Ryan Millsap, Chairman & CEO of Atlanta-based Blackhall Studios, is one of today’s top entertainment executives! With a vision for Blackhall that’s ambitious, energizing and boundless, Millsap is blazing a trail through the heart of the South – and setting his sights on the future of entertainment. Listen and learn as Ryan Millsap journeys through the myriad industries, people and landscapes that traverse the complex and dynamic world of film production.
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Ryan: I'm Ryan Millsap, host of the Blackhall Studios Podcast from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm an entrepreneur mostly by necessity, because I have massive authority issues, and also by constitution – as the entrepreneurial life is filled with things I love: freedom, adventure, creativity and imagination. When I began this leg of my journey into the entertainment industry, you may find it interesting to know that my background before this was all commercial real estate.
And then I built Blackhall Studios as a specialty real estate project for production giants like Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Universal to have a place to ply their skilled craft of production. I'm from Los Angeles, but I moved to Atlanta six years ago. I've done business all over the world, and I know few places with the dynamism of Atlanta. It's a world-class city with a huge economic future as a center of commerce for a global economy. On this podcast, we get local and global and talk to people who are inspirational, sensational, sometimes motivational, but at all times somehow tied to the ecosystem. That is the culture and business of entertainment as it relates to Blackhall Studios.
My guest today on the podcast created an amazing literary website because he was pissed off by a lack of respect for fine Southern drinking establishments. Chuck Reece is a Southerner, and that means two things to him: what Southerners think, and what the rest of the world thinks about Southerners. William Faulkner wrote “Tell about the South. Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?” Chuck got over being mad; he got bitter, and created the website ‘The Bitter Southerner.’ It quickly escalated beyond tales of the South's finest barkeeps and into a fabulous collection of stories about modern Southern culture.
The New York Times called it a kitchen sink publication with a New Yorker profile. I'm hooked. Being an LA transplant to Atlanta, I want to know it all. Chuck is a fascinating guy. I know you'll love listening to him. So, pour yourself some sweet tea -- or something stronger -- and get ready for tales of the Bitter Southerner.
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Ryan: Welcome to the Blackhall podcast. Today we are fortunate to have Chuck Reece, who's the publisher of ‘The Bitter Southerner.’
Chuck: I'm the editor in chief. I'm a co-founder, but I don't want that publisher's job. God almighty, no.
Ryan: Haha! Chuck, welcome to the program.
Chuck: Really glad to be here, Ryan. Thank you for inviting me. I got the good mic out for you.
Ryan: I love it. Glad you're here. You know, one of the things that we started to chat about that I thought would be a wonderful beginning is this idea of what it means to be a Southerner. And the reason I start there is that I moved to the South six years ago from Los Angeles. Well, I was born in the South, actually -- in southern Missouri. I know some Southerners consider that to be the South, and some people don't. But I'll tell you what.
Chuck: No, we'll take it.
Ryan: Yeah. And we'll talk about that too. The Ozarks. I moved to the West Coast when I was five years old. I grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, and then I spent all my adult life in California. But I moved to the South six years ago. And I don't know if Southerners would consider me to be a Southerner, even though I have pretty deep roots now, own a lot of property, and consider this to be my home. So, what do I need to do to become a Southerner?
Chuck: Well, if you go by what we've consistently told our readers, all you have to do is say so. And I'll put it this way. Y’all might have to ‘bleep’ me if you're a ‘bleeping’ kind of podcast. Probably in our second year of existence, I was working on a story that I was writing about a musician from Alabama named Lee Baines III, whose grandmother actually went to the same church as Bull Connor -- who was the Birmingham chief of police who set the dogs and fire hoses on people who were demonstrating for their rights in Birmingham back in the early 60s.
He had written an album called ‘De-Reconstruction’ that was a very pointed look at Southern history. And we were talking about who is a Southerner. He looked at me and he said, “If you say you're a Southerner, then you're a fucking Southerner, and we need to hear from you.”
Ryan: Haha, I love that guy.
Chuck: You’d love his music, too, particularly if you're one of those young men who might have any fond memories of Los Angeles punk rock -- because that's what he sounds like, but he's southern as all get-out. And when Lee said that to me, it really helped coalesce something that we had been thinking about, because the very first question we got after we launched this thing was, “Okay, how do you define the South? Which states?”
