Stan Woodward

Meet Jimmy Oglers, owner of Oglers store and creator of his award winning turtle stew. Jimmy brings us along as he celebrates National Turtle Day in Sutherland, Va., and prepares for the traditional communal cooking of the prize winning turtle stew at his cabin in the woods.

What is Chicken bog? Folks in surrounding states are likely to give you a blank stare if you mention it. Chicken bog is a delicious chicken, rice and sausage dish, and it’s very much a South Carolina thing. Specifically, chicken bog is most popular in Horry County, the home of Myrtle Beach and Conway and west to Florence. It’s closely related to chicken pilau (or pilaf or perlo), except that it’s … well, boggier.

The Puddin’ Pot is the traditional food served on the first Monday at the Indian Field Camp Meeting each September. It is made in a large iron kettle. Different parts of the pig’s head are added into the puddin’ pot along with other ingredients, including onions and seasoning. The Puddin’ Pot is served with rice “cafeteria style” and is doled out on the plates of local politicians, who show their “vote-worthiness” by eating large helpings. Puddin’ Pot is made during the hog-killing season, mostly by women to serve workers at noon. All that remains in the puddin’ pot is cooked down and removed and then ground into hash or used to make liver puddin’. Those who enjoy puddin’ pot recognize its roots as a subsistence food consumed during the hard times that historically marked the small farmer’s lot in South Carolina.

Stan Woodward and Jay Williams (Chief Curator, McKissick Museum) are on the way to a shoot in Brunswick, Georgia, to be used in the Southern Stews documentary when they come upon a barbecue shack back off the road that has a hooded area in front for shade that is loaded with taxidermied as well as plastic animals and a large white stuffed dog. As they pull in and Stan begins to shoot, the owner appears and begins waving and calling him to come eat "the best barbecue and brunswick stew in Georgia." The spontaneous handheld camera follows this leg-pulling and joke-cracking owner to the ordering window where a hilarious exchange about brunswick stew ensues and soon extends itself to a sampling as well as a personal tour into the owners Elvis relic room, ending with an introduction to her caged pet hog!

Chicken bog is a delicious chicken, rice and sausage dish, and it’s very much a South Carolina thing. If you mention it, folks in surrounding states are likely to give you a blank stare. It’s closely related to chicken pilau (or pilaf or perlo), except that it’s … well, boggier. It’s moister than chicken perlo, which is more common in Georgetown County, just to the south of Horry County. The name “bog” probably comes from the wetness of the dish, although some speculate that it may come from the bogginess of the area where it is popular.

Arnold played in J. Floyd & the Shamrocks (who frequently featured a young James Brown on piano) while still in high school, and officially began his professional career when he joined Charles Miller’s band in the early '60s. He moved to Chicago around 1965 and began gigging with saxophonist A.C. Reed before hooking up with Muddy Waters and his band in 1966. The Waters stint led to a fair amount of studio work, and Arnold played bass on several 1960s blues albums, including Otis Spann’s The Blues Is Where It’s At and John Lee Hooker’s Live at Cafe Au Go Go.

Southpaw bassist and South Carolina native Mac Arnold was only ten years old when he and his brother built a guitar out of a gas can, a couple strips of wood, a handful of nails, and some screen wire. Things just got better from there.

This is a remarkable "inside" glimpse into Southern folk culture and the roots of Southern "raconteurship" at it’s most authentic and best. The short work is edited from the archival footage gathered while the filmmaker was producing the CINE Award-winning, Carolina Hash: A Taste of South Carolina.

Carolina Hash starts with establishing as fact the myth that hash-popularity ends at the South Carolina borders. We learn that right across the state line in North Carolina, barbecue customers and restauranteurs "....don’t even know what hash is." The Brunswick stew states of North Carolina and Georgia which border South Carolina for the most part don’t know about it. But the tradition runs deep in all of South Carolina, and most native South Carolinians not only know about it - they can tell you where to go "....to get the best hash in South Carolina!" and the name of the hash-master.

