Three years ago this week, WFAE put out the first episode of my podcast, SouthBound. The first guest was Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, a civil-rights hero who integrated Clemson and almost beat Jesse Helms. We met at the station’s little studio uptown, which was walking distance from Harvey’s house.
He sat down and looked over at me and said: “So what have you gotten yourself into?”
I wasn’t sure. At all.
I’ve never had a career plan, except to do some kind of journalism and keep drawing paychecks. I definitely did not plan to make a living as a podcast host. Those of you who’ve heard me know that I have this rough scratchy voice, the result of surgery from throat cancer almost 30 years ago. It is not a voice for radio, and especially not the fleece blanket of a voice you often hear on NPR.
But I got lucky. A guy named Joe O’Connor came to Charlotte in 2015 to run WFAE. When he got to town, he asked for the names of some journalists he should get to know. Somebody mentioned me. So off and on, over the next couple of years, we’d have coffee or lunch. And at some point I mentioned that I had this idea about doing a podcast.
Every time I do a long magazine story, I do dozens of interviews — sometimes hours of conversations with the same person. You can’t put all that in a story, so I always have to pull the little strands of gold that fit best into whatever I’m writing. Sometimes I end up using almost nothing from what was an amazing conversation. I often wish we could just publish the transcript somewhere.
A good talk show has that feel to it. At its best it’s two people just talking — talking with a purpose, maybe, but with room to meander a bit and tell a story or two. And it can work even better in podcast form, where the show doesn’t have to be a certain length.
Beyond that, my idea was simple: talk to interesting Southerners and find out how the South influences who they are and what they do.
Joe talked it over with Ju-Don Marshall, who runs the WFAE newsroom, and Greg Collard, the main news editor. They agreed to let me give it a try.
Three years and 77 episodes later, here we are.
I’ve talked to Dale Earnhardt Jr. about being a father and to Vivian Howard about getting her kids out of the TV glare. I told fashion icon Andre Leon Talley that his robe reminded me of Ric Flair. (He didn’t know Flair but had heard of Andre the Giant.) These past few months, I’ve focused on talking to black Southerners about this year of racial reckoning — everyone from comedian Roy Wood Jr. to author Eddie Glaude to astronaut Charles Bolden.
And with the help of the incredible staff at WFAE — especially Joni Deutsch, our podcast guru — we’ve kept going through the pandemic. Once every couple of weeks I put on my headphones and start up Zoom and spend an hour with a fascinating human being. It’s a privilege to get to do this for a living.
It’s a lot to ask of a listener, to sit down for 30 or 40 minutes (sometimes more) to pay attention to a couple of people talking. It runs counter to the jump-cut way we live most of our lives now. I think that’s good. We need more conversations, more voices, more smart people taking the time to finish a thought. I hope one or two of our conversations on SouthBound have meant something to you. They’ve all meant a lot to me.
— TT