Today Condé Nast Traveler welcomes actress Lucy Hale for a masterclass on all things Tennessee. Born and raised in Memphis, the Pretty Little Liars star is a true southern belle, so true in fact, they had to train the southern accent out of her when she moved to Los Angeles. From the best BBQ ribs to Graceland and Dollywood, Lucy Hale is here to teach y'all how to be from Tennessee.
Lucy Hale stars in the upcoming Amazon Freevee Original Film PUPPY LOVE, premiering August 18, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/freevee
SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
Lucy Hale stars in the upcoming Amazon Freevee Original Film PUPPY LOVE, premiering August 18, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/freevee
SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Chug, chug, chug.
00:01 Okay.
00:02 Mm.
00:03 Woo.
00:04 Woo.
00:06 Yeah.
00:07 Hi, I'm Lucy Hale,
00:08 and today I'm gonna be teaching you
00:10 how to be a true Tennessean
00:11 by introducing you to some of my favorite snacks,
00:15 some of my favorite sayings,
00:16 and showing you everything I love about Tennessee.
00:18 (upbeat music)
00:29 Here are some quintessential road trip snacks
00:32 that originated in Tennessee,
00:35 starting with Mountain Dew, y'all.
00:38 I'm not necessarily a huge Mountain Dew fanatic,
00:42 but my dad is.
00:43 My dad lived in Mississippi a lot of my childhood,
00:45 and so it would take about an hour
00:47 from Memphis to Mississippi.
00:49 And so I call this like Preston's Go-Go Juice,
00:52 so my dad's name is Preston,
00:53 and he was just a Mountain Dew fanatic.
00:56 I don't know if I've tried a Mountain Dew in many a moon,
00:59 but let's, shh.
01:01 What makes Mountain Dew different than other sodas?
01:03 What's the flavor?
01:04 Guess we'll see.
01:10 Chug, chug, chug.
01:11 Okay.
01:13 Mm.
01:14 Woo.
01:17 Woo.
01:18 It's got a kick to it.
01:19 It's like lemon-lime.
01:22 My dad would be proud.
01:23 Little Debbie, she did a lot of things right.
01:25 She's been busy.
01:26 She's making zebra cakes, Nutty Buddies.
01:29 Yeah, these are the favorites.
01:32 So this is just my childhood in a box.
01:36 I gotta try it.
01:38 I have to try it.
01:39 If I'm gonna try one, it's gonna be that.
01:40 But of course, I think Moon Pie is maybe the fan favorite.
01:43 Oh, and a Goo Goo Cluster.
01:45 Since 1912.
01:47 We love that.
01:48 Okay.
01:50 I'm gonna try a little zebra cake.
01:52 Mm.
01:54 Spike my blood sugar real quick.
01:56 It's just a light midday snack.
01:59 Oh my God, but it's just so good.
02:03 Why?
02:03 What's in this that makes this so good?
02:06 Y'all gotta try this.
02:07 Have you ever had a zebra cake?
02:09 Okay, that's enough.
02:10 And I can honestly say I've probably taken all of these
02:13 on a road trip before.
02:14 Just wash it down with a little, you know.
02:16 When I moved to Tennessee at 15,
02:22 I had a pretty thick Southern accent
02:25 and I had to take accent reduction for auditions.
02:28 I pronounced every consonant.
02:29 It's because I had to actively do that
02:32 for about a year of my life.
02:33 But the one thing that stayed with me,
02:35 this bad boy, y'all.
02:37 It's like, it just sounds better to say,
02:38 what do y'all wanna do?
02:39 Instead of what do you guys wanna do?
02:40 Love a good y'all.
02:41 You all.
02:42 Oh, this is my favorite one.
02:44 Okay.
02:45 Such a good one.
02:46 So this isn't even a word, fixin'.
02:49 It's like, what are you fixing?
02:50 It means like you're going to do something.
02:52 So like, I'm fixin' to go to the store.