From the pioneer days of the Kentucky frontier comes a stew prepared by farmers and hunters. They called it Burgoo. No one knows where the name comes from, but the folks in Western Kentucky around Owensboro declare that the authentic and historical burgoo has to be made with mutton, or mature sheep. Folks in central Kentucky prefer beef or wild game. But one thing becomes very clear – the passion for whatever is called Burgoo, cooked in huge black iron cauldrons, is reflected in the titles given to the burgoo masters- they are called “Burgoo Kings”! And their reputations last beyond their years, as loyal stew masters rigorously maintain recipes and cooking traditions generation to generation. And along with making Burgoo comes a lot of leg-pulling, tall tales, and fellowship around the pot.

Shady Grove is the largest of the four camp grounds in Dorchester County, S.C. It was founded by formerly enslaved people in 1870 but grew out of antebellum camp meetings, where all people would travel great distances to attend religious gatherings held at campgrounds and led by "circuit" preachers. For African-Americans, this was one of the few places where they could meet and enjoy some sense of freedom.

Indian Field Camp Ground of Dorchester County, S.C., is in an area where Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury preached in 1801 and 1803. Camp meetings were held nearby as early as 1810. The present ten-acre site for an annual camp ground dates from 1838 and its buildings from a decade later. In the center sits an open-air tabernacle for the revival services. Ninety-nine wooden “tents” circle the tabernacle. These cabins generally have an upper story for sleeping and a downstairs for food preparation and eating and porches for socializing. A tent gets handed down from generation to generation in member white families. The Indian Tent camp meetings are scheduled for the first week in October.

There are two little downtown stores that have been the cornerstone of Ehrhardt business for nearly a hundred years, the Ehrhardt 5 and 10, and Ehrhardt Grocery, once formerly called the L.M. Hiers and sons, both now owned and operated by Donald Hiers, the son of Claude Hiers, and the grandson of L. M. Hiers. He is quiet, always a smile on his face, a grin in his demeanor, and unobtrusive. "But he can be talkative," as one Ehrhardt native describes him. Hiers (Donald) was born and raised in Ehrhardt, but probably raised more in the 5 and 10 (five and dime) and the grocery store, than on the playgrounds and sand lots of Ehrhardt. Hiers is also a 1954 graduate of Ehrhardt High School and the Citadel in 1959.

Cypress Methodist Camp Ground was established as early as 1794, when Bishop Asbury preached here. Serving crowds too large for church buildings or homes, the camp ground responded to both religious and social needs. A vestige of the Great Awakening in American religious life at the start of the nineteenth century, it has had uninterrupted use as a site for revivalism for almost 200 years. It is one of only a few camp grounds in South Carolina to still host annual week-long camp meetings.

For many families at Cattle Creek Campground, the annual camp meeting signifies a time of fellowship when families can spend a week away from the hectic pace of modern life. Children learn that they can live without air conditioning and television. During the day, they engage in water fights or make numerous visits to the "store," where cold pineapple sherbet is sold. Grownups sit in lawn chairs in the front or back of their "tent" and talk about the latest news, how the children are growing up and what has happened since the last camp meeting. And there is plenty of food. Everyone prepares an abundant supply of their best recipes. Nightly preaching is scheduled at the tabernacle, a large, open structure with a tin roof, wooden benches and a gravel floor. Many a young child has kicked the gravel there to watch the dust fly and then been admonished by a watchful mom or dad, in some cases both.

Begun by traveling Methodist preachers in 1786, camp meeting services have been held annually ever since at the Cattle Creek Campground. The entire campground was rebuilt after burning during a forest fire in the late 1800s. Many of the standing tents are well over a century old. Of course, anyone who has seen the campground realizes that these "tents," as they are called, are wooden buildings with either sawdust or hay on the ground. but the addition of electricity, and rudimentary plumbing has made them somewhat more comfortable than they were 200 years ago.

The Morris Chronicle started out as a film to document a 93-year-old barbecue master--Morris Peeples--as he cooks a hog in the old fashioned way, the way that farmers in the Springfield community in South Carolina have long cooked in this Edisto River region in Barnwell County. This film opens with Morris setting aside a hog for a BBQ requested by an attorney in Barnwell, his attorney. As we move linearly through the cooking of the barbecue, we learn that Morris is supervisor and honorary member of a hunt club that in what Morris calls "the Big House" about 300 yards from his sharecropper house, where he lives with his 52 year old wife, Faye.

