Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson and the South’s Influence on Fast Food

Southern fried chicken has the romantic reputation as a down home dish handmade with love for generations in the U.S. However, fried chicken is also one of our country’s most mass-produced foods and is essential to the history of American fast food. Host Francis Lam talks with Southern food historian John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers, about how the fried chicken empires led by two Southern icons – the bitter Colonel Harland Sanders and the glorified Mahalia Jackson – shaped American food during the 1950-1970s. [Ed. Note: Read Southern Foodways Alliance’s article “Glori-fried and Glori-fied: Mahalia Jackson’s Chicken” by Alice Randall to learn more about the gospel singer’s chicken career.]

Francis Lam: We recently talked about hippies in the South and the surprising ingenuity of their communities as they invented soy ice cream and started making tofu commercially. Now I want to talk to you about a different kind of southern ingenuity that was happening around same time. In a lot of our minds, fast food is the product of California and Illinois because of the McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc. But you argue in your book that the South had a lot to do with it. Tell me about the South's role in the development of fast food.

John T. Edge: Think about an iconic American figure like Colonel Sanders who rose to fame in Kentucky. The interesting thing for me about Sanders is he took this hyper-traditional Southern food, the farm-grounded Southern food – fried chicken – and by way of that pressure cooker and selling his shtick to the masses, he turned it into the ultimate modern food. Then it became that food sold in those buckets at the drive thru; it became the most modern of foods and the idealized fast food.

FL: It sounds like he was fabulously wealthy. In the book, he's driving around in a Rolls-Royce with his face on it. I think literally everyone in the world knows the face of Colonel Harland Sanders. But when we meet him in your book, he is salty, angry and sad. What's the deal?

JTE: As Sanders sold his business and saw it resold by multiple corporations, you see the product in which he took so much pride, you see it degrade. Sanders takes great offense at that. There's a lot of cussing in this part of the book – which I probably can't repeat here – because Colonel Sanders is mad at himself. I believe Colonel Sanders recognizes his own complicity in the building of fast food franchises as a standard for a future tense south; he recognizes that there's a problem, and it's his fault.

FL: It's interesting he saw a problem because he essentially invented a way to make this traditional fried chicken so you could sell it real fast and make a lot of money on it. At what point did he have this change of heart?

JTE: This is me reading into his actions, words, and deeds. There's not a moment wherein Colonel Harland Sanders has this epiphany and recognizes that the decimation of regional cuisine begins with him. But if you read between the lines, and when you watch old clips of him, you see and hear a man angry at himself more so than anyone else. I believe it's because he recognizes in this moment that he's lived a lie. Even his title “Colonel Sanders” was an honorific; he was no Colonel. It was a title bestowed upon him. His goatee was bleached. His white suit was not something to which he was born, it was garb he clothed himself in. The promise of his fried chicken, and in many ways the life he lived, was a conceit.

FL: It's funny because now he's a literal cartoon. He's a drawing on a box of fried chicken, right?

JTE: Right. There's a great example of that. I’ve got a framed album above my desk called “Colonel Sanders’ Tijuana Picnic.” The cover shows Colonel Sanders cozying beneath a tree with his silver cane in his lap. The reverse lists all the songs, and it's Herb Alpert inspired, Mexican-American drivel. He was this facile character that took on all these different personas to sell this bird. In that selling, there's a discomforting position he takes, and I would argue that that discomforting position ultimately unsettles him.

FL: Let’s look at a different perspective on the rise of fast food in your book; I don't want to say the African-American perspective, but it seems like a perspective that is specific to the black community. Mahalia Jackson, the gospel star who, I think I've read in your book, was also probably the person who told Dr. King, "Tell them about the dream" when he was giving his speech.

JTE: Right.

FL: She later also became a sort of Colonel Sanders figure in that she was the face of a fried chicken chain, but it was a very different interpretation of that.

JTE: The Mahalia Jackson fried chicken system story is very much linked to Colonel Sanders. The money made by investors in Colonel Sanders inspired a range of investors across the country. A group of businessmen in Nashville first underwrote Minnie Pearl, the Grand Ole Opry comedian. A fried chicken chain that was to sell to working class white consumers emerged with her name attached to it including a color scheme inspired by the colors of her hat which she famously wore.

Their next step was selling to black consumers; they put up money and built allegiances with black civil rights figures of all things. Benjamin Hooks – who had been president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference – Joseph Lowery and Ralph David Abernathy joined together when this first Mahalia Jackson's [restaurant] was announced to break ground and celebrate the possibilities. They referred to it in that moment as a “declaration of Negro economic independence.” White investors stepped in to bankroll, in part, a black-owned fried chicken restaurant – 50 percent black, 50 percent white. Mahalia Jackson was brought in as the spokesperson at a moment in her career when she is one of the most beloved figures in American music and certainly one of the most beloved figures in black American music. It was almost as if, blood had been spilled at lunch counters. If those places were tainted, then fried chicken franchises and fast food franchises were kind of deracinated that no blood had been spilled there. These were new; these were tabula rasa. There was economic possibility here; it was a modern thing, it wasn't some Deep South plantation gig. They referred to it in the moment by saying, "This is a relationship and a partnership – not plantation-ship."

FL: It's a reinvention, a way to reinvent those old roles and that horrible history, to wipe it clean and say, “This is a way to look forward.”

JTE: It’s a way to drive black economic independence and use white money to do it. That was the idea behind it; that was the ultimate goal. It wasn't selling fried chicken; it was building black wealth – at least for the blacks who participated in it.