02:54 Instead of saying, I'm going to go to the store,
02:56 I'm fixin' to do this, I'm fixin' to do that.
02:59 So, oh, [beep]
03:00 So bless your heart is a term of endearment,
03:03 but it kinda gets a bad rap.
03:05 It can be a little passive aggressive.
03:07 We've heard it said like, oh, bless your heart,
03:09 if you mean it and like, you're an idiot.
03:12 'Cause you can say it in a way like, bless your heart,
03:14 but you're really saying, oh, you dummy,
03:17 or whatever you mean.
03:18 So one of my favorite sayings from the South,
03:22 specifically from my mamaw, is over yonder.
03:26 She still says it to this day.
03:28 I still don't know where yonder is.
03:30 It could mean anywhere from,
03:32 I'm going to the store over yonder,
03:35 the neighbor is over yonder.
03:37 There's just like a timeless feel of it.
03:39 I might actually start incorporating over yonder
03:42 into my everyday life.
03:44 Or even to top it is, are y'all fixin' to go over yonder?
03:47 That's a good one.
03:48 [upbeat music]
03:50 There's so many things I love about the South.
03:53 One thing that we get so right is the food.
03:57 Where I'm from, Memphis, Tennessee,
03:59 we're known for a few things.
04:01 Justin Timberlake, Elvis Presley, and barbecue.
04:04 If you're going to Memphis, come with an empty stomach
04:06 and be prepared to eat your way through the city.
04:09 And Memphis specifically is known for the pork ribs,
04:13 which is what I think we have here.
04:15 Let's see what we got.
04:17 I haven't had a pork rib in a long time,
04:19 but you know what?
04:19 Let's try it.
04:21 My uncle actually owns a barbecue shop
04:23 in a town called Camden, Tennessee.
04:25 His specialty is, I think it's pork ribs and also pork loin.
04:29 I don't know what the pork loin is, but it's delicious.
04:32 Okay.
04:33 It's pretty good.
04:35 I love interactive foods.
04:37 Like I love food that you have to work for.
04:39 That's what's so fun about ribs.
04:40 That's what Memphis is known for.
04:42 If I weren't on camera,
04:43 this would be smeared all over everything,
04:45 but I'll try to have a little manners here.
04:48 Okay.
04:49 Teeth check.
04:50 No, there's definitely stuff in my teeth.
04:52 I can feel it, but.
04:53 Ribs would be nothing without a side.
04:57 And so collard greens is like a staple.
05:00 We have some baked beans, mac and cheese.
05:03 Let's see.
05:04 I never met mac and cheese that I didn't like.
05:06 One of my favorite things
05:07 about a Southern restaurant is fried okra.
05:10 My grandmother used to make fried okra.
05:11 She used to grow her own okra
05:13 and nobody will ever be able to recreate
05:15 my mamaw's fried okra.
05:17 Okay, so the last thing I wanna talk about is ponchos.
05:21 So ponchos is a Mexican restaurant
05:24 that I used to go to with my family.
05:25 We'd go to Redbird Baseball Games
05:27 and the ponchos was,
05:28 I wanna say it was right across the street.
05:30 Really good Mexican food.
05:31 I think it's like a tourist hotspot,
05:33 but it holds up.
05:35 Just sort of like a nice, light, healthy meal
05:37 we've got going on here.
05:39 So just to get you oriented,
05:43 Tennessee is in the Southern part of the United States.
05:47 So if I went on a road trip,
05:49 I personally would start in Eastern Tennessee in Knoxville.
05:54 So my grandparents used to live in Knoxville growing up.
05:57 I have a lot of beautiful memories of the Smoky Mountains
06:00 and it's a lot more green
06:02 and there's more hills and mountains in this area
06:05 as opposed to where I'm from in Memphis.
06:07 And then if you go a little South in Pigeon Forge,
06:12 that's Dolly World,
06:14 which I haven't been to in a very long time.
06:17 Some of my earliest memories are renting cabins
06:20 and we would go to Dolly World
06:22 with my grandmother and my grandparents.