Every year Brunswick, Georgia, holds a festival called Stewbilee to celebrate their invention of Brunswick stew--a claim also made by Brunswick County, Virginia. Stew-masters from far and wide in Georgia gather--and often stew-masters from Virginia too whenever a "Stew War" competition and stew cook-off occurs--gather and compete for awards for best stew under a strict "Cook Off Rules." A panel of judges is invited to sample-taste the stews and vote for the ones they prefer. After learning that folklorist Dr. John Burrison was invited to be a judge at the festival, Stan asked Burrison, who had served as advisor on a number of his films, to join him as he documented the festival.

The Governor, two Georgia State Senators, a “man-on-the-street” in Atlanta, and folklorist, John Burrison speak in one voice authenticating Brunswick stew as a most beloved folk heritage stew of Georgia. The filmmaker reaches back into The Woodward Studio Folklife Archives in making this in-depth story of the origins of Brunswick stew in Georgia, ending up with freshly-shot footage of the Stewbilee in Brunswick, GA, where we hear from a member of the Georgia Sea Island Singers about her ancestors from the days of slavery who cooked Brunswick stews. This is truly a “roots” story about the origins and celebrations around this folk heritage stew of Georgia.

Filmmaker Stan Woodward is joined by South Carolina folklorist Saddler Taylor in this “road film” that travels a spontaneous investigating-and-recording-as-you-go journey through the farm roads and by-ways of four rural South Carolina counties. There, they find home cooking and barbecue prepared by folk-heritage culinary food artisans using ancestral recipes and methods that have been passed on to them by mothers cooking over wood-stoves and fathers cooking in BBQ pits dug in the ground.

This spontaneously-shot surprising documentary looks across the South to see the connections between the folk heritage traditions of communal cooking in gigantic black iron pots stirred with wooden paddles maintained into the 21st century by culinary folk artisans called “stewmasters” with their stew crews. With wit and humor, Southern Stews carries us from Kentucky and Virginia into Georgia and South Carolina to discover ancestral stews that honor an agrarian past and contain the blended history of our European, African, Native American, and frontier settler roots in one-pot meals.

The original feature length version - BRUNSWICK STEW : A Southern Americana Folk Heritage Tradition - was produced for the people of Brunswick County, Virginia, who honor this tradition and maintain it through a system of stewmasters and stew crews who cook for their constituent community. This documentary premiered at the Virginia State Fair on "Brunswick Stew Day" in 1998. It was a day devoted to the stewmasters and stew crews from Brunswick County which lays claim to being "The Original Home of Brunswick Stew". The stewmasters and crews each cooked their unique recipes for their stew which fair attendees sampled. In the afternoon the stewmasters were paraded thriugh the fairgrounds and taken to an auditorium where friends, relatives, invitees, and folks from all over with Brunswick County roots attended the "World Premier" of this documentary. Each stewmaster received special recognition with a framed citation signed by the Governor noting these men as "Virginia Treasures".

A Colorful documentary about Jimmy Olger, proprietor of Olger's Store and Museum in Sutherland, Va., 30-odd miles south of Richmond. A cook of regional foods who uses a traditional black kettle and open-pot style of cooking, Jimmy Olger is locally known as "The King of Brunswick Stew." His other specialties include beef stew and turtle soup. The film includes a look around the inside of his amazing store/museum.

With all the native wit, rib tickling humor and ability to see what makes the South the South found in the literary classics of Southern writers like Mark Twain, documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward helps us discover the common thread that connects the South’s people across all social, economic, political and racial boundaries – Grits! “Grits is us” - or, if we are to be grammatically correct, “Grits are us” - could easily be the title of this uproariously funny and at the same time insightful and poignant personal documentary.

A spherical opening in a steel girder of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge provides a bird's eye view of the Mississppi River below. A stationary camera perched over the hole records ambient sounds and the symmetrical rhythms of the waves and passing vessels.

Members of a branch of the Holiness churches who base their religious beliefs and practices on Bible verses, especially Mark 16:18. The members handle serpents, hold fire to their bodies, speak in tongues, lay hands on the sick and cast out devils.