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Fred Hunter's Alabama

By: Fred Hunter
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  • Summary

  • After 25 years of hosting the popular television show "Absolutely Alabama," native son Fred Hunter is bringing his love of the state and its people to a new format. The podcast "Fred Hunter's Alabama" continues Fred's exploration of the people, places, events — and, of course, the food — that makes Alabama such a special place to call home.
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Episodes
  • Charles McNair: South Alabama Writer Lives High in the Andes

    Charles McNair: South Alabama Writer Lives High in the Andes
    Jul 25 2024
    Writer Charles McNair Lives High in the Andes, but His Roots are in South AlabamaMy conversation with Charles McNair felt a little like a family reunion as we connected many dots in our common roots. It was fascinating to learn how a boy from South Alabama wrote his way to being a Pulitzer-prize nominee, continues to write, and now resides a bit south of the Wiregrass in Bogota, Colombia.Of course he found a very imaginative way to explain that his home state is always with him. Ask him if he’s from Alabama, and the proof is on his knee.“At this very moment, if I weren’t modest, I’d pull up my left pant leg and show you my knee,” McNair said. “I might be the only person in the world with a banjo on my knee — because I come from Alabama. The day I turned 40, I walked down to the tattoo parlor near my home and got a little banjo tattoo.” We had a great time talking about all the things we have in common, but when you’re interviewing a talented storyteller with an interesting past, it’s best to let them do the talking.“Frasier-Ellis Hospital was a two-story house they called a hospital, and my mama delivered me in a room being observed by a team of medical students,” McNair said. “I’m told that when I was presented to the world, they all stood up and applauded. That may have been the defining moment that shaped my personality, I don’t know.”That was 1954 in Dothan, and McNair would spend the next several years absorbing everything the natural world had to offer in the Wiregrass region of Alabama. “I was a large red woodland animal for my first, I’d say 16, 17 years,” he said. “I lived in those woods. We built forts. We had wars. We waded the creeks and watched out for snakes, ran from yellow jackets, and hid by the railroad track when the hobos came down the line. These were mythically terrifying figures. They were like Stephen King characters to us.“And every night when I went to sleep all those years, I heard a train passing by on those tracks behind the house — that mournful whistle, the midnight train whining low,” he continued. “All that infused me with memories and things to write about. All my novels have been nature focused. The presence of the woods and nature played a tremendous role in all the books I've written.”McNair has published three acclaimed novels: “Land O’ Goshen” (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), “Pickett’s Charge” (Livingston Press, 2013), and “The Epicureans” (Tune & Fairweather, 2024). He is also the author of “Play It Again, Sam: The Notable Life of Sam Massell, Atlanta’s First Minority Mayor” (Mercer University Press, 2017).Growing up during the struggles and tensions of the Civil Rights era left a particular wound that McNair carried until a couple of years ago at a reunion of the Dothan High School class of 1972, the first integrated class at the school to graduate together.“A dear friend, a Black man named Shaq Thompson, and I resolved to solve a problem that had existed since we’d graduated,” McNair explained. “In the 10th grade, they closed Carver, the Black school, and all of those students came over to Dothan. There had been a lingering resentment — the hurt feelings of having your culture and your history sort of ignored. Shaq and I brought back together the Black classmates and the white classmates for a 50th reunion. And I felt a healing.“I also made peace with Dothan,” McNair added. “When I left at age 18, I could not wait to shake the dust off. It was too conservative. It was too constraining. And I went off to college and came back many years later and started to make my peace with Dothan and who I’d been and how it had been. My mother went into a decline around 2016, and I flew from Colombia every six weeks to stay a week with her. During that two-year period, I really started making peace with 50 years of anxiety and of disappointment in Dothan. I now am looking at a piece of property to buy there. I have come back. I’ve made new friends. The city’s different … I’m different.”I’ve heard it said that no matter how far you go, you have to write about where you came from. McNair attests to that. The growing-up years are inescapable.“I couldn’t agree more. It’s always about Alabama and family and those friends and that life for me,” he said. “That’s the core. That’s where everything else comes from.McNair attended the University of Alabama for seven years and “when I left, I was still a sophomore,” he said. “I was in and out because of work and when I was in, I only took writing classes. I didn’t get credit for the writing classes that I repeated, but I still took them because that’s all I wanted to be, ever.”The arc of McNair’s career is rich with experiences. He’s taught English to Saudi Arabian students. He’s worked in the newspaper business. He’s worked in corporate America, writing for BellSouth Corp. But he continued his personal ...
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    35 mins
  • Grace Pettis: Living Her Life Down To The Letter

    Grace Pettis: Living Her Life Down To The Letter
    Jul 17 2024

    Singer/songwriter Grace Pettis talks about her new album "Down To The Letter" with Fred Hunter.
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    Grace's music is described as a little bit of folk, a little bit of country/Americana, and a whole lot of soul.

    Grace is the winner of many of the nation’s most prestigious songwriting contests, grants, and residencies, including NPR’s Mountain Stage NewSong Contest, the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Grace’s songs have been recorded by other esteemed artists, including Sara Hickman and Ruthie Foster, with 3 co-writes on Foster's latest, Grammy-nominated album, Healing Time (2024).

