In this week’s episode, Sid Evans, Editor-in-Chief of Southern Living, revisits some of his favorite conversations from Season 5 - many of which have never aired - about his guests’ holiday traditions and memories. You’ll hear stories from Kimberly Schlapman, Tyler Florence, Brittney Spencer, Scotty McCreery, and more. Happy Holidays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cody Johnson was born and raised in a little place called Sebastopol, Texas, about a half hour northeast of Huntsville. It was the kind of small community where everybody knew everybody, and his family went to a small country church where his musical interest and skill found an audience. When he was 18, he went to work with his father in the prison system, an intense experience that taught him a lot about how to read people, and one that also found its way into his songs. And if all that...

Growing up in Los Angeles, Toni Tipton-Martin lived for a time with her Southern-born grandmother who happened to be a professional chef, and who exposed her to what would eventually become a lifelong passion. As Editor-in-Chief of Cook's Country Magazine and as author of books like The Jemima Code, Jubilee, and last year’s Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice, Toni has spent much of her career as a kind of culinary detective, exploring the legacy and impact of African American food culture....

Lucy Buffett grew up as the kid sister of Jimmy Buffett in a working class neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama. A self-proclaimed gypsy rebel, she had plenty of misadventures that took her from Key West to Southern California to New Orleans and the Caribbean, but eventually she moved home to open up a gumbo and burger spot called Lulu’s when she was 46 years old. Now she’s got three locations in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, and a couple of cookbooks including Gumbo Love: Recipes for Gulf...

Bethany Joy Lenz was born in Florida and grew up in Texas, which is where she first got involved in the performing arts, carrying on a tradition she inherited from her grandparents. Her family eventually headed to New Jersey, where her Southerness drew the wrong kind of attention from some of the girls in her class, but she made it through the experience and eventually landed on the hit TV show One Tree Hill. Now Joy is living in Nashville, writing and performing music, editing a publication...

Grace Bowers grew up in Northern California, but when she was not quite 15 years old, her parents decided to move the family to Nashville for better schools and a different kind of life. At first, the culture shock was too much for her, but as Grace became more and more serious about the guitar, she found a music community that recognized her incredible talent—and took her in. Now, at just 18, she and her band, The Hodge Podge, have a new funk and soul-inspired album called Wine on Venus, a...

Leanne Morgan was raised in Adams, Tennessee, a little farming community not far from the Kentucky border. Her parents ran a small grocery store, and eventually a meat processing plant, but meanwhile Leeanne was nursing dreams of a career in Hollywood. It took her until her fifties to get there, but after more than 20 years of selling jewelry, doing small gigs on the comedy circuit, and some serious ups and downs, she’s now becoming a household name. Last year she had a Netflix show called...

Kelsey Barnard Clark was raised in Dothan, Alabama, which is a short drive from the Gulf Coast. But it wasn’t until she spent several years living in fast-paced New York City and working in the even faster-paced kitchens of Michelin-star restaurants that she truly appreciated her hometown. Since she moved back to Dothan in 2012, she’s been busy. She won Season 16 of Bravo’s Top Chef, becoming the first Southerner to ever triumph on the show; she opened KBC, her catering company and restaurant...

Jess Pryles was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, but her fascination with the American South eventually led her to Austin, Texas, where she’s now lived for about 15 years. It didn’t take long for Jess to fall in love with the food in Texas, especially the barbecue, and since then she’s made it her life’s mission to learn the art and science of cooking meat. She’s so obsessed she actually completed a meat science graduate program at Iowa State University, and now she wants to share...

Mitchell Tenpenny basically grew up in the music business, with a grandmother who was the CEO of Sony Publishing and a mother who advocated for songwriters throughout her career. It was this unique vantage point that made Mitchell realize he wanted to be a songwriter, too, but the journey took him a while. It wasn’t until his boss on a construction site put him in touch with an LA producer that Mitchell’s own music career started to take shape. Now, he’s releasing an ambitious and deeply...

Sid talks to a couple of guys from Alabama who are founding members of one of the hottest young bands in the country—the Red Clay Strays. Brandon Coleman, the charismatic lead singer, spent his youth running around with siblings and cousins on a family compound outside of Turnerville, just north of Mobile. Meanwhile, Drew Nix, who plays guitar and writes a lot of the songs, grew up further north, in Birmingham. The two met through a mutual friend and eventually formed a country rock group...

Anne Byrn was born and raised in Nashville and, though she calls Tennessee home, her career has taken her all across the South as she’s written about the people who define this region’s extraordinary cuisine. For 15 years, she was the food editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where she interviewed legends like Julia Child and Nathalie Dupree, and you may also know her as the Cake Mix Doctor, a name she coined as the author of a series of bestselling cookbooks that demystify baking. Now...