It's not so easy -- as you just mentioned, when you look at places like Missouri. Southern Missouri -- the Ozarks -- is just as Southern as the Arkansas Ozarks. You know, it's a difficult thing to do. So, here's what I did that was kind of fun. I went looking for other ways to define it, and I found a study that had been done by a linguistics professor somewhere, who had researched the incidence of various words -- county by county -- across the entire United States. One of the words he studied was ‘y'all.’ And if you put his findings about where the highest incidence of the use of the word ‘y'all’ is, if you put that on a map, you kind of see a ‘y’all line.’
Ryan: So, it's like the gnat line?
Chuck: Yeah, yeah. And it runs from the Mason-Dixon line in Maryland in a long, sweeping, southwesterly arc down through East Texas. So, we were like, “That's the South.” But it was interesting. The first time I ever got invited to speak about The Bitter Southerner and why we were doing it -- which was actually on our very first anniversary – with a group called Creative Mornings, I put a slide up that had the map of the U.S. with the ‘y’all line’ drawn on it, and I asked everyone to stand up who was not born inside that line but lived here now. And I'd say maybe a third of the people in the room stood up.
I said, “Do you think you'll still be here five years from now? Like, is this home?” Then I left those folks standing, and I said, “Okay -- the rest of you who were born inside the line: if you've ever left and moved back, stand up.” I was like, “Okay, that's who Southerners are.” It's people who were born here and have moved elsewhere, but have a tight connection with the place. There's expat Southerners everywhere. It's those who went to places like that and decided to come back. It's the ones who never left. And it's the ones like you, who moved here and made it a home.
Ryan: I love being in that definition. I feel like this is my home.
Chuck: Welcome home brother.
Ryan: Well, I appreciate it. I did get a Big Green Egg recently, and so I thought that might help in my membership.
Chuck: You’re on the way. When you get an offset smoker, let me know.
Ryan: That's next. I'm actually going to build one from scratch.
Chuck: Well, there you go. I’ve got plans galore on my hard drive, buddy -- let me know when you're getting started.
Ryan: Oh, I cannot wait. We're going to talk about it.
Chuck: Right now. I'm running a total improvised hillbilly thing in the backyard. It's the ‘Covid Barbecue,’ and it's made out of seven cement blocks and a piece of steel grating.
Ryan: This is genius. I recently watched one of the episodes of ‘Chef's Table’ on Netflix. I think it was the third episode of the first season, and it was about this Argentinian chef, who, all he does is cook over open fire. He makes these big bonfires. You'd love it. I mean, the guy is amazing.
Chuck: You know, it's kind of funny right now. As we all live through this, it's like, all my discussions with my friends -- especially the ones who are lucky enough to have a little bit of outdoor space around where we live, which is much more common than all my friends, say, who are cooped up in an apartment in New York or someplace --
Ryan: Where are you right now?
Chuck: About four years ago, we moved out of the city to Clarkston, Georgia. Do you know much about Clarkston?
Ryan: I don't, I live in Social Circle, out by Covington.
Chuck: Oh, okay. That's on the east side of town, right?
Ryan: Yeah, it's halfway to Lake Oconee, out the 20.
Chuck: I'm not that far from you. You know Decatur, right?
Ryan: Sure. Of course.
Chuck: Okay. Have you ever been to the DeKalb Farmers Market?
Ryan: No.
Chuck: Oh my God, you have to go. It's like, no matter how weird the recipe, I've never not been able to find the ingredients at that place. It's amazing. And it's, like, as big as four football fields. It’s huge. And I only live two miles from there. But just think about it this way, okay? You've done this a thousand times. You've driven out Ponce de Leon Avenue and into downtown Decatur, right? Keep going two miles, you get to that farmer's market. Keep going two more miles, and you're in Clarkston.
Ryan: I know. Right by Tucker, right?
Chuck: We're closer into the city than Tucker. Clarkston, for the last 30 years, has been part of the National Refugee Resettlement program. So, in the city of Clarkston -- population 13,000 -- there are 75 different ethnic groups represented. If you want to see what the South is becoming, there ain’t no better place to live than Clarkston, Georgia.
