarah was experiencing enough bleeding for it to show up as floating around in her cavity. She would need surgery and an abortion to repair the damage.

A little after 9 p.m., as her blood levels raised the concern of Sarah’s doctors even more, one of her doctors told her something odd and a little disconcerting. She shouldn’t worry, because legal was getting involved.

last week showed that 75 percent of Tennesseans support making some exceptions to the law, including for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

This story is a partnership between the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Scene. The Nashville Banner is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization focused on civic news and will launch fully next year. For more information, visit NashvilleBanner.com.

Sarah woke up on a Tuesday morning in late August feeling bloated.

There could be a dozen reasons for it, she thought. Maybe it was a change she made in her diet recently, adding more greens. Maybe it was the asparagus she ate for dinner or the cruciferous vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower — she’d been trying to add to her plate. The high sulfur content in Brussels sprouts can cause pressure from gas, she surmised. But a day later the feeling persisted, so she texted a close friend who is a nurse practitioner.

If it’s the appendix, her friend responded, you need to get that checked. The pain was specific to the right lower quadrant in Sarah’s abdomen, which means it couldn’t be ruled out.

Thursday morning she went back to work, but the discomfort was constant. Sarah is a teacher, and her general attitude was that she could just power through the day and take care of a personal issue after school — not an uncommon approach for a lot of public school employees. By 3 p.m., the pain was bad enough that she decided to drive herself to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She walked into the emergency room and checked in, not knowing what the next few hours would reveal: Sarah was pregnant, bleeding internally and about to run right into the teeth of Tennessee’s abortion ban.

Months later, recounting the experience, Sarah is still astounded at the turn of events. (Editor’s note: Sarah is a pseudonym. She agreed to talk with the Banner and share her medical records under the condition that we not use her real name.)

An emergency room can seem like “controlled chaos” at times, she says, especially at Vanderbilt, home of the region’s only level-one trauma center. After checking in, Sarah was triaged, but it was an hour-anda-half before her first blood was drawn for a CBC (complete blood count) panel to give the doctors a baseline of her health. The results were inconclusive. Nothing immediately indicated to the medical staff that she was anemic or had an infection, but an inflamed appendix was ruled out.

By 6:45 p.m., an OB/GYN examined Sarah and wondered about her ovaries. The doctor ordered a urine test, which came back with a surprise: Despite having an IUD implanted earlier that year, Sarah was pregnant. A second blood test confirmed it.

“When I got to the hospital that was on my radar, like, what if something happened with the IUD?” she says. “Still, again, not thinking that I’m pregnant? Like, why would I?” IUDs are one of the most effective forms of birth control, stopping more than 99 percent of pregnancies. “I wasn’t expecting that pregnancy result at all, because of the implant.”

But the presence of the device gave doctors and Sarah a clue as to why she was in such distress.

“I immediately knew that something wasn’t right, just from the sort of pain I was in, and I didn’t have any symptoms of pregnancy,” Sarah says. As a mother of two, she was very familiar with the early months of pregnancy and its side effects — nausea, tiredness, subtle changes in her body. But there were none. “So I just knew that something wasn’t right. I even asked [the OB/ GYN], I said, ‘You know, I’m worried it’s ectopic.’ He said, ‘We’re gonna send you to get an ultrasound done to confirm the location of the pregnancy.’”

Ectopic pregnancies are where the tissue — a fertilized egg — implants outside the uterus. According to Dr. Nancy Lipsitz, a longtime Nashville OB/GYN and former professor at Vanderbilt University, this occurs in roughly 2 percent of all pregnancies. Most commonly, the tissue implants in a woman’s fallopian tube. When an IUD fails, this is a common location for the pregnancy.

“Because it is pregnancy tissue, it grows in a space and expands,” Lipsitz says. “And if it’s not treated, it can cause internal bleeding, it can rupture. It can cause damage to fallopian tubes or other structures, and if it’s not treated, can cause hemorrhaging. It can cause hypovolemic shock, and rarely, it can cause death.”

Tennessee’s ban on abortions became law after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June, when a new majority on the court overturned abortion protections enshrined by Roe v. Wade nearly a half-century earlier. The state’s so-called “trigger law,” enacted in 2019, banned all versions of the procedure. And unfortunately for Sarah, the law kicked in just days before she arrived in the emergency room.

Vanderbilt’s lawyers were grappling with language that made providing an abortion a class C felony and subject to both a $10,000 fine and significant prison time. There was a provision for doctors to act, but they were required to make an affirmative defense to prosecution — i.e., they had to admit that they were in violation of the law, but that the mother’s life would be in jeopardy if they did not perform the abortion.

Indeed, inserted into Sarah’s charts are roughly 20 paragraphs of language detailing measures that Vanderbilt doctors had taken in order to provide a legal rationale for an abortion. According to Lipsitz, the area’s hospitals had begun preparing for just this kind of eventuality in June because ectopic pregnancies are not uncommon. An estimated 1 to 2 percent of all pregnancies are ectopic, meaning that in a state like Tennessee — which had 78,689 births in 2020 — somewhere between 780 and 1,570 women per year deal with a situation similar to Sarah’s.

Some lawmakers are beginning to express regret at passing a law that includes no exceptions for rape or incest and places the burden on doctors to defend their actions. Some voted for the law never expecting that it would be put in place, including state Sen. Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville).

“Here, the defendant is guilty until he can prove that he’s not guilty,” said Briggs, a Republican and retired heart surgeon, in an interview with ProPublica in November. “In my opinion, that is a very bad position to put the doctors in — why should this doctor have to pay his own legal bills for saving a woman’s life?”

For Lipsitz, the question of why this procedure requires such legal maneuvers is a perplexing one, since ectopic pregnancies will not lead to a birth.

“The only time I’ve seen a viable pregnancy from an ectopic pregnancy was on Grey’s Anatomy,” she says. “There was a segment where they found an ectopic pregnancy attached to the liver at 26 weeks. I don’t know who their medical consultants were. No, never you’re never going to get a viable pregnancy.”

Though some lawmakers have begun exploring making changes to the law, Gov. Bill Lee has said he’s “satisfied” with the current version. A Vanderbilt poll released

By 10:40 p.m., after hours of consultation, doctors assured Sarah that there was no problem with the legality of treating her and began preparations to get her to surgery. In the interim, Sarah and her husband, as well as other family members, had begun exploring other options in case Vanderbilt balked, including transferring to Centennial Medical Center, which would do the procedure. She stayed, and at 12:48 a.m., she was wheeled into surgery. Doctors removed the pregnancy and part of a fallopian tube and cleaned up some of the damage from the bleeding.

Sarah says she feels lucky to have both family and legal support. As a resident of a city with multiple hospital options, she didn’t have to travel far for care. Even today, she’s flabbergasted that a doctor had to break the law in order to treat her.

“It’s a felony, what they did, and that is crazy to me,” she says. “So while I’m recovering from surgery, and trying to emotionally process all of it, another layer of it was, what if my case wasn’t severe enough, right? And what if a prosecutor decides, ‘Well, we want to make an example.’ Like, what if I wasn’t bleeding internally enough? Or what if, because I was stable the whole time — I was very lucky that I was stable the whole time — but what if that’s used against me one day, or used against my doctor? Those are all things that were on my mind, after the fact. And they shouldn’t have been.”

The downstream effects of the law are only just beginning to be felt, says Lipsitz.

“Are our young OB/GYNs going to move to Tennessee and take jobs here?” Lipsitz says. “Are people going to want to come to residency in Tennessee? Even people who say, ‘This doesn’t really affect me’ — it could affect family members, it could affect your friends, it could affect your children. You’re going to have fewer people come to train here, possibly, you’re going to have fewer people move here and work.”

She pauses for a second and then recounts the conversations she’s had with patients.

“If you have healthy people who are worried about getting pregnant, we’ve created a culture of fear.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

The state comptroller released a scathing performance audit of Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services. Turnover near 50 percent, overburdened caseworkers, children facing violence and abuse in placement homes, and stopgap solutions that have children sleeping in state office buildings all spell out a department in crisis with direct implications for the 8,000-plus children in state custody. … A growing slate of challengers is emerging ahead of the 2023 Metro Council elections. Several councilmembers are term-limited, including at-large reps Bob Mendes and Sharon Hurt, the latter of whom recently announced her run for mayor. Current district

‘If you have healthy people who are worried about getting pregnant, we’ve created a culture of fear’

HOMELESS MEMORIAL HIGHLIGHTS LOW LIFE EXPECTANCY, NEED FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

BY HANNAH HERNER

At this year’s annual homeless memorial, 176 names were read aloud — 176 names of people who died in Nashville having experienced homelessness.

The homeless memorial, which this year took place Dec. 17, is always held on or near the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. This symbolizes the long nights people experience on the streets. Each year the ceremony centers on the Tara Cole memorial bench at Riverfront Park. In 2006, Cole, who was experiencing homelessness, was sleeping on a dock when two men rolled her into the Cumberland River, where she drowned.

Another unfortunate recurring theme at these events: Acts of violence and pedestrian deaths affect people experiencing homelessness more than the general population, explained Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, which is headquartered in Nashville.

“The first thing we do when we go home is we shut the door, and we lock the door — you don’t have that option [if you are homeless],” Watts told the Scene. “People experiencing homelessness are much more likely to die from violence than to commit violence.”

