These 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. But for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville’s Black neighborhoods—and the story of hot chicken says something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future. Hot, Hot Chicken recounts the history of Nashville’s Black communities through the story of its hot chicken scene from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020. "Focusing on a single dish and the branches of the Prince family who created it, Rachel Louise Martin uses Nashville's signature, world-famous hot chicken to guide us through the history of a quintessential southern American town. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to a great city and to the people who were positively influenced by the very African American culture it sought, so often, to undermine. The delicacy of hot chicken is a thread between two cultures and gives historical perspective to this culinary craze." — Carla Hall , chef and author of Carla Hall's Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration "Nashville hot chicken is what best represents the soul of the city, and Rachel Martin describes its storied history. With a crunchy, spicy exterior, and a warm, melting center, it embodies what Nashville is all about." — Maneet Chauhan , James Beard Award–winning chef, TV personality, restaurateur, and author of Chaat "Historically, when we have heard about chicken and African American communities, it is from the perspective of stereotypes and offenses. Rachel Louise Martin has joined the voices that are turning the tide on recognizing the many contributions made by African Americans to cooking 'the gospel bird.' From their migration to Nashville to the present, Martin has shared the story of the Prince family and their place in history as the primary creators of the hot chicken phenomena. This is exciting reading filled with nuggets of African American histories of food, taste, labor, economics, race, gender, place, region, community, and so much more. It is at the same time a gastronomic study, memoir, and illumination of perseverance as much as it is about the ways culinary landscapes can be contentious and even triumphant. It can and should be taught in courses on entrepreneurship, labor, storytelling, material culture, and regionalism, among so many others. And it absolutely is a food history that should be read by all!" — Psyche Williams-Forson , author of Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power Rachel Louise Martin is a writer and public intellectual. She holds a PhD in women's and gender history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in O Magazine , Oxford American , The Atlantic online, Bitter Southerner, CityLab, and Catapult. She has been featured on the BBC's Food Chain , KCRW's Good Food , and The Michelle Meow Show . The story of hot chicken’s creation has become part of Nashville’s mythology, the sort of tale we can recount with practiced pauses and wry chuckles. It happened this way: Back in the 1930s – or maybe it was the 1920s or perhaps as late as the 1940s or even the 1950s – or anyway, back sometime before most of us were born, there was a man named Thornton Prince III. He was a handsome man, tall and good looking. “Beautiful, wavy hair,” said his great-niece Andre Prince Jeffries. Debonair, with a dashing sense of style and a touch of Tennessee twang, or so I assume. Women loved him, and he loved them right back. “He was totally a ladies’ man,” Jeffries laughs. “He sure had plenty of women.” So this one Sunday morning, that time of the week when families across the South woke up expecting to finally enjoy some popping hot fried chicken, Thornton Prince III came in from a long night of catting around, and he told his woman – wife? girlfriend? does it matter? – to make him breakfast. Well, this woman, wife or girlfriend or whatever, she was fed up with his philandering ways. What could she do with a serial cheater like this? Some women look the other way. Others walk out. A few get even. This one took a fourth way. She wanted retribution. She started out by playing it sweet. That morning, just like all their other morning-afters, she got up before him. And she didn’t make him dry toast or gruel. Oh, no, she made him his favorite. She made him fried chicken. I like to think she went out and wrung the neck of the skinniest, stringiest yard bird she could find. No plump church chicken for this sorry son-of-a-gun, no sir. Then, she added the spici