Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon was a member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville for over 50 years. She was best known through her stage persona, Minnie Pearl. We talk with Belmont University's Don Cusic, co-author of the new biography Howdy! The Minnie Pearl Story, published in 2026 by the University of Tennessee Press.

We visit a kitchen in Scott County, Virginia, where late summer means the making of the garden-clearing relish known as chow-chow.

Dr. Kirk Pomper at Kentucky State University discusses the cultivation and uses of the pawpaw, the largest edible fruit native to North America.

In the second part of our interview, Retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Miles Burdine of Kingsport, Tennessee, continues his story about living with PTSD.

Retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Miles Burdine, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Kingsport Chamber of Commerce, shares his story of dealing with PTSD that resulted from his three deployments with the Marines in the Middle East.

Our topic is the recent outbreak of Cyclosporiasis in the United States, and our guest is Dr. William Schaffner, Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Health Policy and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

We learn about the valuable work of a new member of the police force in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Kingsport, Tennessee, lays claim to a recipe for Long Island Iced Tea that originated in the 1920s. We discover how city leaders are using that history to promote tourism.

We remember one of the leading figures in the field of Southern barbecue. Larry Proffitt, second-generation owner of Ridgewood Barbecue in Bluff City, Tennessee, died on June 20, 2026. The Ridgewood has been in the same location and in the same family since 1948.

John U. Bacon's book The Gales of November is a New York Times non-fiction best-seller. In this second part of our interview, Bacon speculates about the causes of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in the waters of Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.