Nashvillian of the Year: André Prince Jeffries

Of all the things that have made Nashville a part of the national zeitgeist — country music, health care, party tractors — the one that many locals are most proud of is Nashville hot chicken. Noted piquant-poultryphile and former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell is an adamant cheerleader of the specialty cuisine.

“Nashville hot chicken is our only indigenous food,” says Purcell, who founded the Music City Hot Chicken Festival more than 15 years ago. “And it’s the only product from Nashville that has ‘Nashville’ in its name. From New York to L.A., Cambodia, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, this chicken has spanned the world, and it’s always referred to as ‘Nashville hot chicken.’ ”

When asked who is primarily responsible for the phenomenon, Purcell answers quickly.

“André Prince Jeffries has been an incredible representative of Nashville and hot chicken. She is genuine and knows who she is. I say that André is the NFT of hot chicken — she cannot be copied, and there are no substitutes or subdivisions for her.”

That’s why the Scene is naming André Prince Jeffries our 2022 Nashvillian of the Year.

At age 76, Ms. André — as she is widely known — doesn’t get around as quickly as she once did. She uses two canes thanks to a pair of arthritic kneecaps, but her eyes still sparkle as she shares a lifetime of stories with her easy laugh. She still shows up at the largest location of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack at 5814 Nolensville Pike almost every night that it’s open, but she doesn’t stick around until 4 in the morning like she used to at Prince’s previous homes — first on Clarksville Highway, then on Ewing Drive. That’s because the restaurant closes at 10 p.m. now, although she hopes to expand the hours in 2023.

“Have mercy!” she recalls. “Everything went down after midnight on Ewing and Clarksville Highway. Things I didn’t even know were happening. I was clueless to things going on around that chicken shack!”

Hot chicken’s origin story is oft-told, but it’s always entertaining to hear Ms. André recount it.

“Thornton Prince was my great-uncle, and he was a real wanted man,” she says. “He married five times. Who has enough energy to do that? He was a real Casanova, jolly like Santa Claus and a real people person.”

Every true hot chicken fan knows the legendary story — that a lady friend of Thornton’s was fed up with his catting around and sought to punish him by blanketing his breakfast fried chicken with hot pepper. So much hot pepper that it was as dark red as the seventh circle of hell with a temperature level to match. But as the story goes, Thornton actually enjoyed the dish and asked her to make it again.

“He loved his punishment and shared it with his friends,” says Ms. André. Those friends suggested Thornton open a restaurant, which he did with his BBQ Chicken Shack in 1945 on the corner of 28th and Jefferson.

“I give the credit to a woman,” says Jeffries. “We don’t know who she was or who all the wives were, but she came up with what I call ‘revenge chicken.’ Thornton’s been dead 65 years, but this all came from a scorned woman and the sacrifice of a little chicken.”

Ms. André was well into adulthood before she got into the hot chicken biz.

“Thornton’s brother Will Prince took over the chicken shack after Thornton died, and his wife Maude was the bookkeeper,” she says. “His cousin Bolton Polk ran the shack when it moved to Clarksville Highway, and that’s where I took over.

“Bolton started his own place, Columbo’s at the foot of the Shelby Street Bridge, and Maude didn’t want to run the restaurant by herself,” she continues. “So she asked my mother if she knew anyone who could do it. My mother was a retired schoolteacher and my father was a postal superintendent, so neither of them wanted it. My brother and sister were both teachers and wanted no part of it. I was the only divorced member of the family and was working at the tax assessor’s office.”

“My mother was on her deathbed with breast cancer when Maude came to ask her who could do it,” Ms. André says. “I think they just didn’t want me and my two daughters on welfare. I was someone who never cooked at home and was never asked to help out in the kitchen. I had only been inside the restaurant a few times at the holidays, so taking over was a shocker and a mind-adjuster. It was definitely a hands-on learning experience.”

Ms. André took the keys in August 1980, and the first thing she did was change the name of the restaurant. “It wasn’t a BBQ chicken shack,” she says. “It was a hot chicken shack, and I wanted it to have the family name. My goal was to keep something in the family.”

Her customers welcomed her with open arms.

“The regulars were just glad the place was open again,” Ms. André recalls with a chuckle. “I didn’t even advertise, and I still don’t. They just saw the lights were on, and they stopped in. I made more raw chicken and sold it than you can imagine, but very few people complained or sent it back.”

She operated Prince’s on Clarksville Highway and later on Ewing for years, but the hot chicken boom was yet to occur. It was mainly just Ms. André and her neighborhood regulars who protected her.

“We didn’t even open until 6 because everybody was working supplemental jobs,” says Ms. André, who’s full of stories about the early days. “We closed at midnight during the week and 4 in the morning on weekends. It was a crazy time, have mercy! One time, a policeman left his car running on Clarksville Highway, and when he came out with his greasy bag of chicken, his car was gone. I don’t think whoever took it knew how to drive because he ended up running it through a fence around Metro Center.”

A major tipping point for Nashville hot chicken’s broader acceptance can be traced back to Mayor Purcell. “He’s a beautiful person!” says Ms. André. “He’s always been a customer. He used to have his meetings at the Chicken Shack, and he still comes in all the time. His order is always ‘one leg, as hot as you can make it.’ ”

“André and I have been friends and co-conspirators for years,” Purcell says. “I was introduced to hot chicken at Columbo’s until the building was ‘eminent domained’ to build the arena. That created a huge void in my life, so I went to Prince’s, even though it wasn’t nearly as close by. I quickly realized that Prince’s was not just the first, but also the best hot chicken in the world.”

Purcell became a proud public advocate for the business.