You see that thing we write about all the time -- which is, we always say that the culture of the South is really a gumbo. And think about what gumbo is, okay? Gumbo was the very first dish on this continent. And it happened in New Orleans, which was the only place that it could have happened. It contained methods and ingredients from our European ancestors, and then from the ancestors of enslaved people from the Caribbean and from Africa. And as every successive wave of immigrants has come in, just like that dish, they’ve put their own flavors into the gumbo pot of this region's culture. What comes out of it is, the flavors change. Now, there are certain people down here who -- when the flavor changes -- they get scared to taste it. But those aren't our readers.
Our readers are the ones who want to taste it, you know? And since the virus has happened, it's comforting to remind oneself that I can walk a few yards in either direction on my street and talk to neighbors who endured wars and bombings and unspeakable horrors and violence. And they’ve made a life here. We sort of feel like we live in a neighborhood that's full of sources of hope.
Ryan: Well, all you have to do is talk to people like that to find out how amazing this country is.
Chuck: Exactly. I mean, that's the thing. They all want to get here. This was their dream. This was the place where they believed they could build the kind of life that they dreamed up for themselves. And they fought like hell to get here. I never fought like hell to get here. There's so many families here that are not complete because some of them didn't make it through the fight, but they're here in the South, statistically -- you know, according to the U.S. census data.
And I don't really care how you define it. Actually, the government does have an official definition for it. But no matter how you slice the data, it's the most diverse part of the country, and it always has been. But we've got this mythology that was created after the Civil War by the United Daughters of the Confederacy -- the whole ‘Lost Cause’ mythology that wound up in the curriculum of our schools until about 20 years ago. I was raised in Southern public schools. And if I was asked on a test to name the cause of the Civil War, and I put slavery, I would be marked wrong.
Ryan: It was the “war of northern aggression.”
Chuck: Yeah. It was all those things that I don't say anymore. Like that phrase you just used. What we had was a civil war that was fought because rich landowners wanted to preserve their right to own human beings. That's a fact. And a whole lot of poor folks died in the war to preserve that right for them -- and they lost, as they should have. That’s a fact.
Right afterwards, the United Daughters of the Confederacy couldn't live with the sense of defeat that the ones who made it home had -- and they created a myth. A whole set of myths. And they actually succeeded in teaching at least 4 or 5, maybe 6 generations of Southerners those myths. And we grew up believing that. Several years ago, when Dylann Roof killed those people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a piece in The Atlantic. I can't remember the headline of it, but I will never forget that, in that piece, he quoted from several of the secession declarations of the southern states -- Confederate states. He did it because Dylann Roof wrote a manifesto that was fully infused with this ‘lost cause’ mythology. And the point he was trying to make is that if you look at the secession declaration, it's clear you don't have to get more than a paragraph deep -- particularly in the first states to secede -- to see that the ‘rights of states’ we were taught that they were defending was the right to enslave people. And I was 52 – no, 54, man -- when I first saw that.
Ryan: And you felt shocked?
Chuck: It felt really shocking. It pissed me off. It was like, “Teachers, why didn't you put this in front of me?”
Ryan: Well, this going to sound crazy, because I'm from the West Coast -- but I don't know what the ‘lost cause’ mythology is.
Chuck: Well, see, that’s the thing. And for a person like you, coming in and making a place like this their home -- one thing that we've heard frequently from readers of The Bitter Southerner, people like you; from adopted Southerners; Southerners by choice, as we call them -- is “Man, your stories helped me understand this place.” It's like, why some people do the things they do; there are no easy explanations for them. You have to kind of understand all that cultural baggage to see where it comes from. And I hope that our stories help people along those lines. I always hope that.
Ryan: Well, you know, I've learned more about my own family after having moved to the South, because my dad's from southern Missouri; from Springfield. I was born in Springfield. The first time I ever took my ex-wife, who was a Californian, to visit southern Missouri, we got off the plane and there was a huge sign that said “Welcome to the Ozarks.” She turned to me, and she said, “They really call it the Ozarks? I thought that was a derogatory term.” And I thought, “Man, there's a cultural insight.” And that's true of all sorts of things that are Southern that are misunderstood.
But I had no idea that the Ozarks, and people in the Ozarks, really culturally are Southern -- whether they say it or not -- until I moved here, and I realized, “Man, I grew up with these people. These are almost all my family from the Ozarks.” You know, the ways of being, the family life, the pride culture, the love of the land, the love of the outdoors, the love of America -- but definitely with a little bit of animosity toward big government.
