Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story - Rachel Louise Martin

nThese days, hot chicken is a must-try Southern food. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge, and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken Nashville-style. Thousands of people attend the Music City Hot Chicken Festival each year. The James Beard Foundation has given Prince's Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish. n But for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville's Black neighborhoods--and the story of hot chicken says something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future. n nHot, Hot Chicken recounts the history of Nashville's Black communities through the story of its hot chicken scene from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.n