“When I was in the legislature during the ’80s, I made sure that Prince’s was always in my district,” he says. “There are definitely some advantages to being majority leader. Then on my last day in the House, I put forth legislation declaring Prince’s to be the best restaurant in Tennessee.”

As he neared the end of his second term as Nashville’s mayor in 2006, Purcell came up with another way to honor Prince’s and Nashville hot chicken writ large.

“In 2006, we were celebrating Nashville’s bicentennial of incorporation as a city. I decided to take a year and focus on some aspect of the city each month with a festival. As the year neared an end, we wanted one final celebration, so of course I came up with the idea of a hot chicken festival. As mayor, you become accustomed to your staff telling you ‘what a great idea’ at meetings. It was only later that I found out that my staffers had left the meeting saying to each other that it was the stupidest idea I’d ever come up with.

“At that point hot chicken wasn’t understood by the whole city, and many people had never had it,” Purcell continues. “It turned out to be an enormous success, and we’ve seen every year that the crowd that gathers in East Park on July 4 represents the whole city and most of the hot chicken restaurants. It’s a uniter.”

When he hears people complain about the Nashville heat in early July, Purcell responds, “July 4 is the ideal day! It’s the hottest day and the hottest chicken. We celebrate that one additional freedom to eat Nashville hot chicken together.”

Once Prince’s popped up on the national culinary radar, Ms. André found herself inundated with opportunities to expand her operations.

“I had so many offers to sell out,” she remembers. “But my feet are on the ground, and I just wanted my one little chicken shack. I had a fellow from Saudi Arabia visit four times, and he wanted me to open up in Dubai. He even flew me over there on that Emirates plane, and there I was above the clouds, like a United Nations of chicken!”

Ms. André eventually acceded to an idea from longtime family friend Mario Hambrick to open a food truck and a second Prince’s location in a converted sports bar in South Nashville. This was an extremely fortuitous decision — not long after opening, a car smashed into the strip mall that housed Prince’s on Ewing. The December 2018 accident started a fire, and water damage caused by the fire department’s efforts to stop the blaze caused extensive damage, forcing Ms. André to close down her flagship location for good. “I don’t know where I’d be if Mario hadn’t convinced me to open that second restaurant,” she says.

Ms. André also struck up a partnership with Yee-Haw Brewing Co. to open an outpost at their brewery in Greenville, S.C. “We send a truck down there every week to get them supplies and to check on them,” she says. “If you don’t keep an eye on people, they start doing their own thing their own way. Yee-Haw has been very good to me.”

Still, it hasn’t been easy for Ms. André.

“Mom-and-pop places are disappearing so fast due to big business,” she says. “I see all these new hot chicken restaurants, and I’m not jealous of them. But when I see them open, I know they had to have been to Prince’s first! Like those guys at Howlin’ Ray’s [a very successful hot chicken restaurant in Los Angeles] — they came here and they saw dollar signs. We didn’t, have mercy! We didn’t have access to loans. We never took a loan until the pandemic, and all our money went back into the restaurant. Those people knew bankers. I’m not mad at ’em.”

Ms. André knows that issues of access to capital extend beyond her humble chicken shack. “People of color are the most exploited people on the face of the earth,” she says. “We create things but don’t get the credit. Other people get rich, but it doesn’t trickle down with a profit to the creators. I guess that’s what you call ‘authentic.’ That’s what’s happening to the hot chicken business. The takers get the credit because they can get the loans. The process you go through to run a hot chicken restaurant is so strenuous that it makes it harder on the creators, especially when you’ve got people lurking over you.”

Jeffries measures success on her own terms.

“I didn’t call the restaurant André’s,” she points out. “It’s the family name. Our people come from Franklin, and we still live there on the property where our forefathers were slaves. I just want the people whose shoulders we stood on to be recognized. My goal was to have one place that is good quality and keep it in the family.”

Prince’s has definitely received adulation through the years, even while Ms. André worked so hard to pay the bills. It was designated as one of America’s Classics by the James Beard Foundation in 2013, and just this year Jeffries was presented with the 2022 Culinary Icon Award at the National Fried Chicken Festival in New Orleans. (“They flew me down on Southwest, and I got recognized on the plane,” she shares proudly.)

The Nashville Entrepreneur Center inducted Jeffries into their Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame at a ceremony in October, and she was beside herself thinking about it. “There I was on the stage at the Schermerhon thinking, ‘Imagine where this little chicken has taken me!’ My mother must have known something.”

“When I was 12 or 13 years old, my mother called me into the kitchen and said, ‘Sister, I’m gonna teach you how to cut up a chicken,’ ” says Ms. André. “She taught me how to cut it into eight pieces, and then I did it. Then she told me I could go back outside. She never called me back into the kitchen to do anything ever again. It must have been divine inspiration for someone who had never been asked to cook a meal to be in the restaurant business. I am most indebted to my customers who have passed it on through the generations.”

She’s preparing to open the next Prince’s at the Nashville International Airport — though, she notes quizzically, “Other hot chicken restaurants got there first. You’d have thought the originators would have got there first.” She’s also working on an upcoming project on Jefferson Street a couple blocks from where the first Prince’s opened decades ago. “It’s as close as we could get to where we first started. I’ve been working on it for 20 years, but the devil’s been busy!”

Ms. André has already transferred much of the business responsibility to her two daughters, who handle the management and bookkeeping of the restaurants.

“Uncle Sam said I’ve retired, so I can only make a certain amount of money,” she explains. “I’ve got to pass it on to the younger generation, but this little chicken shack has taken me places I never would have thought I’d been. It’s way beyond my imagination!”

You can bet that whenever Ms. André’s daughters fully take over the business at Prince’s, they’ll remember whose shoulders they have stood on. And with this recognition of André Prince Jeffries as the 2022 Nashvillian of the Year, so do we.