Salvation South

Fifty years ago next week, Georgia’s Jimmy Carter was elected president—the first man from the Deep South to win the White House since Zachary Taylor in 1848.  Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece says the story the South told itself that night was true, just not in the way most of us remember it. Here’s Chuck.  

On this episode, Lee Bains, the Birmingham-born songwriter who leads the Glory Fires, reads from  Work Lunch , his first poetry collection, just out from Hub City Press. At his kitchen table in Atlanta, he tells Chuck Reece about a billionaire's buyout that ended his writing job and the Spanish-speaking crew that welcomed the only gringo on the job site. He also talks about his grandfather, w...

In the fall of 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ran out of patience. Fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education , it ordered Southern school districts to end segregation "at once." Many white families answered by leaving for private "segregation academies." Some stayed. And Black students watched their own schools, and everything those schools had built, disappear. Mississippi writer Ellen Ann Fe...

Wendell Berry spent a lifetime writing about land, work, community, and the moral obligations we inherit from the places that shape us. In this commentary, Salvation South  editor Chuck Reece remembers a childhood creek in North Georgia, a conversation with farmer Will Harris, and Berry’s enduring warning about the hidden costs of convenience.  

This weekend, better than three million Southerners will sit in the bleachers at a football game. Chuck Reece, who memorized the Gilmer High School lineup before he could name three Beatitudes, argues these gatherings are the last reliable place where Southerners still stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers. His evidence is a woman in the Gator Bowl in 1980 whose name he never learned.

Dolly Parton’s death leaves a world of listeners grieving not only a singular singer and songwriter, but also a woman whose generosity, humor, and acceptance made people feel seen. Chuck Reece remembers the night he and three underage friends talked their way into Atlanta’s Great Southeast Music Hall to see a 31-year-old Dolly Parton. He also reflects on her plainspoken belief that people deserve...

Salvation South   Deluxe host Chuck Reece sits down with Jim Auchmutey, author of  Smokelore , to argue about barbecue sauce—and to trace the deeper, harder story of who really built the tradition Southerners of every color now claim as their own.

The Sacred Harp, the shape-note hymnal published in west Georgia in 1844, got its first revision in thirty-four years—and more than seven hundred singers showed up in Atlanta to christen it. Chuck Reece explains why a book older than his great-grandparents keeps outliving its own obituaries, and what the hollow square knows that the rest of us have forgotten.  

In the same storage bin as his parents' World War II letters, Chuck Reece found the scrapbook his mother ordered before he started the first grade in 1967. As thousands of Southern children head into first grade, he considers the one box on that page he has never quite finished checking.  

Erika Council makes the only biscuit in the Michelin Guide — three years running. But behind that improbable honor stand two grandmothers, a church soup kitchen in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and a question her mother once asked that changed everything: were the Black women who built Southern food hidden, or erased? Chuck Reece visits Bomb Biscuit Company in Atlanta to talk with Council about inher...

What does a cartoon sailor have to do with Pride Month? More than you might think. In this commentary, Chuck Reece traces a line from Popeye’s stubborn self-acceptance to the urgent realities facing LGBTQ+ young people today—and to the power of Pride celebrations in the South, where the simple act of saying “this is who I am” does important, mind-changing work.    

Chuck Reece previews a new Salvation South Deluxe episode on the Jewish South. From Savannah and Charleston to the wider region, the episode—with historians Marcie Cohen Ferris and Shari Rabin—traces Jewish Southern history and provides a vivid look at how one community helped shape the American South.    

They were in Charleston before the colony had a charter. They wore Confederate gray. They marched with mobs that overturned Black governments after the war. They were also lynched in Marietta and bombed in Atlanta and Jackson. In this special episode of Salvation South Deluxe, Chuck Reece sits between two of the South's foremost Jewish historians — Shari Rabin, chair of Jewish Studies at Oberlin a...

What happens when the place that made you who you are vanishes completely? Writer Tracy Thompson and poet Annie Woodford share stories of Southern landscapes lost to progress——and the particular grief called solastalgia. From red oak groves in south Atlanta to furniture mill towns in Appalachia, this episode explores what we lose when home disappears.    

Since the death of Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner, outlets all over the world have broadcast accounts of his giant ambitions, his creation of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in which we all live today, and his work as an environmentalist.  Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece has some thoughts about the essential Southernness that underlaid everything Turner did.    

On Sunday, families all over Georgia will celebrate Mother’s Day, taking moms out to brunch and buying presents. Others, whose mothers are no longer with them, will sift through memories. The mother of  Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece died when he was just 11 years old. His memories of her were scant — until recently, when he found some hidden treasures.

During this pledge week, GPB has been asking our listeners, “Who has the best biscuits in Georgia?” Hundreds of you have put your answers on social media, but we haven’t seen anything close to a general agreement on the answer. That fact does not surprise Salvation South editor Chuck Reece.     

Salvation South Deluxe sits down with Beth Ann Fennelly—poet, novelist, and inventor of the “micro‑memoir”—to talk about her latest book, ‘The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs.’ In a conversation that ranges from Alzheimer’s and caregiving to hyperrealistic nude portraits of folks in Oxford, Mississippi, Fennelly explains why she’s done “Photoshopping” her life and how telling the smallest stories can...

This is the time of year in Georgia when, after every rain, the puddles left behind are yellow, thanks to an abundance of pine pollen. Some people sneeze at the pollen, some people curse at the pollen, and some people find a great deal of humor in it. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece is one of the latter. 

A city‑hall slush fund, a dissenting vote, and a rainy weekend in Tallahassee accidentally created Word of South, the South’s most unlikely laboratory for music and literature. In this episode of Salvation South Deluxe, Chuck Reece walks Cascades Park with co‑founder Mark Mustian, hears BJ Barham of American Aquarium and novelist Kristen Arnett blow up old ideas about who counts as Southern, reliv...

Last week, Salvation South editor Chuck Reece delivered a lecture at Mercer University’s Center for Southern Studies in Macon. The next morning, he had breakfast at the H&H, a restaurant that’s been feeding Maconites for nearly seventy years. A restaurant that has stories of its own to tell about the South. 

As a young, fiery pastor in a crater town in Kentucky, Abe Partridge thought he had finally found the rock to build his life on. Then his faith collapsed, and his ministry went with it. In this in‑depth conversation, Abe joins host Chuck Reece and writer Tad Bartlett to explore dark years, snake‑handling churches, punk rock mosh pits, and how songs and paintings became a quieter kind of prayer.

What is the biggest party in the South? Some say it happens every year in Jacksonville, Fla., learning up to the annual Georgia/Florida football game. But really, the biggest party in the South — and maybe the biggest, longest party in the world — is Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece is here with some Mardi Gras history that might surprise you.

This past weekend’s widespread storms, which dumped tons of snow and ice on states from New Mexico to New England, proved deadly for some and paralyzing for thousands of communities, including every Southern state save Florida. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece has a few words about the difference between experiencing the white stuff as an adult and as a child.

Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers sits on the Salvation South porch to remember Muscle Shoals, Gregory Dean “The Living Bubba” Smalley, Jason Isbell’s “Outfit,”  The Definitive Decoration Day , and a fiery  Colbert reunion.