Chuck: Well, see, that's a mountain person thing.
Ryan: Yeah, yeah. There you go. Hillbillies.
Chuck: See, that's common in the Ozarks and in Appalachia. I grew up in southern Appalachia. And you have to remember that in Appalachia, it's really three groups of people. It was the Scottish Highlanders who were so rowdy that they got kicked out to Ireland, and then they all weren't being allowed to live like they wanted. They moved to America. So it's their descendants, and the descendants of escaped slaves, who make up the population of Appalachia. And these are people who, you know -- I mean, everyone who was coming to America had a choice. “Do I hav e the best chance of making a new life for my family in an isolated place where I have a few other people, but command of the resources at hand -- or do I move to a city where there are many resources, but I will be competing with thousands of others?”
And you know like I do, man -- folks are wired differently like that. Still, today, some folks want the quiet existence; some want a little more hubbub in their lives. It's just those kinds of people, you know -- and they've each got different stories, because their people came from elsewhere. But all of this makes me think. Do you have a computer in front of you, or a tablet or something?
Ryan: I don't, but, whatever you tell me, I'll go look up right after that.
Chuck: Okay. Well, all I want you to do is go to thebittersoutherner.com and look up a story called ‘Ozark Life.’
Ryan: I already read it.
Chuck: Fantastic.
Ryan: Clearly, the Bitter Southerner believes the Ozarks are the South.
Chuck: They can't not be, dude. I mean, the fact that I crawl up into Missouri -- if that means Missouri's part of the South, then like I said, we don't care.
Ryan: Well, I'll promise you, the ‘y’all line’ is south of Saint Louis.
Chuck: Oh, it is.
Ryan: Because everybody in Southern Missouri -- they think they're Southerners. Everybody who lives north of Saint Louis thinks they're from Chicago. So it's a split state, culturally.
Chuck: One of my regular contributors is from the bootheel. He lived in Atlanta for a long time, and he's moved back up into one of the exurbs south of Saint Louis. So occasionally, we will send him out. He did a story for us. We actually had him drive all the way down to the very southern end to Arkansas to do a piece about a town called El Dorado, which was called something like ‘The Cultural Resurgence of El Dorado,’ because it's a little town that has always been dependent on the Murphy Oil Company, because that's where it's headquartered. The town had kind of gone to nothing as the oil business changed. And so the Murphy family had put millions of dollars into trying to turn El Dorado into a cultural destination, you know? So he does those kinds of things for us.
I was talking to Tony one time and he was like, “Yeah, where I live, whether people consider themselves Southern kind of depends on whether they came down from Saint Louis or up from somewhere farther south.” So, it kind of doesn't matter. But I guess all we can do as a publication is to do stories that help people, over time, get a broader understanding of what Southern culture consists of -- because a precise definition of what the region is and what it means to people is dependent on so many other factors that it becomes impossible.
Ryan: Well, and that's really where the word ‘bitter’ comes into this, right? It's more of the forgottenness of the South that you want to make known as well. Is that fair?
Chuck: It’s absolutely fair. And if you want to know how we got to that...
Ryan: I would love that story.
Chuck: It's pretty simple. In 2011, for Halloween week, we went to spend the week in New Orleans. This was about the time when the whole resurgence of the ‘classic, cocktail-knowledgeable bartender’ thing was happening and had made it to Atlanta. So we spent a few nights in some nice bars where the bartenders knew what they were doing in New Orleans, and I got home, and the next week I was at work, and a thing popped into my Facebook feed about a list of the 50 best cocktail bars in the world. The only reason I clicked on that story was because I thought, “Hey, maybe one of those places we went to in New Orleans last week will be on it.” Then I clicked on it, and it was this magazine called ‘Drinks International,’ which is like sort of a global bar business trade publication. And they put together this list of the 50 best cocktail bars in the world.
Not only was there no bar in New Orleans on that list, there was no bar in the American South. I was like, “Once again, nobody thinks that we would have anybody sophisticated enough to pull something off like that.” And I’d just experienced said sophistication last week. So I was like, “I bet I could do a little blog about southern bartenders -- you know, nights and weekends. It'd be fun.”