The median age of those on this year’s list is 54, which falls in line with national averages in life expectancy for those who have been homeless. Nationally, the average life expectancy is around 76. This discrepancy is attributed to elevated rates of disease, including cardiovascular conditions, as well as overdose. Cancer is also more of a risk, as it

Councilmembers Russ Pulley and Jeff Syracuse are both eyeing at-large seats, as is attorney Quin Evans Segall, who currently sits on the city’s Industrial Development Board. … Talking Points Memo published text messages sent to then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows about efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — including one from Nashville’s new U.S. Rep. Mark Green. … A poll released by Vanderbilt University shows that three-quarters of Tennesseans, including 62 percent of Republicans, believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape or incest. The poll also showed a significant split among Tennessee Republicans: 36 percent plan to support Donald Trump in 2024, down 8 percent since last year, while 54 percent are behind a presidential run for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Mayor John Cooper is pushing for a new policy that would require the city to keep enough cash reserves to cover two months’ worth of city operating expenses — a more conservative approach to

tends to be diagnosed later in the unhoused population.

“Causes of death are pretty consistent with populations of people that are not experiencing homelessness,” says India Pungarcher, advocacy and outreach specialist with Open Table Nashville. “They’re just dying literally 20 years earlier than someone who’s not experiencing homelessness.”

Pungarcher is a leader in compiling the list each year, and this year she took on recording medical examiner’s data — a task usually reserved for the Metro Homeless Impact Division. It’s a group effort compiled by Open Table Nashville, Metro Social Services’ indigent burial program, Nashville Rescue Mission, Room In The Inn, Salvation Army and additional outreach workers. While a lack of official tracking from the city can make the list incomplete in terms of cause and date of death, Pungarcher says it can be a strength in other ways. By including outreach workers in data collection, word-of-mouth can catch people who an automated system might miss.

Homelessness has been on the minds of elected officials this year, for better or for worse. Metro officials including Councilmember Freddie O’Connell, Homelessness Planning Council Chair Jaha Martin, and April Calvin with the Metro Homeless Impact Division spoke at the event Saturday. In April, the state legislature passed a bill making camping near or under state highways a misdemeanor, and camping on public property a felony. In October, the Metro Council approved a $50 million plan to address homelessness. In November, Mayor John Cooper’s office announced it would close the encampment at Brookmeade Park by Jan. 1, with the goal of housing every person there.

The number of 2022 deaths is down from last year’s number, 194. Watts said he’s observed a positive long-term impact of using COVID-19 relief funds to temporarily house those experiencing homelessness — though he’s concerned that once those relief funds run out, a housing-first approach will be less possible.

“People say nothing works and the situation is hopeless, but that is not true at all,” Watts said. “Nashville housed more people, they got more people into housing [than in previous years]. The problem is more people are falling out of housing because of the economy of rising rents and other issues.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

fiscal management that would bring the city in line with municipal best practices. … Lagra Newman, speaking on behalf of North Nashville charter school Purpose Prep, contested Metro Nashville Public Schools’ data regarding Purpose Prep’s economically disadvantaged students at last week’s board meeting. The dispute, rooted in conflicting definitions of disadvantaged students, hit on continued tension between the board and charter school leadership. … During a five-week public engagement tour across the county, Nashvillians spoke to councilmembers about the city’s proposed $2.1 billion new stadium for the Tennessee Titans The topic became a proxy for city spending priorities, and conversation ranged from teacher pay to affordable housing, previewing what might become a key issue during next year’s Metro elections. … Contributor Betsy Phillips captures Tennesseans’ misfortunes under Gov. Bill Lee in a creative retelling of a familiar holiday fable.

This year the state outlawed camping while more local funding was introduced

Pictured: Crystal Atkinson, Caroline Dean, Giovanna Murillo Anna Dorris, Devin Mueller, Shelbi Aimonetti, Deborah Vahle Callie Hughes Mark Deutschmann Maggie Kay Latina Davis Danielle Helling Newell Anderson Katie Evans mann, Davis,

Nashville’s newest luxury condominiums by Richland Building Partners Offering views of The Parthenon, Centennial Park & Downtown Skyline Now accepting contracts – delivering 2024

A T H E N A A T T H E P A R K . C O M

NASHVILLIAN OF THE YEAR ANDRÉ PRINCE JEFFRIES

With her family’s signature dish now a global sensation, the longtime matriarch behind Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack is a cultural ambassador for Music City

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

OF ALL THE THINGS that have made Nashville a part of the national zeitgeist — country music, health care, party tractors — the one that many locals are most proud of is Nashville hot chicken. Noted piquantpoultryphile and former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell is an adamant cheerleader of the specialty cuisine.

“Nashville hot chicken is our only indigenous food,” says Purcell, who founded the Music City Hot Chicken Festival more than 15 years ago. “And it’s the only product from Nashville that has ‘Nashville’ in its name. From New York to L.A., Cambodia, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, this chicken has spanned the world, and it’s always referred to as ‘Nashville hot chicken.’ ”

When asked who is primarily responsible for the phenomenon, Purcell answers quickly.

“André Prince Jeffries has been an incredible representative of Nashville and hot chicken. She is genuine and knows who she is. I say that André is the NFT of hot chicken — she cannot be copied, and there are no substitutes or subdivisions for her.”

That’s why the Scene is naming André Prince Jeffries our 2022 Nashvillian of the Year.

At age 76, Ms. André — as she is widely known — doesn’t get around as quickly as she once did. She uses two canes thanks to a pair of arthritic kneecaps, but her eyes still sparkle as she shares a lifetime of stories with her easy laugh. She still shows up at the largest location of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack at 5814 Nolensville Pike almost every night that it’s open, but she doesn’t stick around until 4 in the morning like she used to at Prince’s previous homes — first on Clarksville Highway, then on Ewing Drive. That’s because the restaurant closes at 10 p.m. now, although she hopes to expand the hours in 2023.

“Have mercy!” she recalls. “Everything went down after midnight on Ewing and Clarksville Highway. Things I didn’t even know were happening. I was clueless to things going on around that chicken shack!”

Hot chicken’s origin story is oft-told, but

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

it’s always entertaining to hear Ms. André recount it.

“Thornton Prince was my great-uncle, and he was a real wanted man,” she says. “He married five times. Who has enough energy to do that? He was a real Casanova, jolly like Santa Claus and a real people person.”

Every true hot chicken fan knows the legendary story — that a lady friend of Thornton’s was fed up with his catting around and sought to punish him by blanketing his breakfast fried chicken with hot pepper. So much hot pepper that it was as dark red as the seventh circle of hell with a temperature level to match. But as the story goes, Thornton actually enjoyed the dish and asked her to make it again.

“He loved his punishment and shared it with his friends,” says Ms. André. Those friends suggested Thornton open a restaurant, which he did with his BBQ Chicken Shack in 1945 on the corner of 28th and Jefferson.

“I give the credit to a woman,” says Jeffries. “We don’t know who she was or who all the wives were, but she came up with what I call ‘revenge chicken.’ Thornton’s been dead 65 years, but this all came from a scorned woman and the sacrifice of a little chicken.”

MS. ANDRÉ WAS well into adulthood before she got into the hot chicken biz.

“Thornton’s brother Will Prince took over the chicken shack after Thornton died, and his wife Maude was the bookkeeper,” she says. “His cousin Bolton Polk ran the shack when it moved to Clarksville Highway, and that’s where I took over.

“Bolton started his own place, Columbo’s at the foot of the Shelby Street Bridge, and Maude didn’t want to run the restaurant by herself,” she continues. “So she asked my mother if she knew anyone who could do it. My mother was a retired schoolteacher and my father was a postal superintendent, so neither of them wanted it. My brother and sister were both teachers and wanted no part of it. I was the only divorced member of the family and was working at the tax assessor’s office.”

“My mother was on her deathbed with breast cancer when Maude came to ask her who could do it,” Ms. André says. “I think they just didn’t want me and my two daughters on welfare. I was someone who never cooked at home and was never asked to help out in the kitchen. I had only been inside the restaurant a few times at the holidays, so taking over was a shocker and a mind-adjuster. It was definitely a hands-on learning experience.”

Ms. André took the keys in August 1980, and the first thing she did was change the name of the restaurant. “It wasn’t a BBQ chicken shack,” she says. “It was a hot chicken shack, and I wanted it to have the family name. My goal was to keep something in the family.”

Her customers welcomed her with open arms.

“The regulars were just glad the place was open again,” Ms. André recalls with a chuckle. “I didn’t even advertise, and I still don’t. They just saw the lights were on, and they stopped in. I made more raw chicken and sold it than you can imagine, but very few people complained or sent it back.”

She operated Prince’s on Clarksville Highway and later on Ewing for years, but

the hot chicken boom was yet to occur. It was mainly just Ms. André and her neighborhood regulars who protected her.

“We didn’t even open until 6 because everybody was working supplemental jobs,” says Ms. André, who’s full of stories about the early days. “We closed at midnight during the week and 4 in the morning on weekends. It was a crazy time, have mercy! One time, a policeman left his car running on Clarksville Highway, and when he came out with his greasy bag of chicken, his car was gone. I don’t think whoever took it knew how to drive because he ended up running it through a fence around Metro Center.”

A major tipping point for Nashville hot chicken’s broader acceptance can be traced back to Mayor Purcell. “He’s a beautiful person!” says Ms. André. “He’s always been a customer. He used to have his meetings at the Chicken Shack, and he still comes in all the time. His order is always ‘one leg, as hot as you can make it.’ ”

“André and I have been friends and coconspirators for years,” Purcell says. “I was introduced to hot chicken at Columbo’s until the building was ‘eminent domained’ to build the arena. That created a huge void in my life, so I went to Prince’s, even though it wasn’t nearly as close by. I quickly realized

that Prince’s was not just the first, but also the best hot chicken in the world.”

Purcell became a proud public advocate for the business.

“When I was in the legislature during the ’80s, I made sure that Prince’s was always in my district,” he says. “There are definitely some advantages to being majority leader. Then on my last day in the House, I put forth legislation declaring Prince’s to be the best restaurant in Tennessee.”

