The story begins, as most good food stories do, with a relationship gone sideways. Sometime in the 1930s, a woman whose name history has not preserved attempted to punish Thornton Prince, her unfaithful partner, by loading his Sunday morning fried chicken with what she hoped would be an overwhelming dose of cayenne pepper. The revenge failed. Prince loved it. He took the recipe to his brothers. They loved it too. Within a few years they had opened a restaurant, and Nashville hot chicken had been born.
This is the origin story as told by Prince’s family, particularly by Andre Prince Jeffries, the great-niece who took over the restaurant in 1980 and still operates it today. Nashville historian Rachel Louise Martin, author of the 2021 book “Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story,” spent years investigating the background and identified five women who had romantic relationships with Prince and who may have been the actual inventor of the dish. Their names were Caroline Bridges, Gertrude Claybrook, Mattie Crutcher, Mattie Hicks, and Jennie May Patton. All are long deceased. The family still refers to the woman simply as “Girlfriend X.”
Thornton Prince: The Man Behind the Dish
Thornton James Prince was born near Franklin, Tennessee, in December 1892. His maternal grandmother, Ann Currine, was an enslaved cook. He was, by multiple accounts, tall, handsome, and a committed ladies’ man. Sunday fried chicken was a tradition in Nashville’s African American communities, which made it a plausible vehicle for both celebration and revenge.
Prince and his brothers, all of whom held day jobs including post office work and farming, opened the Bar-B-Q Chicken Shack after perfecting the recipe. Because they worked full-time elsewhere, the restaurant operated on an unusual schedule: opening at the end of the workday, staying open until midnight on weeknights and until 4 a.m. on weekends. That late-night schedule became part of the establishment’s character and a tradition Jeffries has tried to maintain.
Segregation and the First Decades
The restaurant operated entirely within Nashville’s Black community for its first several decades, a function of both segregation and the neighborhood demographics of North Nashville where it was initially located. As it became more popular, including drawing Grand Ole Opry performers who heard about it after shows, a separate room was built in the back for white guests, who entered through the main dining room and the kitchen. The dish existed in a city that never fully knew it was there.
Thornton Prince died around 1960. The restaurant passed to his brother Will, then to Will’s wife Maude, then to Bruce, and in 1980 to Andre Prince Jeffries, who renamed it Prince’s Hot Chicken and moved the restaurant to its current East Nashville location on Ewing Drive in 1988. The Wikipedia record notes the business was established in 1945, though some accounts place the original shack’s opening in the mid-1930s. The discrepancy reflects the informal, undocumented origins of a family business that was never meant to become a cultural institution.
From Local Secret to National Phenomenon
For most of the twentieth century, hot chicken stayed almost entirely within Nashville’s Black community. Andre Prince Jeffries describes the expansion as gradual: the smell traveled, people followed it, and the clientele slowly diversified. But for decades the dish remained unknown to most Nashvillians outside the community.
The formal turning point came when former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell, a devoted fan who called his regular table at Prince’s his “second office,” founded the Music City Hot Chicken Festival in 2006, timed to Nashville’s bicentennial as an incorporated city. The James Beard Foundation gave Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish. In 2012, Hattie B’s Hot Chicken opened, offering a more accessible, fast-casual format with standardized heat levels. In January 2016, KFC launched “Nashville Hot Chicken” in U.S. locations after a successful pilot in Pittsburgh. At that point the dish crossed from regional specialty to national food trend.
By 2014, more than 12,000 people had shown up for the Fourth of July Music City Hot Chicken Festival. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge, Los Angeles, and eventually Melbourne, Seoul, and Calgary began advertising Nashville-style preparation. The dish had become not just a recipe but a category.
What Makes It Distinct
Nashville hot chicken is not simply spicy fried chicken. The technique involves a cayenne-heavy paste or sauce applied to the fried chicken after it comes out of the oil, or in some preparations, before a second fry. The paste combines lard and cayenne as its two core ingredients, with individual restaurants adding their own spice blends. The chicken is served on white bread to soak up the oil and spice, with dill pickle chips on top. The white bread and pickles are not optional garnishes; they are structural components of the dish.
What separates it from Buffalo wings or other regional spicy preparations is the paste application method and the specific presentation. The bread provides fat absorption and some cooling effect. The pickles cut through the heat. The heat level itself ranges from mild to preparations that require medical-grade warnings.
The James Beard Foundation citation, the KFC expansion, and the national restaurant chains that now specialize in the dish (Dave’s Hot Chicken, Hattie B’s, Howlin’ Ray’s) are all downstream from one undocumented morning in Nashville in the 1930s when an unnamed woman reached for her cayenne pepper with revenge on her mind and accidentally invented an American food tradition.
Sources
- Prince’s Hot Chicken, official history (princeshotchicken.com)
- Fox News Digital, “Meet the American who gave us Nashville hot chicken,” October 2023
- The Bitter Southerner, “How Hot Chicken Really Happened” (bittersoutherner.com)
- Wikipedia, “Hot chicken” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotchicken)
- Wikipedia, “Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince%27sHotChickenShack)
- Mashed, “The Surprising Origin Story of Nashville Hot Chicken,” July 2021
- Under the Wing-Fluence, “The History of Nashville Hot Chicken,” January 2024 (wingaddicts.com)
- Rachel Louise Martin, “Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story,” 2021 (Vanderbilt University Press)