So I went to my buddy Dave Whitling, who is now the creative director of The Bitter Southerner, and one of the co-founders along with me. He's a designer. I walked over to where the design folks sat in our office, and I said, “Hey, I’ve got this idea for a little cocktail blog -- will you design it for me?” And he said, “Sure.” So we met pretty soon thereafter at a coffee shop that we both were regulars at one Saturday, and we tried to figure out, “Okay, if we're going to do this, what do we name it?” And because we worked at a firm that did design and editorial work for big corporations, we have been through naming exercises countless times. We're like, “Okay, it's a cocktail blog.”
Ryan: And when you when you say a firm, you're talking about Coca-Cola?
Chuck: No, no, I'm talking about a firm called an Unboundary, which is still in existence. It’s in Atlantic Station now. It was right behind the Coca-Cola building when Dave and I worked there. I'd left journalism in 1991 and sort of got accidentally sucked into politics. I worked in politics for five years, went to the Coca-Cola company, worked there for five years, moved back to New York the second time, was a senior VP at a big PR agency up there.
And then my dad got sick, and I was an only child. He had multiple myeloma, was diagnosed at age 82. 9/11 had happened the year before, about half a mile from our apartment in New York. We were not affected by it in terms of ash or anything, only because of the way the wind was blowing that day. And then, very soon after 9/11 happened, a few months after that, I got a call from Dad that he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. And, we came home -- me and my ex-wife. That's what got me home.
For seven years, from 2002 until 2009, I did solo speechwriting, employee communications consulting, and corporate editorial consulting -- solo. Then I got tired of working by myself, and I joined this firm, Unboundary, that did the same kind of thing, but on a larger scale. I was having to put together virtual teams to do big projects, but they were all in-house, and it gave me people to work with every day, and a place where I could take my dog.
So, I did that -- and that's where I met Dave. I asked Dave to do this blog for me. We met, and we started talking about, “Okay, what ingredients go in cocktails?” And we're like, “Okay. Fruit juice; citrus spirits; gin; whiskey.” We went through all the spirits -- ‘The Spirited Southerner’ when we thought about the syrups, ‘The Sweet Southerner’ or ‘The Sour Southerner’ for the citrus.
And then we got to the bitters, and we were like, “The Bitter Southerner.” We both just sort of looked at each other like, “Holy shit, we can't do that.” Because Dave grew up in a small town in Middle Georgia: Sandersville. We both got this, and we were like, “That name is doing something bigger -- that that name is not a cocktail blog.”
Ryan: I agree with that.
Chuck: That name expresses what we feel about all the things that people do not understand about where we're from. Essentially, Ryan, it took Dave and I a year. Along the way, we brought in other people, including our two other co-founders, Kyle Tibbs Jones and Butler Raines. But it took us a whole year to figure out what that name was telling us to do.
At the time, Dave and I were working on a big project; we were doing a corporate magazine. We had been doing a corporate magazine for them, and we were transitioning it to online, because online -- you know, big expansive designs. We're like, “Let's do those big feature stories.” We always said that nobody's going to understand the South by reading one story. They are going to understand the South by reading several stories over time.
Ryan: Nobody’s going to understand the South unless they come live here, Chuck. I promise you -- I've got friends all over the world. And until they get here for any extended period of time, this place is a mystery to them.
Chuck: But when they get there, our stories help them.
Ryan: 100%. Right. But it's like studying a language from afar. It makes sense to me. It makes perfect sense.
Chuck: Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do. That’s always what we've tried to do.
Ryan: And it changes -- like, think about like reading Tolstoy. When you read Tolstoy when you're 20, you don't get it. You read Tolstoy when you're 40, you realize what a genius the guy is, right? And you read Tolstoy...
Chuck: ...when you’re 60, and like, yeah. I'm 59. I totally get where you're coming from, man. You know, our audience, though, is remarkable in its demographic spread. 35-55 is the heart of it, as you might guess, from what you've just said -- but it really runs the gamut, man. We seem to have become the place, and our audience is a community -- unlike any other publications audience that I've ever seen or that I've heard of -- that literally, in social media, call each other ‘cousin.’
Ryan: Love that. That's like my family in southern Missouri. That's how they refer to all their neighbors -- “oh, my cousin down the street.”