As he neared the end of his second term as Nashville’s mayor in 2006, Purcell came up with another way to honor Prince’s and Nashville hot chicken writ large.

PRINCE’S HOT CHICKEN SHACK

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

“In 2006, we were celebrating Nashville’s bicentennial of incorporation as a city. I decided to take a year and focus on some aspect of the city each month with a festival. As the year neared an end, we wanted one final celebration, so of course I came up with the idea of a hot chicken festival. As mayor, you become accustomed to your staff telling you ‘what a great idea’ at meetings. It was only later that I found out that my staffers had left the meeting saying to each other that it was the stupidest idea I’d ever come up with.

“At that point hot chicken wasn’t understood by the whole city, and many people had never had it,” Purcell continues. “It turned out to be an enormous success, and we’ve seen every year that the crowd that gathers in East Park on July 4 represents the whole city and most of the hot chicken restaurants. It’s a uniter.”

When he hears people complain about the Nashville heat in early July, Purcell responds, “July 4 is the ideal day! It’s the hottest day and the hottest chicken. We celebrate that one additional freedom to eat Nashville hot chicken together.”

ONCE PRINCE’S POPPED up on the national culinary radar, Ms. André found herself inundated with opportunities to expand her operations.

“I had so many offers to sell out,” she remembers. “But my feet are on the ground, and I just wanted my one little chicken shack. I had a fellow from Saudi Arabia visit four times, and he wanted me to open up in Dubai. He even flew me over there on that Emirates plane, and there I was above the clouds, like a United Nations of chicken!”

Ms. André eventually acceded to an idea from longtime family friend Mario Hambrick to open a food truck and a second Prince’s location in a converted sports bar in South Nashville. This was an extremely fortuitous decision — not long after opening, a car smashed into the strip mall that housed Prince’s on Ewing. The December 2018 accident started a fire, and water dam-

age caused by the fire department’s efforts to stop the blaze caused extensive damage, forcing Ms. André to close down her flagship location for good. “I don’t know where I’d be if Mario hadn’t convinced me to open that second restaurant,” she says.

Ms. André also struck up a partnership with Yee-Haw Brewing Co. to open an outpost at their brewery in Greenville, S.C. “We send a truck down there every week to get them supplies and to check on them,” she says. “If you don’t keep an eye on people, they start doing their own thing their own way. Yee-Haw has been very good to me.”

Still, it hasn’t been easy for Ms. André.

“Mom-and-pop places are disappearing so fast due to big business,” she says. “I see all these new hot chicken restaurants, and I’m not jealous of them. But when I see them open, I know they had to have been to Prince’s first! Like those guys at Howlin’ Ray’s [a very successful hot chicken restaurant in Los Angeles] — they came here and they saw dollar signs. We didn’t, have mercy! We didn’t have access to loans. We never took a loan until the pandemic, and all our money went back into the restaurant. Those people knew bankers. I’m not mad at ’em.”

Ms. André knows that issues of access to capital extend beyond her humble chicken shack. “People of color are the most exploited people on the face of the earth,” she says. “We create things but don’t get the credit. Other people get rich, but it doesn’t trickle down with a profit to the creators.

I guess that’s what you call ‘authentic.’

That’s what’s happening to the hot chicken business. The takers get the credit because they can get the loans. The process you go through to run a hot chicken restaurant is so strenuous that it makes it harder on the creators, especially when you’ve got people lurking over you.”

Jeffries measures success on her own terms.

“I didn’t call the restaurant André’s,” she points out. “It’s the family name. Our people come from Franklin, and we still live there on the property where our forefathers were slaves. I just want the people whose shoul-

ders we stood on to be recognized. My goal was to have one place that is good quality and keep it in the family.”

Prince’s has definitely received adulation through the years, even while Ms. André worked so hard to pay the bills. It was designated as one of America’s Classics by the James Beard Foundation in 2013, and just this year Jeffries was presented with the 2022 Culinary Icon Award at the National Fried Chicken Festival in New Orleans. (“They flew me down on Southwest, and I got recognized on the plane,” she shares proudly.)

The Nashville Entrepreneur Center inducted Jeffries into their Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame at a ceremony in October, and she was beside herself thinking about it. “There I was on the stage at the Schermerhon thinking, ‘Imagine where this little chicken has taken me!’ My mother must have known something.”

“WHEN I WAS 12 or 13 years old, my mother called me into the kitchen and said, ‘Sister, I’m gonna teach you how to cut up a chicken,’ ” says Ms. André. “She taught me how to cut it into eight pieces, and then I did it. Then she told me I could go back outside. She never called me back into the kitchen to do anything ever again. It must have been divine inspiration for someone who had

never been asked to cook a meal to be in the restaurant business. I am most indebted to my customers who have passed it on through the generations.”

She’s preparing to open the next Prince’s at the Nashville International Airport — though, she notes quizzically, “Other hot chicken restaurants got there first. You’d have thought the originators would have got there first.” She’s also working on an upcoming project on Jefferson Street a couple blocks from where the first Prince’s opened decades ago. “It’s as close as we could get to where we first started. I’ve been working on it for 20 years, but the devil’s been busy!”

Ms. André has already transferred much of the business responsibility to her two daughters, who handle the management and bookkeeping of the restaurants.

“Uncle Sam said I’ve retired, so I can only make a certain amount of money,” she explains. “I’ve got to pass it on to the younger generation, but this little chicken shack has taken me places I never would have thought I’d been. It’s way beyond my imagination!”

You can bet that whenever Ms. André’s daughters fully take over the business at Prince’s, they’ll remember whose shoulders they have stood on. And with this recognition of André Prince Jeffries as the 2022 Nashvillian of the Year, so do we.

PRINCE’S HOT CHICKEN SHACK ON NOLENSVILLE PIKE

PHOTOS: ERIC ENGLAND

CRITICS’ PICKS

ROUNDUP OF THINGS TO DO

DREW AND ELLIE HOLCOMB’S NEIGHBORLY CHRISTMAS

THURSDAY, DEC. 22

MUSIC

DREW AND ELLIE HOLCOMB’S

NEIGHBORLY CHRISTMAS

Drew and Ellie Holcomb’s annual Christmas concert is back for its 14th year and promises a cozy night at the Schermerhorn. The couple met at UTKnoxville and have earned praise both as talented solo artists and as a smiling, strumming, Americana-singing family who proudly calls East Nashville home. (Drew, who leads the Americana outfit Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, is also the organizer of Chattanooga’s Moon River Festival.) Songs like “Tennessee” and “Feels Like Home” celebrate what a gosh-darn nice place to live this state can be at its best, and while some of those songs might show up Thursday, the show will focus on holiday tunes and classics. The concert is sold out as of press time, but livestream service Mandolin is offering an option to watch the show live — or any time until the link expires on Jan. 6, 2023 — from your own home for a jangly alternative to watching Frosty the Snowman for the umpteenth time. 7:30 p.m. at the Schermerhorn, 1 Symphony Place COLE VILLENA

MUSIC CITY CHORUS CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION FEAT. DAVID PHELPS & VOCAL SPECTRUM

There’s really no better time of year for an a cappella chorus than Christmas. (“Carol of the Bells,” amirite?) In Nashville, we don’t have just any old choral group either: The Music City Chorus just took top honors in the chorus section at the International Championship of the Barbershop Harmony Society this year, and they’ve been churning out non-instrumental tunes since 1948. The group is known for its humor, which helped the 86-piece chorus win the 2022 award. The fellas will be joined by even more fellas for a special Christmas celebration at the Ryman: David Phelps, who is known for his work with the Gaither Vocal Band, and barbershop quartet Vocal Spectrum, who were the 2006 Barbershop Harmony Society International Quartet Champions, are also on the slate. That’s a lot of award-winning crooners on one stage, and it truly is their time of the year to shine. Christmas is here! 7 p.m. at the Ryman, 116 Rep. John Lewis Way N. AMANDA HAGGARD

[WHOSE NOTE IS IT ANYWAY]

family, or perhaps just a way to escape the holiday hustle and bustle, Third Coast Comedy Club has got you covered with a great lineup of performances this week. You could start Thursday with Off Broadway: An Improvised Musical — a one-act musical made up on the spot, with a randomly selected genre and a little help from the audience. Off Broadway is a new Nashvillebased troupe (featuring Sam Brewer, Paige Kaprelian, Seth Nathan Green, Sean McCann, Teagan Stewart, Carley Haggerty, Missy Ecker and James Paul) that made its debut earlier this year at Third Coast. And on Friday, you can check out some of the club’s other popular offerings, including the always-popular Third Coast Comedy Show (serving up both short- and long-form improv comedy, inspired by audience suggestions), or the Third Coast Stand-Up Showcase. For a full schedule, visit thirdcoastcomedy.club. 9 p.m. at Third Coast Comedy Club, 1310 Clinton St. AMY STUMPFL

[TAKE A HIKE]

THEATER

OFF BROADWAY: AN IMPROVISED MUSICAL

Whether you’re looking for a fun preChristmas outing with friends and

OUTDOORS

MARSHMALLOW HIKES

Situated on 300 acres in Brentwood, Owl’s Hill Nature Sanctuary offers year-round programs for nature lovers of all ages. One of my favorites has to be its Marshmallow Hikes, which offer a truly unique way to experience the scenic

wildlife sanctuary. You’ll start out with a peaceful hike along a winter trail, followed by toasted marshmallows and a nice cup of hot chocolate. It’s a great activity for the whole family (and a fun way to get little ones out of the house during the holidays), with two difficulty levels available. Hikes last 30 to 45 minutes, and while you’re there, you can check out upcoming programs — including everything from geocache games to building your own bluebird nest-box. One note: To help protect the sanctuary’s diverse wildlife and fragile habitats, please leave all pets at home. Hikes depart multiple times per day from Dec. 22 to 23, Dec. 27 to 31 and Jan. 7 and 14. Visit owlshill.org for complete details. Various dates through Jan. 7 at Owl’s Hill Nature Sanctuary, 545 Beech Creek Road AMY STUMPFL

