The story starts with revenge that failed spectacularly.
Thornton Prince III was, by his family’s own account and historical records, a womanizer. He was born near Franklin, Tennessee, in December 1892, and by the time he reached adulthood in Nashville he had earned a reputation for staying out late and having relationships he did not fully disclose to the women in his life. Historian Rachel Louise Martin, who wrote Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story in 2021, identified at least five women linked to Prince romantically, including one she believes was the actual inventor of the dish that made him famous.
The Prince family tells it this way: after one of his habitual late nights, his primary girlfriend decided to teach him a lesson. She fried him his beloved breakfast chicken and loaded it with cayenne and whatever heat she had in the pantry. The intention was punishment. The outcome was that Thornton Prince loved it, asked how she made it, and began developing the recipe himself.
From Home Kitchen to Restaurant
Prince perfected the recipe in the 1930s and began selling the chicken to neighbors and friends from his home. He was a pig farmer by day. The restaurant came later. He and at least two of his brothers eventually opened the BBQ Chicken Shack on the corner of Jefferson Street and 28th Avenue in North Nashville, in the heart of a Black community north of downtown. The exact opening date varies by source, with some records suggesting as early as the mid-1930s and the James Beard Foundation citing 1945 in their American Classic designation.
The operation was never open during conventional hours. The Prince brothers all worked other jobs during the day. The restaurant opened at the end of the work day and stayed open until midnight, and until 4 a.m. on weekends. It served the late-night crowd in a neighborhood that had its own contained economy and social life under segregation.
During the era of the Grand Ole Opry’s rise, Prince’s developed an odd distinction: white Opry stars discovered the restaurant and wanted to eat there. Because of segregation, a separate room was built in the back of the restaurant for white guests, who entered by walking through the main dining room and the kitchen. Nashville’s most famous Black food business became, in a limited way, integrated through the back door.
Displacement, Survival, and Inheritance
Urban renewal projects disrupted the restaurant multiple times. Nashville’s Hell’s Half Acre urban renewal project forced the Prince family to relocate. They moved again when the new location proved too far from their customer base. They eventually settled in a block building at 17th and Charlotte before landing permanently in an East Nashville strip mall on Ewing Drive in 1988.
Thornton Prince died around 1960. His brother Will took over, then Will’s wife Maude ran the business, and in 1980 Maude decided that Thornton’s great-niece, Andre Prince Jeffries, should take the restaurant. Jeffries was then in her thirties. She renamed it Prince’s Hot Chicken, dropping the BBQ designation, to honor her great-uncle directly. She has run it ever since.
In 2013, the James Beard Foundation named Prince’s Hot Chicken an American Classic. By then, Jeffries had watched the dish she grew up eating move from a neighborhood institution to a national obsession. In December 2018, a car crash and subsequent fire damaged the Ewing Drive location and eventually led to its permanent closure. Prince’s continued operating from other locations.
The woman who invented the dish remains unnamed. Historian Martin believes she can narrow down the likely candidates to a few women from Prince’s documented past. None of them are remembered outside of academic research.
Sources
- Prince’s Hot Chicken, “Our History,” https://www.princeshotchicken.com/about
- Wikipedia, “Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince’sHotChicken_Shack
- Fox News, “Meet the American who gave us Nashville hot chicken,” https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/meet-american-gave-nashville-hot-chicken-thornton-prince-man-many-passions
- Wingaddicts, “The History of Nashville Hot Chicken,” https://www.wingaddicts.com/blog/nashvillehot
- Mashed, “The Surprising Origin Story Of Nashville Hot Chicken,” https://www.mashed.com/468364/the-surprising-origin-story-of-nashville-hot-chicken/
- The Bitter Southerner, “How Hot Chicken Really Happened,” https://bittersoutherner.com/how-hot-chicken-really-happened