John T Edge grew up in Clinton, Georgia, raised in a Confederate general’s house that introduced him early on to the complicated legacy of the South. His childhood was complicated, too, and not always happy, but his mother and father shared a curiosity about food and cooking that never left him. For more than 20 years, John T headed up the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, shining a light on the diverse food cultures of the South, and he’s written as thoughtfully...

Texas troubadour Hayes Carll was born in Houston and raised in the Woodlands, a famous planned community that was much smaller back then, surrounded by thousands of acres of pine trees. He grew up listening to Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson, and later, Jerry Jeff Walker and Townes Van Zandt, all of whom seemed like mythical figures to a kid from the suburbs. His family wasn’t particularly religious, but it was the music he heard at a Unitarian Church that ultimately inspired him to pick up a...

Ricky McKinnie, the leader of the Blind Boys of Alabama, was born and raised in Atlanta, where he got his start singing in the church alongside his mother. Not long after that, while still in his teens, he embarked on a career as a singer and a drummer, often performing with a band called the Soul Searchers. Around the age of 20, he began to lose his eyesight, but as Ricky says, he never lost his vision. After playing with the Blind Boys of Alabama from time to time, he became an official...

Since 2016, Fawn Weaver has been obsessed with uncovering the true story of Nearest Green, a former slave who helped teach Jack Daniel the complicated process of making whiskey. Along the way, Fawn became so invested in her research that she bought the farm in Lynchburg, Tennessee, where Jack Daniel and Nearest Green worked together, and she’s since launched the Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey brand, which is winning awards and making serious waves in the spirits business. Fawn stopped by the...

Wynonna Judd was one half of one of the most famous duos in country music history, and she’s also been plenty successful out on her own. She was last on the show nearly three years ago, back during the height of the pandemic, and a lot has happened since then. On April 30th, 2022, the day before the Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, she lost her mother, Naomi, to suicide, an event that upended her life and shook the world of country to its core. But Wynonna is back on...

Brian Kelley was born and raised in Ormond Beach, Florida, just North of Daytona. At one point, he thought he might have a baseball career ahead of him, but when he didn’t make the road team at his beloved Florida State, he spent his free time discovering the power of music. He also ended up heading to Daytona State College where the baseball coach taught him valuable lessons of perseverance that have served him well to this day. Now that he and his Florida Georgia Line partner, Tyler...

Ashley Christensen is a two-time James Beard Award winning chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author from Raleigh, North Carolina, who has a way of taking classic Southern dishes and making them the talk of the food world. She grew up with parents who loved to cook, entertain, and play music in the kitchen, and Ashley has channeled that spirit of hospitality into her restaurants like Poole's Diner and Death & Taxes. At home, she and her wife, Kaitlyn Goalen, love to cook together too, and...

Jennifer Nettles was born and raised in rural South Georgia, where she got very involved in 4-H as a kid, a relationship that’s still a big part of her life. She went on to an extraordinary music career, winning a long list of Grammys, CMA Awards, and ACM Awards with Sugarland in the mid 2000s. By 2015, she’d started to work more in film and television, including her roles as Dolly Parton’s mother in Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors and Dolly Parton’s Christmas of Many Colors, and now she’s...

Tyler Florence is a Southern chef and Food Network star who, after 16 previous cookbooks, is finally releasing one that focuses on his passion for grilling. Tyler has been working in restaurants since he was a teenager in Greenville, South Carolina. Since then he’s lived and worked in Charleston, New York City and, for more than a decade now, California – where he and his partners run several high profile restaurants. But as Tyler likes to say, “you can take the boy out of the South, but you...

Since 1985, Emily Sailers and Amy Ray have been known as the Indigo Girls, and they’ve never once stopped making music or sharing their message of acceptance. The two met when they were kids in Decatur, Georgia,, and once they started playing together in high school, it didn’t take long for their unique sound to find an audience—first regionally, then nationally, and eventually worldwide. Last summer, when their hit song “Closer to Fine” was featured prominently in the movie Barbie, they...

Kimberly Schlapman, a founding member of the band Little Big Town, has been a musician almost all her life. As a little girl she played piano alongside her mother at a Baptist church near where she grew up in Cornelia, Georgia, and even then people knew her voice was something special. Years later, on a choir camp bus when she was at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, she met Karen Fairchild, her future bandmate—and the rest is country music history. But Kimberly has also made her...

Brian Baumgartner may be best known to many people, across at least a couple of generations, as Kevin from The Office, but there’s much more to the actor than his famous onscreen persona. Born and raised in Atlanta, Brian has a deep love for the South, a wicked sense of humor, an obsession with sports, and a successful podcast called Off the Beat. He also has a lifelong passion for barbecue – both the style of cooking and the communal gathering that defines it—and now he’s come out with the...