    Grace was an official showcasing artist at SXSW and Folk Alliance International this year (2024). She has independently released three acclaimed records and signed with MPress Records in 2020. Her debut album on MPress, Working Woman (2021), was produced by lauded singer-songwriter Mary Bragg, mixed by 2x Grammy® award winner Shani Gandhi (Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical), and featured an all-female/non-binary band and creative credits. Guest contributions came from Indigo Girls, Ruthie Foster, Dar Williams, and other luminaries.

    Grace Pettis' much-anticipated sophomore MPress Records release, Down To The Letter, captures the Nashville-based (formerly Austin-based) singer-songwriter at the peak of her songwriting powers. Chronicling the end of a marriage and the reclamation of self after betrayal, codependency, and loss with heartbreaking detail, the lyrics deftly toe the line between personal pain and universal catharsis.

    ​

    Produced by Mary Bragg (Natalie Price), mixed by Jon Estes (Robyn Hitchcock, Dolly Parton), and mastered by John McLaggan (Parachute Mastering), the album showcases Pettis' rich voice, perhaps one of the most dynamic and agile of her generation.

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    34 mins
  • Pierce Pettis: This Traveling Troubadour Is Right Where He Wants to Be

    Pierce Pettis: This Traveling Troubadour Is Right Where He Wants to Be
    Jul 2 2024
    Throughout his career as a performer, songwriter, and recording artist, Fort Payne native Pierce Pettis has been inside the hurricane they call the music business. But he is also an outsider, never achieving the often sought-after goal of world fame — and for that, he is grateful.Through his work with Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, PolyGram Publishing, High Street Records, and Compass Records, his songs have been recorded by music legends such as Garth Brooks, Joan Baez, and Art Garfunkel. Pierce has also released numerous albums, both as a solo artist and as part of groups. His work can’t be pigeonholed in one genre. He dreamed of making it big as a young musician, but after working in the industry and seeing firsthand the tribulations stars can face, he feels blessed to have worked as a craftsman behind the curtain, doing what he loves.“This is going to sound crazy,” Pierce says. “I count my blessings that I didn’t reach what I thought were my dreams when I was young: fame and fortune. Well, I wouldn’t mind fortune. But I have friends who are very famous, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It takes a toll on you. And so I’ve had the great privilege of seeing it through friends’ eyes without having to go through what they went through.”Before Pierce was born, his father moved from Evergreen, Alabama, to Guntersville, where he finished high school. Eventually, the elder Pettis opened a store in Fort Payne, but as Pierce tells it, the family didn’t know anyone in town and, unfortunately, his father’s business didn’t thrive. But they liked the town and, even though they were “outsiders,” everyone was welcoming and kind. There is that “insider-outsider” theme that would echo throughout the songwriter’s professional life.Pierce comes from a musical family, and he was in childhood bands from an early age. He left the Fort Payne area, attending school in Florida and later traveling to and living in a multitude of places, including London and Paris, North Carolina, Ohio and New York, and Nashville. After his first marriage ended in divorce and his children were living with his ex-wife in Atlanta, he came home to Fort Payne and has been there ever since. No matter where he traveled, the songs that emanated from his soul tended to touch on his home and were rooted in small-town Southern culture.“I realized looking back at all the songs I wrote during all that time, there were so many songs about where I grew up,” Pierce says. “I have a theory that one of the reasons is the South in particular has a very powerful oral tradition. And we’re agrarian. When you live in the country, you tell stories. We’re like the Irish. Most of Ireland is still very rural. That creates a nation of storytellers, and we’ve created a lot of writers and a lot of singers and songwriters. It’s just in the air.”So how did Pierce get from his early days of college in Florida to a career in music? That path, too, winds through Fort Payne. “I was down at Florida State, about to be kicked out of music school, because I was an idiot,” Pierce laughs. “I was forging my advisor’s signature to get into classes I wasn’t supposed to be in. And I didn’t bother to pick up a principal instrument, which you’re really supposed to do. I could have been a voice major. I didn’t have the sense to think that through. Meanwhile, my friends from Fort Payne, Dennis and Russell Gulley, called me up one day and said, ‘Man, you need to come over to Muscle Shoals.’ So I dropped out of college and headed to the Shoals. I met [producer] Jimmy Johnson and I had reels of all these songs I’d written. Jimmy was kind enough to sit and listen and he saw some potential.” While he was working in Muscle Shoals, a big break came Pierce’s way when Joan Baez covered his song “Song at the End of the Movie” for her 1979 album “Honest Lullaby.” “Joan Baez’s album, before the one I was on, was called ‘Diamonds and Rust,’ and it was a huge album,” he recalls. “So everybody wanted to be on the next album. I got to be on this album, and that was really something because of the other writers — like Jackson Browne and Randy Newman. Everybody thought this album was going to be gigantic. And it wasn’t.”Meanwhile, Pierce signed with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in Nashville, partly because they believed the upcoming Baez album with his song was going to be a huge hit. “But signing wasn’t the greatest thing that ever could have happened to me,” he says, “because it forced me to go back into the trenches. My deal ran out in Muscle Shoals in 1980 and I ended up going back and finishing school at Florida State in mass communications and psychology. Pretty good background for a writer, right?”As a singer/songwriter, he played the college circuit, along with basically anywhere else he could take the stage. This included rough and rowdy ...
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    1 hr and 6 mins
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