Chuck: Yeah, exactly. And it’s that very thing, Ryan -- that some of them decided to start calling each other that. We've never really had to define the name for them. They define that for anyone who asks. We appear to have created the first community of Southerners who have as a primary common goal to put aside the ‘lost cause’ mythology.
Ryan: The thing that I've observed that I think is so fascinating is that there's a depth of soul in the South, right? The William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Southern soul that exists -- oftentimes in the shadows, because there's not a lot of opportunity in my experience thus far for depth of conversation, because it's not a Southern tradition to be vulnerable. What I love about the conversation that you're having, and this conversation of Southern culture in the midst of the global order, is a deep reverence combined with a deep humility that results in a lot of vulnerability about the good, bad, and ugly of what it means to be Southern.
It doesn't feel like it's, you know -- there's no, like, “I am a Southerner. Hear me roar.” It's, “I am a Southerner. Listen to my voice. Know my story. Know my history, know my psychology, know my sociology.” And that is the beauty of at least what I've been exposed to in The Bitter Southerner. What you guys are doing is that there's just depth to it, and texture, and beauty. Have you been a philosophical person most of your life? It sounds like.
Chuck: I guess I have been more of a philosophical kind of person. You know, I don't really have a lot of evidence to back that up with. I mean, I've always looked into that. A lot of it, in a way, goes back to my dad. Like I said, I was an only child -- and my dad was a huge influence on me. The little church we went to was part of our life every single week, and usually 2 or 3 times. And it was the same church. My dad was one of 12, and the church was about two throws of a half-pound rock from the house where all those 12 kids were raised. It was like the family church. But lots of other people from that part of Gilmer County came to it.
My dad was a choir director. He taught singing schools in little churches all over North Georgia. And he paid attention to who wrote the songs. I was, like, seven years old when 1968 came, and there were riots in the streets. RFK being assassinated; Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King being assassinated. It used to be, on Sunday mornings, all the local stations in Atlanta carried different churches’ services. You could watch, like, four sermons before you went to church yourself if you wanted to. And one of the preachers that Dad loved to love to listen to was the Reverend William Holmes Porters, who was at Wheat Street Baptist Church -- which was one of the big three churches of the Civil Rights movement there in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. He could hear how Martin Luther King's teachings were in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
In that year, he started pointing out to me -- “Okay, this song we sang here, ‘Just A Little Talk With Jesus:’ that guy whose name is on it, Cleveland Derricks? He was a black preacher from Chattanooga.” My dad kind of taught me. And what's been interesting to me is that when you look into every piece of Southern culture -- whether it's art on a wall, music, the written word, play, film -- I don't care. Anything that's ever stood the test of time, with one very notable exception, has been by the people who knew that the original premise of this whole region -- of the Confederacy -- was just wrong; just morally wrong.
Flannery knew it. Faulkner knew it, and wrestled with it. All of those people wrestled with it. And in her own way, bless her heart, Margaret Mitchell tried to wrestle with it. And we got this movie, Gone With the Wind, which is what cemented the ‘lost cause’ mythology firmly in the global collective memory through the 20th century. But when we got to a place where kids were growing up, and they could go to Google and Google the term ‘states’ rights’ and find out within 15 minutes what it actually meant, suddenly there was a generation of people that were willing to look at this -- and those younger people are making the older ones like me do it. I did it anyway, just because I'm built that way.
But you keep finding all the similarities, the more you dig into it, that go completely across races and cultures. I mean, I pulled up something here that I want to read to you. You know who Killer Mike is? The rapper?
Ryan: No, I don’t.
Chuck: Okay. School yourself, son. He's a very important person here in Atlanta. He's got a TV show that's called ‘Trigger Warning,’ and it's brilliant. He's also half of a rap duo called Run the Jewels, which has sold millions and millions of records; his partner in them in that rap duo is a white guy from Brooklyn named El-P. But before that, Mike had been a rapper. He'd actually won a Grammy back in the 2000s for an appearance on an Outkast song. He was part of that crowd. He’s 40-something now, and he was rapping about this stuff -- about being Southern. I had a friend who was his accountant, I think. And when we started The Bitter Southerner, I was like, “Would you tell Mike about it and see if he would sit down with me for an interview?”
