Exploding, star-glazed ‘Music City’ is home to three tasty U.S. inventions
Nashville gets a “C” grade for its overall number of inventions. That’s a “C” as in the combination candy bar, chicken (hot) and cotton candy.
BY REID CREAGER
A compelling cross-section of Southern glitz, wealth, celebrity, history and small-town values framed in sprawling, split-rail-fenced, treed spaces, exploding Nashville boasts the substance/success combination that bigger-name U.S. megacities lost in the crowds.
The “Music City” metro area population grew at least 2 percent a year for 30 straight years beginning in 1991—and was still close to that rate in 2021 and 2022. One report ranked Nashville No. 1 in America for economic growth in 2021.
You might know that Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake, Tim McGraw and many others either live in Nashville or have strong business ties there. But you might not know that the city is home to three delicious inventions.
Yes, the first Cracker Barrel restaurant/country store opened about a half-century ago in the Nashville suburb of Lebanon. And Maxwell House Coffee got its name from coffee that was featured at the iconic Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville.
We just happen to think you would rather read about the first combination candy bar, hot chicken and cotton candy.
Cluster’s first stand
When the Goo Goo Dolls perform at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater on August 27, maybe they will mention Nashville being the original home of the Goo Goo Cluster. And maybe the audience shouldn’t hold its breath.
Anyway: The Goo Goo Cluster is known as America’s first “combination” candy bar, created by Howell Campbell in 1912. It was made in a copper kettle at the Standard Candy Co., at historic Clark Street and First Avenue North in downtown Nashville.
No boring slab of rectangular chocolate here. The Goo Goo Cluster is filled with caramel, marshmallow nougat and fresh roasted peanuts, all drenched in chocolate.
The Goo Goo Chocolate Co.’s downtown Nashville storefront recently underwent a $2 million face lift that Dolly Parton would envy. (The factory, with a capacity to make 20,000 bars in an hour, is near the airport.)
Customers are still served a nostalgic vibe now stuffed with 21st-century innovation that includes a wall of touchscreens, where customers can design their own Goo Goo Clusters “with ingredients from the whimsical—Fruity Pebbles and potato chips, for example—to the premium,” according to Southern Kitichen.
Green Olive Media, an international branding and communications company headquartered in Atlanta, notes that the cluster has exploded beyond that single storefront. It’s now available in Southern supermarkets and drugstore chains. Internet sales are increasingly rich.
Goo Goo Cluster has been a registered trademark of Standard Candy Co. since 2016 despite being around for more than 100 years—another nod to the spiraling importance of intellectual property.
He was hot; this is hotter
Timothy Davis, author of “The Hot Chicken Cookbook,” says the secret to hot chicken is basically “a ton of cayenne.” And if you are anywhere near Nashville, you’d better call it Nashville hot chicken.
The dish originated with a Depression-era womanizer who was punished for his happy specialty. Thornton Prince was “tall, handsome, and good-looking,” his great niece, André Prince Jeffries, was quoted as saying.
The story goes that the flesh Prince stepped out on his woman one night. The following morning for breakfast, she served him fried chicken drowning in hot pepper.
But Prince apparently liked a lot of things that were hot. Eventually, he opened a chicken shack.
Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, around for about 70 years now, draws tourists from around the world. It popped up on the menu at chain restaurants KFC and O’Charley’s. Now there are Nashville hot chicken restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Bobby Meadows told NPR he has been happily addicted to the stuff for more than 50 years. He drives about a half-hour from Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, for his fix.
“It’s worse than dope,” he said. “It’s got a craving worse than anything. And when you get to thinking about it and your mouth gets to water, you might as well turn your truck around and go get you some, ’cause it ain’t going to get no better.”
Sticky history
Cotton candy’s status as an iconic Nashville invention is kinda fuzzy. Many newcomers to the city—and they are good and plenty—don’t seem to know about it.
But long-timers can tell you right away that cotton candy (originally called “fairy floss”) was invented by a Nashville dentist, of all people. An inventor who held several patents, William James Morrison partnered with candymaker John C. Wharton on an electric candy machine in 1897.
Cotton candy is made by heating and liquefying sugar, and spinning it centrifugally through tiny holes. This causes it to rapidly cool and re-solidify into fine strands.
Some claim that versions of spun sugar originated in Italy as early as the 1400s. But Morrison and Wharton are largely credited with the invention, even though internet details about the confectionary’s history are sometimes erroneous.
National Geographic, among others, reports that Morrison and Wharton designed and patented their machine in 1897. This is false. Documents show they filed their patent application on Dec. 23, 1897, and were granted a patent on Jan. 31, 1899.
That patent—U.S. Patent No. 618,428A—says: “Our invention relates to improvements in candy making, or, as commonly called, candy-machines, in which a revoluble or rotating pan or vessel containing candy or melted sugar causes the said candy or melted sugar to form into masses of thread-like or silk-like filaments by the centrifugal force due to the rotation of the vessel.”
The Nashville Tennessean and other reports say Morrison and Wharton sold the patent to The Electric Candy Machine Co., also in Nashville—which “bought the patent prior to the World’s Fair in 1904 and marketed the invention to the rest of the world.” A poster made by the company, found online, confirms this success.
More than 65,000 boxes were sold at 25 cents apiece—a tasty haul at the turn of the last century.