MUSIC [HOKE-COMING]

JIM HOKE’S FLOATING ZONE

Got friends and family in town for the holidays and want to show them the real Nashville music scene? Jim Hoke’s show will fill the bill. Lots of folks in Nashville are called multi-instrumentalists, but Hoke takes it to a new level. On his 2019 album Floating Zone, for example, he played nearly every single instrument on the recordings (drums, bass, you name it). You can hear him in all his versatility when he returns to The 5 Spot in East Nashville this week. His name may not be one your fam recognizes, but they’ll know all the names Hoke has played for, from Dolly Parton and Buddy Guy to George Jones and Paul McCartney. And they can get in on the fun, too — Hoke often gives the audience an opportunity to stump the band with an unusual song request. Just $10 for all that entertainment. 6 p.m. at The 5 Spot, 1106 Forrest Ave. MARGARET LITTMAN

FRIDAY / 12.23

[THE MOOD IS RIGHT, THE SPIRIT’S UP]

MUSIC

WICK-IT & KDSML

You didn’t think two of Middle Tennessee’s finest beat merchants were going to voluntarily let a Christmas season go by without their nearly annual get-together, did you? Friday night, your homegrown supreme DJs Wick-it the Instigator and KDSML will take over The 5 Spot for a master class in booty movin’. The gig isn’t the full-on reunion of the entire Mashville crew that’s historically happened around the holidays, but it features two top-notch contributors from that particular hip-hop and dance-music party from the late Aughts and early 2010s, which helped a big variety of talents connect with each other and cultivate a vibrant artistic community. It’s comforting like a fuzzy cardigan to see these two old pals — Wick-it, one of the most skilled mashup artists Music City has yet seen, and KDSML, a true master

[PITCH PERFECT]

The Schermerhorn

PHOTO:

of the beat — getting together to throw down. 9 p.m. at The 5 Spot, 1106 Forrest Ave. STEPHEN TRAGESER

MUSIC [SEASONAL JAMS AND TELES]

DANIEL DONATO’S COSMIC COUNTRY CHRISTMAS JAM

There’s no shortage of holiday shows to choose from this year, but if you hit just one, make it Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country Christmas Jam, coming to Brooklyn Bowl on Friday — just in time for Festivus! While a full lineup for the evening is under wraps (who doesn’t love a Christmas surprise?), Nashville native Donato promises a bevy of special guests will join him and his ace band through what’s sure to be a festive and eclectic night of holiday classics new and old. And if the term “cosmic country” has you scratching your head, check out Donato’s 2021 release Cosmic Country & Western Songs, a heady eight-song collection of spacey, psych-adjacent twangers and bangers. 8 p.m. at Brooklyn Bowl, 925 Third Ave. N. BRITTNEY McKENNA

FILM [A REGULAR, NORMAL CHRISTMAS] HOLIDAY CLASSICS: DIE HARD

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Naysayers point out the 1988 action blockbuster was released in the summer rather than around the holidays. Plus, there are, like, a lot of machine guns. Artillery notwithstanding, the Belcourt repeatedly selects Die Hard as part of its Holiday Classics series for a reason. The setting, for one, is a Christmas party for the Nakatomi Corp. at which John McClane’s estranged wife (whose name, “Holly,” is also very Christmas-y) has climbed the corporate ladder. The audience learns that Holly separated from her less-than-supportive husband (a schmo-ish cop who wears tank top undershirts) in New York and relocated to Los Angeles, where she has retaken her maiden name, Gennero (snap!). Though formerly chagrined by Holly’s work-life imbalance (Nakatomi’s office party is on Christmas Eve for Chrissake!), McClane is inspired by Christmastime to reunite at his

ex-wife’s party and confess his jackassery. When dapper German terrorists — led by Hans Gruber (unforgettably played by the late Alan Rickman) — invade the Nakatomi Tower, they also spoil John’s opportunity for making amends to Ms. Gennero. Carnage ensues (a substitute for McClane’s apology), and John emerges from the bloodbathed building wounded, but atoned. A rekindled Holly embraces him and introduces herself to the LAPD as “Mrs. McClane.” A Christmas miracle! Visit belcourt.org for more upcoming and ongoing Holiday Classics screenings, among them It’s a Wonderful Life, Diner, Tangerine and more. 9:45 p.m. at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. WILLIAM HOOKER

FILM

[’TIS THE SEASON FOR MOVIE FUN] A CHRISTMAS STORY & SCROOGED

As much as I love curling up on the couch for a little movie marathon, there’s something rather special about seeing a favorite film up on the big screen

— especially at the holidays. Fortunately, City Winery has cooked up a great double feature Friday that is sure to get you into the spirit of things. The evening kicks off at 5 p.m. with Jean Shepherd’s charming classic A Christmas Story. Then, at 7 p.m., the fun continues with Scrooged, Bill Murray’s hilarious take on Charles Dickens’ familiar A Christmas Carol. A limited menu will be available for purchase, along with holiday-themed cocktails and nonalcoholic beverages. Best of all, it’s all free with your RSVP. Looking for even more holiday movie options? The Belcourt also has a great lineup of Holiday Classics, along with a few lesser-known gems (see Die Hard elsewhere in this section). And the historic Franklin Theatre wraps up its holiday movie series this week. 5 p.m. at City Winery, 609 Lafayette St. AMY STUMPFL

MUSIC [OUTLAW BLUES]

STEVE EARLE

It makes sense that his tribute to his late son Justin Townes Earle, 2021’s J.T., stands as not only the best of Steve Earle’s tributes to his favorite songwriters but also as one of his best records to date. The elder Earle tended to obscure the literary quality of fellow tunesmith Guy Clark’s work on 2019’s Guy — the band certainly rocks out, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to honor Clark’s laconic style. Meanwhile, Earle has also cut songs with singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin on 2016’s Colvin & Earle, on which Colvin cuts the super-eclectic outlaw singer on a collection of collaborations and covers. Earle sounds close to his subject on this year’s Jerry Jeff, which tips a battered Stetson to Jerry Jeff Walker. For me, Texas singer-songwriterdom tends to the sentimental and the received musical idea — even Earle’s record of Townes Van Zandt songs, 2009’s Townes (Earle has a way with album titles), doesn’t totally convince me of Van Zandt’s eternal greatness. That’s not important — this is the world Earle swims in, and I have to give him credit for trying new things, even when they don’t work perfectly. Earle is a slippery figure who has questioned the outlaw ethos itself on his fine 2017 album So You Wannabe an Outlaw. He told Taste of Country’s Chuck Armstrong this year that he was reassessing modern country: “Those kids in Nashville, those kids

DANIEL DONATO

STEVE EARLE

PHOTO: DANNY CLINCH

on the radio, they decide what’s country.” Earle’s no more of a pop adept than Clark and Van Zandt were, but I’m glad he seems to understand the futility of railing against modern country armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar. Dec. 23-24 at 7 p.m. at the Grand Ole Opry House, 600 Opry Mills Drive

EDD HURT

MARY MEYER AND THE HONEY DARLINS

Mary Meyer sometimes calls herself a “utility musician,” but that term does no justice to the virtuosic talents of the multiinstrumentalist. She’ll bring her band, the Honey Darlins, to the Station Inn on Friday. An ace on the mandolin, fiddle, bass, guitar and piano — not to mention a vocalist and songwriter — Meyer is also known as part of critically acclaimed bluegrass act Sister Sadie, which she joined in early 2022. Look for string-band standards and maybe a holiday song or two in what’s sure to be a dazzling set. The show starts at 9 p.m. but doors are at 7 p.m., so consider getting there early and kicking back with some beer and pimiento cheese while you wait — as with all Station Inn shows, tickets are only available at the door. 9 p.m. at the Station Inn, 402 12th Ave. S. BRITTNEY McKENNA

SUNDAY / 12.25

MUSIC [HO-HO-HOKE]

AUSTIN HOKE PERFORMS THE WORKS OF BACH FOR CELLO

As dive bars have been for time out of mind, venerable Centennial Park-adjacent watering hole Springwater is a refuge at the holidays — a place to find some companionship when you’ve got no one else to be with, or if (really, when) you prefer

to be alone with others who prefer the same. Multi-instrumentalist Austin Hoke, whom you’ll have seen with Heinous Orca among other bands, is bringing a little Yuletide cheer to the venue on Christmas Day with a feat that you might not expect: a performance of all of Bach’s suites for cello, about three hours of music, and as much of it as possible from memory. He’s passionate about the music but not at all expecting the crowd to sit spellbound like it’s a formal classical concert; all the more reason it’s appropriate for a tiny venue that has played a mighty role in Music City’s ever-evolving creative community for more than 40 years.

