11 Things Tennesseans Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

Tennessee is the state that gave America the blues, country, and rock and roll within a few hundred miles of each other and considers this a perfectly reasonable accomplishment for one state to be responsible for. The Volunteer State stretches from the Mississippi River bluffs of Memphis to the Appalachian peaks along the North Carolina border, by way of Nashville’s honky-tonks and a whole lot of genuinely beautiful country in between, and it has produced a culture built on music, barbecue, hospitality, and a fierce regional pride that doesn’t need outside validation because the outside has already been showing up for decades to hear what Tennessee has to play. Pull up a stool. The band’s about to start, and somebody’s already smoking a pork shoulder out back.

1. Conduct the Memphis versus Nashville barbecue and music rivalry like it’s a genuine state crisis

Memphis and Nashville are 210 miles apart and represent two entirely different versions of Tennessee that regard each other with the polite mutual suspicion of cities that know they’re both right about different things. Memphis has the blues, dry-rub ribs, and Beale Street. Nashville has country music, Broadway honky-tonks, and a population boom that Memphis watches with a complicated mixture of envy and disdain. Memphians think Nashville is shiny and a little fake. Nashvillians think Memphis is gritty in ways that have stopped being charming. Both cities are completely Tennessee. Neither will admit the other has a point.

2. Argue about dry rub versus wet sauce barbecue like the matter could still go either way

Memphis barbecue comes two ways — dry rub ribs, coated in a spice blend and smoked without sauce, the sauce served on the side if at all, versus wet ribs, slathered in sauce throughout the cooking process — and Tennesseans have strong, specific, deeply held opinions about which is correct that they will share whether or not you asked. The Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest draws competitors from across the world to settle questions that Memphis residents consider mostly settled already, just not in a way the rest of the contestants have caught up to yet.

3. Treat Dolly Parton with a reverence that borders on the religious, and nobody finds this excessive

Dolly Parton is not merely a country music legend in Tennessee — she is something closer to a patron saint, beloved across every political and social divide in a state that doesn’t agree on much else. Dollywood draws millions of visitors to Pigeon Forge every year. Her literacy program, the Imagination Library, has mailed free books to children across the state and the country for decades. Tennesseans who would disagree about nearly everything else will unite instantly and completely in defense of Dolly, and anyone who speaks ill of her in Tennessee should be prepared for a level of pushback usually reserved for matters of genuine consequence, because to Tennessee, this is a matter of genuine consequence.

4. Eat a hot chicken so spicy it requires a waiver of sorts and call it a perfectly normal lunch order

Nashville hot chicken — fried chicken coated in a cayenne-based paste so intense that the higher heat levels are genuinely dangerous, served on white bread with pickles to absorb some of the damage — originated at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack and has become one of Nashville’s most identifiable culinary exports. Nashvillians order it at heat levels that visitors are gently discouraged from attempting, watch the visitors attempt it anyway, and observe the consequences with the kind, knowing patience of people who have seen this exact scene play out many times before. The medium is already too hot for most people. Nashvillians know this. They let you find out yourself.

5. Take the Tennessee Walking Horse and its distinctive gait with a regional seriousness that requires real expertise to appreciate

The Tennessee Walking Horse — bred specifically for its smooth, distinctive running walk gait, developed by plantation owners who wanted a comfortable ride for overseeing large properties — is a genuine point of state pride, with horse shows, breeding operations, and a dedicated community that takes the breed’s history and characteristics with real seriousness. Middle Tennessee’s horse farms are not decorative. They represent a genuine agricultural and cultural tradition that Tennesseans who grew up around it discuss with an expertise that surprises people who didn’t know horse gaits could be a subject of such specific passion.

6. Drive the Foothills Parkway and Cades Cove loop on a fall weekend and accept the resulting traffic as the price of doing business

The Great Smoky Mountains — the most visited national park in America, straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border — produce a fall foliage traffic situation in the Cades Cove loop and along the Foothills Parkway that can stretch into hours-long crawls during peak color weekends. Tennesseans who live near the park plan around this, accept it, and still go anyway, because the foliage is genuinely worth the wait, and complaining about Smoky Mountain traffic in October is simply part of being a Tennessean in autumn, like complaining about the heat in July or the SEC officiating any time at all.