So, our very first thing, which you can read if you go to the About page of our site, which was the thing I wrote that started the whole thing -- she sent that to Killer Mike, and Mike read it, evidently, and loved it. He was playing a show that weekend at the Old Masquerade on North Avenue. And he said, “I'll put as many as want to come on the guest list.” So, Dave and I went to the show with my friend who knew Mike. And, damned if he didn't say, “Bitter Southerners in the house! I love that shit -- I'm bitter, too!”
He agreed to be interviewed. He had opened a barbershop down in southwest Atlanta. Mothers were afraid to go to barber shops because a lot of the drug trade congregated around some of them, and they didn't feel like it was safe to take their kids. So Mike was determined to build a barbershop where it would be safe and welcoming. He now has three of them. There's actually one in State Farm Arena, where you can get your hair cut and watch the Hawks play at the same time.
Ryan: Love it.
Chuck: I sat down with him at that first barbershop -- this was before Run the Jewels, and before he had the means he has today. What I did was, I talked to Mike about how, “You know, we'll sit around all day, and we'll listen to old Appalachian murder ballads. We’ll listen to Johnny Cash say, ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,’ and never once think Johnny Cash actually did that. But if you write about a black guy with a gun, they’ll think it's you.” And he was like, “Right.” Here's what he said to me.
He said, “It bothers me, too. I feel sorry for my neighbors who may be a little afraid of me -- because you deny yourself such a valuable experience when you shut yourself out from other human beings. I mean, being a young black man in the South can be a difficult and arduous task at times, but at some point, after you get past the anger and some of the confusion of adolescence, and you grow up and travel the world of people who are stereotypically supposed to hate me, or the people I'm supposed to mistrust, have always been my neighbors. And for most of my life, we've been really nice to each other. That's my honest experience with whites in the South. And I think a lot of times when people say ‘Southerner,’ or make those crass jokes, I, as the black guy, am supposed to excuse myself from the joke. But we're all Southerners. We all talk with these drawls and twangs. We all go to the racetrack on Sunday; we all go fishing. I don't have a Dixie flag on the back of my pickup, because y’all lost, but it still has mud flaps and big tires.”
Ryan: Well, that is that is the truth of the South.
Chuck: That really is the truth of the South. If you look at the music, man -- look at the soul music that came out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Macon, and other little places around the South; Atlanta, Charlotte, Western North Carolina. I mean, go back to the Carter family. If you watch the Ken Burns documentary about country music, AP Carter's main song-catching partner was a black man. They were just grabbing songs -- whatever songs people sang, because that's the way stuff got passed around. All of our beautiful music from the South, and arguably every great thing that's ever happened in American music, came from here. And I'll kind of fight anybody who says otherwise. Because I can trace the route of the Beach Boys all the way back to the South if you want me to.
Ryan: Listen, I believe you. And I know that if I don't listen to you, you’ll punch me in the nose like a good Southerner.
Chuck: Nah, I won't. I'm not a violent man and never have been. I won’t punch you in the nose, but I might come up with a good verbal shot for you.
Ryan: Yeah, fair enough. Chuck, we're out of time. The last thing I'd ask is a couple of things. One, share with everybody how they can reach you on social media, if you have any of those pieces. And maybe share one thing -- something you'd love for people who are not Southerners to really imbibe about the South.
Chuck: If you've never heard of this thing called Bitter Southerner, I have a few suggestions for you. I would ask you to -- if you want to just start reading and dive right in, you can do that at bittersoutherner.com. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we are @BitterSouth. On Instagram, we are @BitterSoutherner. And of course, we have a Bitter Southerner Facebook page, and you can engage with us in all of those places there.
In terms of one last thing to say, Ryan, I guess I'll just say this. If you're from the South, or not from the South, and are trying to figure this out because it's so puzzling -- keep reading us, and we will further complicate your understanding.
Ryan: The South is a complicated place. I love it. Chuck, thank you for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure.
Chuck: It's been a pleasure too, my new friend who is highly dependent upon the film business. I wish us a safe and speedy turnaround.
Ryan: Indeed. I think it will be fast once we start working. All right, Chuck. Have a great day. Stay safe out there.
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Ryan: I'll leave you guys with thoughts, which are reflections that I write on Instagram. ‘None of us are allowed to value the suffering of others. We are only allowed to value our own suffering.’ This has been the Blackhall Studios podcast. I'm Ryan Millsap, chairman and CEO. Thanks for listening.
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