“I guess this show is about playing my favorite music at my favorite music venue,” Hoke says in an email. “As for the Bach cello suites, they are of course some of the greatest music ever written, and I’m always looking for excuses to play them in bar settings just for fun.” 7 p.m. at Springwater, 115 27th Ave. N. STEPHEN TRAGESER

TUESDAY / 12.27

MUSIC [SOUTHERN ROCK SOUL MAN] JIMMY HALL

Fresh off the release in late September of Ready Now, his first new record in more than a decade, Southern rock legend Jimmy Hall returns to his local stomping ground with the Prisoners of Love — guitarist Kenny Greenberg, bassist Michael Joyce and drummer Derek Phillips — for a post-Christmas show that will be sure to keep the holiday spirit flowing. The former Wet Willie frontman will be performing material from across an acclaimed career that spans half a century. “We’ll be playing several songs from my Ready Now album, plus some from my [earlier] solo albums, maybe one or two from my Jeff Beck

repertoire,” Hall tells the Scene from Denver, where he is performing with the Allman Family Revival Tour. “Also a few I’ve never recorded. And of course there’ll be some Wet Willie favorites as well.” Bluesman Yates McKendree opens the show, and Hall says, “He may jump up with us, plus his dad, Kevin, who plays keyboards with him, will likely join in on the fun, too.” 7:30 p.m. at 3rd & Lindsley, 818 Third. Ave. S. DARYL

SANDERS

WEDNESDAY / 12.28

MUSIC [PITCHING IN] FROM NASHVILLE TO AUSTIN: A NIGHT OF LOVE FOR MINGO FISHTRAP’S ROGER BLEVINS

As the leader of Austin, Texas, neo-R&B band Mingo Fishtrap, singer and songwriter Roger Blevins Jr. has combined Southern soul with New Orleans grooves since 1992, when he formed the band while attending the University of North Texas in Denton. Mingo Fishtrap’s sound leans to the New Orleans side of things — the band employs elaborate horn arrangements on tunes that seem lifted from the collective unconsciousness of R&B fanatics everywhere. Mingo Fishtrap’s 2014 fulllength On Time shows off Blevins & Co.’s skills on tunes like “End of the World” and “Sugadoo,” which fold in Stevie Wonder-style melodies and Chicago-style arrangements — in fact, Mingo Fishtrap could serve as a prototype for, say, Nashville

band LadyCouch. Wednesday at 3rd and Lindsley, a slew of great R&B-influenced musicians will raise money for Blevins, who is currently battling cancer. Among those pitching in will be the great singer and songwriter Gary Nicholson, along with The McCrary Sisters, Paul Thorn and Etta and Bob Britt. 7:30 p.m. at 3rd and Lindsley, 818 Third Ave. S. EDD HURT

MUSIC [HOOPLANDIA] KENNYHOOPLA

Not only could Survivors Guilt: The Mixtape — the major-label debut from Cleveland-raised, L.A.-based musician Kennyhoopla (Kenneth La’ron) — pass for turn-of-the-millennium Warped Tour undercard fare, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker’s presence on the 2021 LP lends cred to snot-nosed missives like “Hollywood Sucks,” a riotous reading of the hell that is dating in the modern age in a metro of nearly 20 million. Whether or not you’ll pick up what Hoopla’s putting down probably will depend on your age (nostalgia for SoCal skate punk is a prerequisite for those north of 25 — plus a high tolerance for all-together-now “whoa-oh” vocals), but music of this ilk isn’t meant to be overanalyzed either. Atlanta songsmith and multi-instrumentalist Ergo Bria (née Bria McCollum) supports. 8 p.m. at The Basement East, 917 Woodland St.

CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

MUSIC [PUBLIC UTILITY]

KENNYHOOPLA

MARY MEYER AND THE HONEY DARLINS

MY DINNER WITH AUDREY

An in-depth look at the elevated Appalachian cuisine of Sean Brock’s Audrey

BY KAY WEST

in October 2021; baby June was born in July.

“It’s the craziest balance,” he adds. “You can be in the business 30 years, and it’s still a guessing game. You just never know what people will respond to or what they’ll run away from.”

“I

t’s been the wildest few years,” says Sean Brock. True that, replies everyone in the world. But few have had two children (as Brock has done with his wife Adi) and opened four restaurants, all in the space of three years during the most topsy-turvy, rollercoaster-y, unpredictable era in the hospitality industry.

His son is 3 and his daughter is 1. And his restaurants? Joyland will turn 3 in March; The Continental in The Grand Hyatt Hotel was 2 in October (though it did not open its dining room until May 2021); Audrey began service

Brock marks another milestone in 2023 — 20 years since the Virginia native arrived in Nashville for his first executive chef position at the newly renovated Hermitage Hotel and Capitol Grille restaurant. The 24-year-old wunderkind soared to fame with his contemporary interpretation of Southern cuisine, 30-course tasting menus and mad-scientist forays into molecular gastronomy. Then, just like that, he was gone to Charleston, S.C. Then back, opening Husk Nashville in 2013. Then gone again.

And now here for good, he promises — a devoted family man committed to his sobriety and bent on creating healthy and supportive environments for staff at all his enterprises.

While Joyland is his playful sandbox, The Continental is a member of the hautecuisine hotel dining club, and June is the laboratory for his most daring experimentation, Audrey is his heart.

Named for the maternal grandmother whose rural home Brock was raised in after his father died when Brock was 11, it is an

homage to Appalachian cuisine and culture and a honed expression of lessons learned from Audrey Morgan. She was a butcher, beekeeper and gardener. She nurtured her grandson’s interest in food and kept him by her side. “She taught me everything she knew,” he says. “We were always growing, preparing and preserving food.”

Two days after my dinner at Audrey, during the drive from Nashville to Asheville where I now live, a snippet of an oft-cited observation — usually attributed to Helena Bonham Carter — about life as art kept running through my head. Once home, I looked it up. “I believe everything in life is art. What you do. What you believe in and all your dreams. How you decorate. The food

you make.”

By that measure, all of Audrey is art — the dramatically austere charcoal twostory building planted near the border of McFerrin Park and Cleveland Park in East Nashville; the planked-wood front door marked with Audrey’s cursive signature rendered in metal; the seamlessly blended rustic/contemporary/Japanese design ethos of the interior (by Powell’s Katie Vance); the effusively eclectic exhibition of art, photographs and textiles on the smooth concrete-skin walls; the George Nakashima spindle-back chairs, Holler Design wood furnishings, emerald-green chenille upholstered booths; the open live-fire kitchen with a walnut-topped pass, where finished

AUDREY

PHOTOS: DANIEL MEIGS

SHAVED COUNTRY HAM LOCAL TROUT

JIMMY RED GRITS

plates are placed by Brock and chef de cuisine Colin Shane.

Those plates are masterpieces of refined minimalism, where Brock’s creativity and vision reside these days. “Complexity within simplicity,” is the term he uses. “That’s my life and brain now. I finally understand the complexity in simplicity, and I love thinking that way.”

The bent heads at tables at Audrey are not fixated on phone screens, but intently studying a small leather-bound, wood-covered menu. Introduced on Oct. 15, 2022, it marked the one-year anniversary of Audrey and announced a change in format for the restaurant from its launch with prix-fixe tasting service.

The menu now is meant to evoke a cookbook. “The context of our food is built around stories,” he says. “The printed story is like the paragraph in cookbooks above the recipe. I like that people can pick up the book and read what they want.”

The title page also bears Audrey’s signature, and each subsequent turn reveals on the right, the story of individual dishes on the menu: origin, technique and personal recollections — so unselfconscious it is not averse to exclamation points. “Just like Audrey’s recipe, this gets its creaminess from a touch of Velveeta!” concludes the description of Walnut Gianduja Mousse with roasted banana pudding created by pastry directors Keaton Vasek and Michael Werrell.

On the left, whimsical single-subject illustrations by Jenna Pearl Leonard (also the GM). An ear of dried Jimmy Red corn, a strutting chicken, pink apple, craggy oyster shell, multihued trout.

We read our books while seated in a plush booth directly across from the kitchen and beside a wall of paintings by Mose Tolliver and Jimmy Lee Sudduth from Brock’s collection. “When I started doing a deep dive into the world of outsider art, I realized it was so similar to Southern cooking, using materials at hand. The common thread that weaves them together is making something beautiful out of nothing, and that’s how we cook.”

With the exception of the two breads — a crisped round of Jimmy Red corn pone warm from the skillet, with a saucer of sour corn butter capped with cracklin’s, and golden salt-risen rolls with a ball of cultured butter and squash jam core — all dishes are presented mostly unembellished

on canvases of white or neutral clay plates and bowls.

Translucent shaved slices of Bob Woods Tennessee country ham arrayed like a pink pinwheel, brushed with chamomile honey, strewn with chive and slivers of local chestnuts, last just seconds on the tongue.

The fried Appalachian apples are prepared as Brock says Audrey made them for breakfast — sautéed in butter in a skillet — textured with toasted buckwheat groats and elevated with the addition of Japanese flavor in the yuzu juice created in his lab. Cristabel lettuce also gets the Appalachian spin, dressed with maple syrup vinegar and “killed” with a tableside pour of hot country ham fat. Jimmy Red corn, an heirloom variety once used to make moonshine, makes another appearance as grits, flavored with bay leaf oil, centered by a sorghum-cured egg yolk to pierce and stir into the hearty porridge.

Brock is clear that the menu will change — the book is a guide for the one-sheet printed menu, but fresh-caught trout is an Appalachian staple, so expect to see it as a foundational item. Brock is especially enthused about candy roaster squash, its history dating back to the Cherokee and limitless potential. He demonstrates by rubbing the skin with a miso and squash-seed-oil paste, slow cooking it in the ember pit, slicing it and serving alongside a pool of fermented barley sauce. “It’s a slice of squash with a sauce, unassuming and humble, but it has so many steps to get there, and when you eat it your brain explodes.”

The desserts we tried were exquisite, not overly sweet or fussy, true to region and ambition, particularly that mousse of Audrey’s hillbilly black walnut fudge, encased in a crackly shell, on a mound of roasted banana pudding.

Nashville has undergone seismic changes since Brock blazed into the town 20 years ago, as has he. But while the small, big city has taken off like a rocket, the chef has landed in a grounded place with purpose and peace of mind and intends to remain.