7. Eat a slice of Jack Daniel’s-soaked anything and consider this a reasonable use of bourbon… excuse me, Tennessee whiskey

Tennessee whiskey, made through the Lincoln County Process — charcoal filtering before barrel aging, which legally distinguishes it from bourbon — is a point of specific regional pride that Tennesseans will correct you on if you call Jack Daniel’s a bourbon, which it is not, legally and by Tennessee’s own definition, and they will explain this distinction whether or not you asked for it. Jack Daniel’s, made in the dry county of Moore County, Tennessee, where you can buy the whiskey at the distillery gift shop but not at a bar in town, is one of the more peculiar contradictions in Tennessee’s relationship with its own most famous export, and Tennesseans find this contradiction completely unremarkable.

8. Maintain a genuine, ongoing devotion to live music that goes well beyond the tourist version on Broadway

Nashville’s Lower Broadway honky-tonks are what visitors see — multiple levels, live bands on every floor, neon everywhere — but the real Nashville music scene happens in writer’s rounds at the Bluebird Cafe, in songwriter circles in living rooms, in studios where session musicians who play on records you’ve heard a hundred times work in near anonymity. Tennesseans who are serious about music regard the tourist Broadway scene as a fine introduction and a completely different thing from the actual creative engine of the city, which operates quietly, constantly, and largely out of view of the people taking photos of the neon signs.

9. Eat biscuits and gravy for breakfast with an expectation of quality that visitors don’t always anticipate

Tennessee breakfast culture runs deep, particularly in the eastern and middle parts of the state, where biscuits and sausage gravy are treated as a craft worth taking seriously rather than a diner default. The biscuit should be tall, flaky, and made from scratch. The gravy should have real sausage flavor and the right peppery kick. Tennesseans who grew up with a grandmother’s biscuit recipe regard the version served at chain restaurants with the specific disappointment of people who know what the real thing tastes like and are unwilling to pretend the substitute is adequate.

10. Follow SEC football with a devotion that organizes the entire fall around it, regardless of the team’s record

The University of Tennessee Volunteers, playing in the SEC, command a fan devotion in orange that fills Neyland Stadium to over 100,000 people on home game Saturdays regardless of how the season is actually going, because in Tennessee, SEC football is not contingent on success. It is identity, ritual, and a fall social calendar that takes priority over nearly everything else. The Vol Navy — boats that dock along the Tennessee River next to the stadium for tailgating before games — is exactly as committed and exactly as nautically impressive as it sounds, and Tennesseans regard it as a completely normal way to attend a football game.

11. Practice a hospitality so warm and so immediate that it catches first-time visitors off guard, every time

Tennessee hospitality is genuine in the specific Southern way that assumes good faith, offers food before asking questions, and makes a stranger feel like a guest within minutes of meeting them. This shows up at the barbecue joint where the owner remembers your order, at the church potluck where a plate appears before you’ve decided you’re hungry, at the music venue where the bartender starts a conversation that turns into forty-five minutes of genuine connection. Visitors who come from less effusive parts of the country sometimes don’t know what to do with this warmth at first. By the time they leave, they’ve usually figured it out, and they usually miss it.

Tennessee is not interested in convincing anyone of anything, because the proof has been on the radio, in barbecue smoke, and on stage in Nashville and Memphis for the better part of a century, and the state has stopped feeling the need to argue the point. It gave the world the blues from the Mississippi Delta filtering up through Memphis, country music built in Nashville studios and refined on the Opry stage, rock and roll born at Sun Records when a kid named Elvis walked in to make a record for his mother, and a mountain range so beautiful it draws more visitors than any other national park in the country. Tennessee has earned its confidence the old-fashioned way — by actually being this good at the things it cares about. Come hungry. Come ready to hear something. Leave your schedule a little open. Tennessee tends to run long, in the best possible way.