06:24 So we go down South to Chattanooga,
06:27 which is also a beautiful area.
06:28 But Chattanooga is really special to me
06:30 because I was 13, I was living in Memphis.
06:34 Kelly Clarkson had just won American Idol
06:36 and I saw a commercial for American Juniors
06:39 and auditions were being held in Chattanooga.
06:42 My mom told me we could drive to Chattanooga
06:44 and I could audition for American Juniors,
06:46 which was a singing show.
06:48 And because of that show, that's what led me to acting.
06:51 It was the sort of the stepping stone to my whole career.
06:55 So I'm very grateful to Chattanooga.
06:57 We got to stop in Nashville.
06:59 I love Nashville so much.
07:01 I love the farmland.
07:02 I love the music scene.
07:04 I love the people.
07:05 I used to do some country music,
07:07 so I spent a lot of time there
07:09 and I have a lot of friends there.
07:10 My mom lives in a town called Decaturville, Tennessee,
07:14 which is somewhere in here.
07:19 We'd make a pit stop at my mom's, say hi.
07:22 And then we would go up to Union City.
07:25 My grandparents used to live there.
07:26 My granddad was a pastor,
07:27 and so I had so many memories of his church
07:30 and this specific home in Union City
07:33 that I haven't been to in a long time, 25 years.
07:37 But we just got to make a pit stop there.
07:39 And then we're making our way to Memphis,
07:43 which is where I'm from.
07:45 I love Memphis.
07:47 It is such a cool, cool city.
07:49 So much culture.
07:50 I'm from a little part called Cordova,
07:53 which is between Germantown and Collierville.
07:55 Memphis is known for Graceland, where Elvis lived.
08:00 And Graceland is amazing.
08:01 It's not exactly what you'd expect.
08:04 They've really kept everything exactly the same
08:06 as when Elvis lived there.
08:07 There's the TV room where there's like seven different TVs.
08:10 It's really wild, but aesthetically,
08:13 I kind of love all the retro interior design.
08:16 So I think it's really fascinating.
08:17 It's also known for Sun Studios,
08:19 which is where Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison
08:22 and Elvis Presley recorded some of their biggest hits.
08:25 There's Beale Street, and Memphis is the home of the blues.
08:28 So you can listen to jazz and blues music,
08:31 the best probably in the world in Memphis.
08:34 There's a lot of really amazing pockets of Memphis.
08:37 There's the Cooper Young District
08:39 that has renovated warehouses.
08:41 There's a restaurant there called The Beauty Shop,
08:43 a renovated old beauty shop that's now a restaurant.
08:47 And I don't know if this is true,
08:48 but there's a rumor that Priscilla Presley
08:50 used to get her hair done at this beauty shop.
08:52 So Tennessee obviously has produced some musical icons.
09:02 Memphis is obviously known for Elvis Presley, BB King.
09:07 Beale Street is considered the home of the blues
09:11 and the birthplace of rock and roll.
09:12 And so on Beale Street, there's a lot of blues and jazz bars
09:16 and you can find music at any hour of the day on Beale Street.
09:20 And then in Nashville, I mean,
09:22 any country artist ever lives there.
09:26 There's obviously the Grand Ole Opry,
09:28 which to me is like peak country music.
09:32 It's so classic.
09:33 It's just stuck in tradition in the most beautiful way.
09:37 I think almost every country performer, artist
09:40 has performed at the Grand Ole Opry.
09:41 I actually did a music video there.
09:43 So I got to stand in the circle, which was so cool
09:46 because, you know, anyone from Johnny Cash to Loretta Lynn
09:49 to Dolly Parton to Martina McBride, they all performed here.
09:52 So you must stop at Grand Ole Opry.
09:54 All right, well, that is it.
09:55 Now you know how to be a real Tennessean
09:58 and I will see y'all later.
09:59 (upbeat music)
10:02 (upbeat music)
10:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]