“I am going to wake up and go to work here at Audrey until I retire, so it is important for me to create a place that is healthy, makes people happy, pushes tradition and asks every day what is possible.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

BoozeHound

Cocktails You Should Be Drinking

Big Red Bow at Jane’s Hideaway

The new East Side location has saved you a seat at the bar

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

The former No. 308 was my regular watering hole for years, so I dragged my feet about going to the new Jane’s Hideaway in 308’s former location on Gallatin Avenue. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I’d like it — Jane’s Printer’s Alley location was great. But I wasn’t sure I’d feel the sense of community that I did at my old stomping grounds.

Well, I should have trusted the process (and nods from my fellow Scene writers). Jane’s Hideaway is a welcoming hangout with writers’ nights, bluegrass and Americana acts, supported by a small but thoughtful menu. The staff knows regulars’ names and favorite drinks — and they’ve even been lauded on the East Nashville neighborhood Facebook page, which is not famous for doling out praise. (IYKYK.)

The cocktail menu is seasonal and more focused than No. 308’s many, many pages. (Although there is a full bar with lots of Tennessee whiskeys, so order what you like off menu.) Jane’s Hideaway offers a decent wine and local beer list and a few creative nonalcoholic concoctions. And this holiday season they’ve got all the deliciousness wrapped up with … well, one Big Red Bow. That’s the name of a festive drink made with Fords Gin, spiced cranberry grenadine, Aperol and sparkling wine. It’s lighter than you usually get with winter seasonal cocktails. (Earlier this year Jane’s Hideaway also donated a portion of the sale of each of one specific cocktail to help Nashville hospitality pro Emily Wilcher fight cancer, which, again, made me feel like Jane’s is more than a bar, but a member of the community.)

Other current options on the menu include boozy hot chocolate and an Old Fashioned with cardamom syrup. Drink names are cheeky, but not cheesy (i.e., Warm Socks and Toyotathon). Accompany your drinks with shared plates — chili tofu salad, okra fries and deviled eggs — with your new friends at the bar.

PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

BY MARY LIZA HARTONG

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.

When my parents got divorced, I thought, as most silver-liningseeking children do, of the obvious perk: two Christmases. I imagined I’d have not one stocking, but a pair. Not one goblet of eggnog, but a gallon. At 13, I was willing to trade the ease of walking down the stairs to a family intact for a few extra parcels under the tree. That’s kid logic for you. I also remember thinking, as my mother pulled me in for a too-tight hug, that the divorce would give me something juicy to write about.

Before the split, we’d throw the kind of Christmas Eve party that backed up the whole street. The later you arrived, the farther you’d have to walk, mailbox to mailbox, holly bush to holly bush. There would always be at least one old lady who’d arrive an hour early — some elderly aunt or friend of my grandmother’s, a fur-coated, bourbon-bearing cheek kisser who would sit on our good couch while my mother finished blow-drying her hair and we picked up sticks in the front yard — but 6 o’clock snuck up on us. My sisters would rush to apply their mascara in the tiny upstairs bathroom, I’d roll up my white stockings, and when the first car arrived in the driveway, I’d bound down the stairs, velvety. From that moment on, there would be no sitting. No moment alone. We were surrounded by every uncle, neighbor, infant and godmother in Nashville who, somewhere around 10, would start to congregate around the piano. We’d sing “Silent Night” as fast as we could. We’d run that piano ragged. Eventually, friends would beg off to midnight Mass or pass out for a long winter’s nap, and I would slip into my pajamas. Standing at the top of the stairs, I’d beseech the last of the tipsy carolers to leave, hoping their departure would hasten Santa’s sleigh.

On Christmas morning we took turns opening our presents — Playmobil castles for me, clothes for Corinne, puzzles for Graham — until our living room crackled with crinkled paper. My mother took dutiful notes; my father searched for batteries. My uncle, who lived behind us, would tumble over in a terrycloth robe in search of coffee and cast-off candy canes. Together we would eat sausage pinwheels and relish the bounty of another crowded, chaotic Christmas.

We still had the party for a few years

after my father moved out, but Christmas morning was different. Instead of lounging around in our pajamas, we said goodbye to our mother and the sausage pinwheels and drove to my father’s condo. I remember how cold my red Jeep was when I was 16. How empty the streets were. Coasting down a deserted West End Avenue, I thought, nobody’s driving because they’re all at home with their families. If my parents had never gotten divorced, I would never have known this version of the street.

But that’s just it. As a child of divorce, you occupy a middle space. The empty West End, the sore spot between your old life and your new life. When we arrived at the condo, my father and stepmother Val offered us another set of stockings, another stack of gifts, just as I’d imagined. Val made us breakfast casserole. She had beautiful gift tags and elegant handwriting. It was all very generous. But those first few years, it still hurt. I wanted the doorbell back, the pile of coats on my parents’ bed. I did not want to know how quiet a street could be.

Now that my sisters have children, every Christmas is different from the last. Some years we’re in Dallas, where Graham and her three girls open presents in 70-degree weather. Some years we’re in Knoxville, where we bundle up for a Christmas morning jog. I realize now that those 10 minutes in the car with my sisters going from Mom’s house to Dad’s were also precious. We were freezing, sure, but we were in cahoots. Someone would find the Christmas tunes on the radio, and flying through green light after green light, we’d compare presents. What did you think of that sweater? Can I trade you for those socks?

In the space between our parents, we found ourselves lucky to have one another, a living memorial to the good years they spent together. It is a gift that, year after year, we will continue to unwrap.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

and Trouble surveys witchy history

BY SUSANNAH FELTS

The story of the occult is largely the story of women and power. Pick any era, pick your practice — Wicca, tarot, astrology and magical herbalism, among others — and you’ll find women at the center of the narrative, blazing their own paths, finding their followers and carving out spheres of considerable influence, patriarchy

be damned. In Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult, Memphis writer Lisa Kröger and Delta State University professor Melanie R. Anderson profile religious leaders, entertainers, psychic mediums, healers, activists and more, from Puritan New England to the witch-friendly grounds of social media today.

In every century, the authors argue, women and nonbinary people have taken up occult practices in an effort to cultivate power, advance social justice and reap financial gain. Occult is understood by the authors as “a belief in an unknown world that will open the door to hidden knowledge, knowledge that will make the world a better (and often more equal) place.”

All along the way, patriarchal forces have pushed back, positioning the occult in public perception as a way to stigmatize, discredit and delegitimize those who challenged the dominant culture.

In particular, the spiritualist movement of the 19th century plays a huge role in the story of women and the occult in the United States. The Fox sisters, “stars in the séance community” and key personalities in the stirring of the movement, confessed that their connection to the spiritual world was a hoax after they achieved fame, fortune and agency. But later spiritualists developed genuine roles in social reform, advocating for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Sojourner Truth once lived in a spiritualist community, and Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Black spiritualist movement in New Orleans. Kröger and Anderson trace a fascinating through line from these and other early figures to occult intersections with social justice campaigns of the present.

The presence of the occult in the nexus of political power presents an especially fascinating stop on Kröger and Alexander’s journey. Suffragist, free-love advocate and first female candidate for president Victoria Woodhull was also a medical clairvoyant, once employed by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Astrologers have influenced presidential administrations, from first lady Florence Harding’s adviser Madame Marcia Champney to Nancy Reagan’s Joan Quigley. In the late 1960s, a group of political activists who called themselves

WITCH — the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell — staged protests in witch garb and hexed Wall Street. “WITCH may seem to have receded into our nation’s past,” the authors write, “but its influence on anonymous protest groups who pursue performative acts of protest is clear, especially in our current social media mobilized world of magical political resistance.”

On a related note, as I was working on this review, Satanic Temple, an abortion-rights activist group, was trending on Twitter, illustrating the fact that Toil and Trouble is not only a thorough and efficient study of those who have come before, but a product of its time. Witchcraft and the like are seemingly everywhere these days, a fact hardly lost on the authors. “We are living in a golden age of online witchery,” they write, and the connections between the occult and activism have rarely seemed so clear or mainstream.

In fact, the occult has been a part of my own family’s life since 2020, when my then-12year-old daughter began a selfguided exploration via TikTok. As it happened, her interests aligned with my own; I had purchased an oracle deck and was nurturing a newfound curiosity about tarot and herbalism. I learned how to make sigils (a type of magical symbol), and my daughter and I created an altar to our ancestors for Samhain.

Are we, along with millions of other baby witches, merely riding a faddish broomstick? One could be forgiven for dismissing the current surge in occult interest as a trend tied to generalized anxiety in a culture where dominant religious traditions have diminished influence. But the practices we have explored are connected to the natural world in a way that is deeply satisfying and meaningful, particularly within the context of climate change. Given our family’s lack of other religious beliefs, celebrations around the Wheel of the Year seem as good a way as any for the two of us to connect to each other and the earth.

“Embracing the occult … at its best [is] about finding personal power within oneself and then using that power to effect change in societal structures, working towards a more ethical and inclusive narrative,” the authors write. “The occult is inherently nonbinary. It is open to all possibilities. Through the occult, individuals can create new spaces for themselves, while simultaneously dismantling the mainstream stereotypes for how people should identify and behave.” Taken as a whole, the profiles in Toil and Trouble provide a fresh angle on deeply rooted traditions and practices that are now as popular as they are persistent.

For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

IN DREAMS

Jared Small brings a surreal South to David Lusk Gallery

BY JOE NOLAN

Jared Small’s latest exhibition at David Lusk Gallery is full of surprises, mostly conjured from a combination of unique methods and materials. It’s also the best show I’ve seen by one of the gallery’s standout painters. I expect architecture and floral stilllife subjects from a Small show. This exhibit has these, but it also includes colorful painted portraits that expand the breadth of the artist’s painterly universe, connecting narratives between the works and bringing added depth and personal content to the display. The exhibition’s many strengths are further elevated with a thoughtful, creative installation from Lusk’s Nashville team, which closes the 2022 art calendar with one of its best shows of the year.

Small generally paints on wooden panels, and flat, pristine surfaces are part of his signature style. But here, he puts oils to clear acrylic plexiglass, and doubles down on the daydream moods his images always inspire. Small deftly details every slightly wilting flower petal, every gleaming green leaf, every peel of paint or spot of rust, every curl of hair in the centers of his images. But all these paintings fade into gooey blurs of pigment and linseed at their edges. The artist regularly utilizes this fading effect and deep shadows to suspend his subjects in surreal, somnambulant spaces.

Some of Small’s stylings resemble contemporary photography. His bouquets don’t populate vases on tables or window ledges in domestic scenes. Instead, they’re isolated in infinitely receding spaces, like the ones we recognize from commercial photography. And many viewers will find Small’s blurrededged paintings familiar from their own use of portrait-mode filters on smartphone cameras. These materials and techniques — the moods they evoke and the artistic conversations they create — move Small’s work out of the tall, seedy grass of Southern painting and photography’s entropy nostalgia; these painted places are more haunted than sentimental. His flowers are gorgeous and ornate, but like a get-well-soon bouquet, not a prom corsage. Small’s subjects are too complex to be wistful. Too actually wounded to be merely romantic. And his new development of painting on transparent plexiglass is a formal breakthrough that takes his signature look to a new level, making many of his bouquets, front porches and beautiful faces feel like they’re floating in front of the gallery walls with all the delicate materiality of a dream memory.

The exhibition’s architectural and floral paintings find Small continuing to explore familiar subjects across a range of exquisite works: The blurry blue built facade of “Hyde House,” the dilapidated grandeur of “Rosy,” the olive and gold blossoms of “Trumpet.”

Small also includes three portraits of Black women rendered in their title colors: “Silent Roses,” “Fuchsia” and “Soft Blue.” It’s not the first time Small has done figurative work, but it’s the first time he’s incorporated it into his more recent practice, which has been marked by the success of his remarkable architectural paintings. The artist is a native Memphian, and the women in these portraits are all his friends.

Small has made many paintings of houses in Memphis — his hydrangeas are as Southern as they are ethereal — and these colorful, costumed images of friends feel like a natural extension of work from an artist who’s made a subject of his everyday surroundings in a particular place. The portraits introduce more directly personal content into the show — but like all of Small’s work, they’re too uniquely stylized and surreal to get tangled in Southern portrait clichés. The works’ vivid colors make their subjects otherworldly, and the clothing and flowers evoke religious and royal paintings.

The Lusk installation takes its cues from the three colored portraits, arranging the show on separate walls of red, blue and pink paintings. There’s also an additional selection of paintings on dark backgrounds that more than stand on their own, and feel deliberately separated from the more colorful sections of the show. The centerline of the installation is loosely implied here, but each colored section includes works of different sizes, hung at varying heights and distances from each other. Like Small’s paintings, the organization feels deliberate but dreamy. Each grouping is more like a cloud formation than a formal gallery layout, and the color coordination makes the paintings’ hues appear even more richly saturated. This exhibition is a great example of how a very strong show becomes uniquely exceptional through the glamour of a sharp-eyed display.

Lusk’s Nashville outpost frequently closes its calendar year with a Small show. It’s happened often enough that I’ve come to think of these exhibitions as something like a holiday tradition. This year, it’s the present you knew you were going to get, but once you unwrap it you realize that it’s even better than you had expected.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

JARED

LIVE AND IN PERSON

Revered songwriter Pat McLaughlin returns to what he loves most

BY DARYL SANDERS

Esteemed songwriter and guitarist Pat McLaughlin will take the stage at 3rd and Lindsley Friday night and do what he loves to do more than anything else.

“Playing live is what I really enjoy doing,” McLaughlin says. “That’s the thing that comes most natural to me. It seems to drive everything else.”

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, McLaughlin first made his mark in Nashville in the late ’70s with performances at small clubs like Springwater, Mississippi Whiskers and Old Time Pickin’ Parlor. He had a hot band back then, and he still does. On Friday, he’ll be backed by a trio of musicians he’s worked with for decades: guitarist Kenny Greenberg, bassist Michael Rhodes and drummer Greg Morrow, all well-known session players.

“It’s a lot of fun to get to play with them,” McLaughlin says. “We’ve known each other for years, and it’s a really nice situation.”

Friday’s gig is one of the “regularly random” shows he does at the club with the band each year. He notes that he would like to play more often than the four or five annual appearances they have made there in recent years, but his bandmates are in high

demand. “There are easier bands to get your calls returned from,” he quips.

Despite his love for playing live, McLaughlin acknowledges that is no longer his main focus, with writing at the forefront. Of course, one of the biggest reasons McLaughlin has been a mainstay in Nashville nightclubs for more than four decades is he’s one of the city’s finest songwriters. His songs have been recorded by an array of stars, including Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Trisha Yearwood, Nanci Griffith, Don Williams and Dan Auerbach. Delbert McClinton and Tanya Tucker earned a Grammy nomination in 1993 in the Country Vocal Collaboration category for their duet on his song “Tell Me About It.”

But one of the clearest signs of McLaughlin’s greatness as a songwriter is that he was one of John Prine’s regular collaborators for a quarter of a century. Prine’s acclaimed final album The Tree of Forgiveness includes five co-writes with McLaughlin. They also co-wrote Prine’s final single “I Remember Everything,” which won Grammys for Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance in 2021. McLaughlin, who was also a member of Prine’s band off and on, humbly downplays the significance of his work with the songwriting legend.

“We were buddies, and I opened some shows for him, you know, just doing a solo thing, in the late ’80s,” McLaughlin recalls. “And then eventually we started to write together. He wrote with a lot of people. And then I don’t know if he got me in the band because he just wanted to hang out or what.”

The songwriting friends did hang out a lot. They famously would meet to write on Tuesday mornings so they could then go to

Arnold’s Country Kitchen for the meatloaf special. As Prine explained during a 2018 appearance on NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts: “It’s kind of like the carrot on the stick. We get together early in the morning and try to write a song before they start serving the meatloaf, and then after lunch, we’d come back and record the song.”

“I’ve been really, really fortunate to get to work with the people I’ve worked with,” McLaughlin says. “There’s no doubt about that, man. I’ve worked hard for it, but I’m really, really fortunate.”

McLaughlin has released a number of his own recordings over the years, including a pair of albums he recorded for Capitol Records in the late ’80s. His 1988 eponymous debut for the label received critical acclaim and yielded a music video in regular rotation on MTV for his rendition of Allen Toussaint’s “Wrong Number.” Although his second album for Capitol, Get Out and Stay Out, was shipped to music journalists, radio stations and even some stores, it ultimately was not released after a shakeup in the label’s A&R department resulted in him being dropped from their roster. That record, which was considered even better than his first for the label, was ultimately acquired and released in 1995 by Austin, Texas-based Dos Records, which had released McLaughlin’s album Unglued the previous year. A few years later, he joined with members of The Subdudes and The Goners to form the group Tiny Town, which released a self-titled album in 1998. Since then, he’s released a few more solo records, the most recent being 2006’s Horsefly

Asked when his fans might expect another Pat McLaughlin album, he says, “I’ve

thought about it, and I might do it sometime, but I don’t have any plans to do it right now.”

Interestingly, the material McLaughlin and his band will perform Friday will not include many of the songs he’s best known for.

“Most of the songs we play have never been recorded,” he says.

Which is one more reason McLaughlin’s live performances are so special — you get to hear songs from a world-class songwriter that you can hear nowhere else.

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

FUNKY DRUMMERS

Megan Coleman and Jon Radford explore deep grooves at The 5 Spot

BY EDD HURT

Funky music is, among other things, party music. The rhythms and calland-response aspect of soul move in tandem with changes taken from gospel music, itself a genre that allows listeners and players the chance to experience the exhilaration of salvation. James Brown’s abstraction of gospel pointed the way toward ’70s funk on 1967’s epochal release “Cold Sweat,” a record that stutter-steps toward the ecstasy that great parties can provide. For drummers and DJs Megan Coleman and Jon Radford, the idea of a dance party featuring soul, funk, boogie and hiphop — and maybe a little disco thrown in for good measure — started to feel like a necessity over the past couple of very fraught years.

This week at The 5 Spot, Radford and Coleman bring their immense expertise to the stage for what they’re calling The Wednesday Beat. In fact, the show, which Radford says will run for the foreseeable future at the venue, sizes up to be a great party for dancers and listeners alike, with the two drummers trading DJ and drum duties and adding their beats to records that span the era that lies between the 1960s and the ’90s. Both Radford and Coleman are pros who have played in a variety of contexts, and they know the rich catalog of obscure and well-known records that constitutes something like a Funk Canon.

For Coleman, a Detroit native who grew up playing drums in church and at school before studying biology for a pre-nursing program and moving to Nashville in 2014, The Wednesday Beat is a continuation of what she’s been doing during her career. Along the way, Coleman attended a Bible college in Dallas and played in bands in Jordan, where she was studying Arabic and doing work for refugees in that country.

“I was already playing drums and playing music in worship teams for half of my life at that point,” she says about her early years. “But I really had no intention of doing music professionally by any means. I went to a mostly white Christian school [in Detroit], and I started playing at [a] Black church, got my wings at school, and then eventually started going to the church my school was connected to and started playing there more.”

Coleman began pursuing music in earnest a couple of years after she settled in Nashville.

She’s done drum duties on the road with singer Jenny Lewis this year, and says she’s been

PLAYING FRIDAY, DEC. 23, AT 3RD AND LINDSLEY

PLAYING WEDNESDAYS AT THE 5 SPOT

recording and performing with Americana star Allison Russell. She’s also toured with blues-folk singer Yola.

Coleman’s varied experiences add up to the kind of mastery that funky musicians aspire to, right down to her stint playing in church. Meanwhile, Radford — a native of Clarksville, Tenn., who has made a name for himself in Nashville with post-country instrumental band Steelism, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors and, most recently, as a member of country singer Pam Tillis’ road band — extols the power of funky music as a corrective to the big, bad world we live in these days.

“The studio and session work, it’s all kind of going in and out of itself, if you know what I mean,” Radford says. He moved over the summer back to Clarksville, where he says he’s thriving in a mediumsized town that has its own music and cultural scene. “I don’t want the whole drumming thing to be the reason people come [to The Wednesday Beat],” he continues. “I want the music to be the main draw, but for Megan and me, the drumming is like walking and breathing and eating. It’s just gonna be a natural part of it.”

Radford, whose résumé also includes a wellexecuted turn on psych-rocker Robyn Hitchcock’s 2017 self-titled album, takes the tightened-up

approach of drummers like Bernard Purdie and famed James Brown band members John “Jabo” Starks and Clyde Stubblefield as a first principle. He’s also a student of the great Southern rhythm sections, which include masters like Nashville-born session drummer Kenny Buttrey.

Radford says he and Coleman will refine the concept as they go along, but the idea is to make connections among, say, Stax grooves, James Brown, hip-hop and Afrobeat. Given their deep connection to Black American music, Radford and Coleman are making a statement about culture that is much needed right now. Records give you a picture of an event that came together through the exertions of committed musicians. What Coleman and Radford will play to augment — really, to comment upon — these works of art promises to expand our understanding of the impulses that power the records.

“The party is on Wednesday specifically to help you get through the week [and] to get you on the good groove, and to propel you to Saturday’s party,” Radford says. “I love disco, but we love James Brown, and we want to bring the two Fs to the party: funky and fabulous. We want to make sure everybody feels that way when they come to the throwdown.”

PHOTO: STEPHANIE HUDSON

LA LA LAND

Babylon is a gloriously wild dive into Hollywood’s dark past

BY CORY WOODROOF

At the corner of 42nd Street and The Wolf of Wall Street, you’ll find Babylon. Oscar winner Damien Chazelle’s latest film takes aim at the industry itself, and is a spectacular bacchanal that will leave you disoriented and amazed. Chazelle has a ton of fun exploring the flip side of the movie magic he extolled in La La Land, and while he’s certainly still romantic about the medium, here he spotlights its perverse, capitalistic underbelly.

You could say this is Chazelle’s Boogie Nights. Much like Paul Thomas Anderson’s landmark showbiz epic, Babylon tries to capture the glitz and glamour of Hollywood with a ribald lens. He turns filmmakers into roving party pirates, desperate for the high that only something as insane as moviemaking and stardom can give them. And when the show’s over, well, that’s when things really get dark. Babylon is of course far from the first film to delve into the dark side of celebrity. (Obviously … have you seen how many versions of A Star Is Born have been made?) But as with Oliver Stone’s polarizing sports drama Any Given Sunday — stellar and affrontive and tacky as it was — Babylon sets out to show us how the sausage is made.

Like the 1952 masterpiece Singin’ in

HIS OWN PRIVATE IDAHO

The Whale is devastating, dark and raw

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS

Every so often, a film comes along that is such a debilitating gut-punch of despair that it splits audiences entirely. Adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his play of the same name, The Whale is just such a film, as likely to break your heart as it is to downright piss you off.

Directed by the eternally divisive Darren Aronofsky, The Whale features ’90s heartthrob Brendan Fraser — poised for a career renaissance — as Charlie, a severely obese recluse who teaches writing courses remotely from his twobedroom apartment someplace in Idaho. Estranged from his ex-wife and daughter and still not recovered from the death of the boyfriend he left them for, Charlie is shut off from the outside world and dying from congestive heart failure. He interacts with others only through food delivery, visits from door-to-door religious zealots, the college courses he instructs virtually (though he intentionally disables his laptop’s camera for those) and his friend and nurse Liz. Liz is portrayed by Hong Chau, and as remarkable

the Rain, Babylon is set in the late 1920s, dropping us into Hollywood as the industry transitions from silent films to “talkies.” But it differs from that Gene Kelly song-anddance classic in its brutal honesty. Chazelle aims to depict this Tinseltown how it actually was — Jay Gatsby run amok, before the Hays Code morality movement swept through Hollywood.

Chazelle draws up his central characters using three classic Hollywood archetypes — the new starlet (Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy), the established leading man (Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad) and the audience avatar who finds himself along for a wild ride (Diego Calva’s Manny Torres). LaRoy is a brash, often strung-out party girl who becomes famous by just walking onto a movie set. Conrad is the womanizing John Gilbert stand-in who might not have a future

in talking pictures. Torres is the workingclass dreamer who just wants to be part of something bigger than himself. All three give powder-keg performances, motivating Chazelle’s themes of moviemaking’s regality and ruin.

Supported by that trio and some other inspired performances, Babylon has a lot of fun staging its on-set disasters and off-set debaucheries, but never quite shying away from their inherent horror. Just like The Wolf of Wall Street shows that Martin Scorsese was no fan of Jordan Belfort, Chazelle has no interest in celebrating the hedonism of Hollywood’s elite. Babylon is hilarious when it mocks, but it’s also got a devastating comedown. Chazelle nails the tonal tightrope walk in his most ambitious film yet. We often separate the things we love from the inconvenient truths at their core.

If you love football, you don’t always want to think about the brain injuries that have plagued many of the league’s retirees. If you love Top Gun: Maverick, it’s possibly in spite of Tom Cruise’s brand ambassadorship for Scientology. With Babylon, Chazelle forces us to square the grand emotions movies make us feel with the disturbing history of the medium.

Babylon seems destined to alienate half its audience, but it speaks the truth. Whereas Jordan Peele’s breathtaking Nope warns us not to look directly into the eye of the spectacle, Chazelle’s film — all 189 minutes of it — helps us come to terms with what happens when we do. We’re always going to love movies, but Babylon reminds us not to forget what’s on the other side of the curtain.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Writes Gay, “Come look at the freak, the movie beckons.” And though Aronofsky does indeed lens Charlie’s labored movements in an exaggerated manner, the depiction is ultimately sympathetic. Heartbreaking, obsessive and sympathetic.

The Whale does feel very much like the adaptation of a stage play in its scope. It’s unavoidably claustrophobic — the entire movie takes place almost exclusively inside Charlie’s cramped and filthy apartment, its cast limited to only half a dozen actors. Even the aspect ratio is tight, boxing us in at 1.33:1. (Another common criticism here is that A24, the hip distribution company behind The Whale, leans too heavily on uncommon aspect ratios; American Honey, The Lighthouse, First Reformed, the list goes on.) But it works. With Aronofsky’s camera trained closely on Fraser’s every moment, as he yearns to connect with his teenage daughter (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink, bitter and seething), as he obsesses over a particularly special student essay about Moby-Dick, as he gives in to the temptation to binge-eat junk food, we are in this apartment with him.

and rightfully acclaimed as Fraser’s performance is, for my money, it’s Chau who surprises and devastates here the most, expressing Liz’s deep frustration, rage and anguish at her friend’s unwillingness to save his own life. Fraser donned a fat suit and prosthetics to take on the role, and in a number of scenes he’s

shown obsessively binge-eating or painstakingly moving around his apartment with the help of a walker. Some critics, though united in their praise of Fraser’s commitment, have called the film fatphobic. Writing for The New York Times, noted author and critic Roxane Gay calls the film “a carnival sideshow.”

Like Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea or even Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, The Whale is a film characterized by wall-to-wall woe and the lonesomeness and obsession felt by one doomed man. It is devastating, dark and raw, relentless in its commitment to make the audience feel something. As it happens, for many audiences that something will be rage. For others, sorrow and awe. But without question, it will make you feel something.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Crosswords for young solvers: nytimes.com/ studentcrosswords.

same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on JANUARY 23, 2023 It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon FAUSTINO TORRES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after DECEMBER 22, 2022, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on JANUARY 23, 2023

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

M De Jesus, Deputy Clerk

Date: November 22 2022

ville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on JANUARY 30, 2023

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk

M De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: December 2 2022

Gary W. Temple Attorney for Plaintiff

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Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 22D 1165

SERBANDA AJXOLLIP GONZALEZ vs. GUSTAVO LINARES

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Non-Resident

Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 22D1696

JAMES AUBREY BENNERMAN vs. SHARRE NICOLE FOUTH

Don’t Pay For Covered Home Repairs Again!

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Non-Resident Notice

Fourth Circuit Docket No. 22D722

TERESA DIANE HENDERSON vs. SEAN LAMAR HENDERSON

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SEAN LAMAR HENDERSON. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after DECEMBER 29, 2022 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on JANUARY 30, 2023

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Date: December 2, 2022

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon GUSTAVO LINARES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after DECEMBER 22, 2022, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on JANUARY 23, 2023

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk M De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: November 22, 2022

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SHARRE NICOLE FOUTH. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after JANUARY 12, 2023, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on February 13, 2023.

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk

L. Chappell, Deputy Clerk Date: December 15, 2022

Roland T. Hairston, II Attorney for Plaintiff

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Joseph P. Day, Clerk

M De Jesus Deputy Clerk

Gary W. Temple Attorney for Plaintiff

Joseph P. Day, Clerk

Matt Maniatis Attorney for Plaintiff

Gary W. Temple Attorney for Plaintiff