Debbie Baxter: It all boils down to being nice to people and having a good time and that's what they come there for and you know, if you do that you've done a good job.
Lucas Hendrickson: Southern hospitality is real, y'all. And food is often the thread that ties that hospitality and the people who experience it together. That's certainly the case in the tiny town best known as the home of Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Since 1908, Miss Mary Bobo's boarding house has been the nexus of great food and lively conversation in that pastoral dot on the Middle Tennessee map. Generations of Lynchburg residents and whiskey enthusiasts alike have gathered around Miss Mary Bobo's tables, and Debbie Baxter carries on that tradition as the manager in the boarding house today. Debbie brings her own decades of experience to the role, having learned from Miss Mary herself, and knows the appeal of a great southern dining experience, which leads to great stories to tell Around the Barrel.
Welcome to the Season One finale of Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel's. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson. Believe it or not, there are still places in the U.S. that don't equate food with something you can drive up to a window and acquire. One of those places is Lynchburg, Tennessee, where there is nary an Arch, a Bell, a King, or a Colonel to be found. For 110 years, Miss Mary Bobo's boarding house, located in the heart of Lynchburg, has welcomed visitors from near and far to sit a while, experience a great meal, and get to know friends you just met, even if they live half a world away. Debbie Baxter is a Lynchburg native growing up around the Jack Daniel Distillery and the various businesses and venues affiliated with it. She proudly carries on Miss Mary Bobo's vision of treating everybody that walks through the door like family and making sure no one leaves her table hungry.
Debbie: Hello, my name is Debbie Baxter. And I'm the manager at Miss Mary Bobo's boarding house here in Lynchburg, Tennessee. I went to school here in Lynchburg and have lived here all of my life.
Lucas: Debbie Baxter, welcome to Around the Barrel.
Debbie: Glad to be here.
Lucas: So, Miss Mary Bobo's boarding house is a huge part of the legend and the tapestry that is Lynchburg and the distillery's history. Give us a little bit of the history of that place and your place within it.
Debbie: Okay, Miss Mary Bobo opened the boarding house in 1908. She and her family moved in there to this huge house and she had a small family and they had a lot of empty rooms. So she decided she - we didn't have a hotel or motel in town or any place for anyone to stay - so she decided to open it up as a boarding house because they were big back in the day, and when you got a room to stay would always get a meal to go with it, a good Southern meal where you sat down and passed the bowls around just like we do today, and she took in guests from all different walks of life. Lots of times it was people visiting the distillery, like people are here, traveling salesman or whatever and then sometimes Federal Revenue agents came down and stayed with her and it's been said that Jack came down himself and had dinner there every once in a while, of course it's a little bit far back for me. So I don't know that for sure.
Lucas: What was Miss Mary Bobo like? What was her connection to the distillery, to the Jack Daniel's family, to the Motlows? And where did she come into Lynchburg to set up the boarding house?
Debbie: Miss Mary Bobo was a family lady, she was married to Mr. Jack Bobo and he was a businessman in town. She was actually the sister of Miss Ophelia Motlow who was Mr. Lem Motlow's wife. So the Motlow brothers and the one daughter, they were her niece's nephews. And in fact, she talked to Miss Ophelia every day on the phone. They went over "Days of Our Lives," every day after they had watched it. So they settled here, she was from this area anyway, but there was a doctor that had owned the house, Miss Mary Bobo's boarding house, or the house back then, and he had moved to Nashville to retire, and so she and her husband moved in, and it was just she and her husband, her son and her daughter. Mr. Charles Bobo and Miss Crutcher or now, then she was Louise Bobo, but now Miss Crutcher, but they moved into that big old house and just had a lot of empty rooms and she wanted to help out so she had this idea of turning the house into a boarding house because there's no place to stay in Lynchburg. We didn't have a hotel back then or or bed and breakfast or anything like that, so people would come in to stay.
Lucas: Okay, and she ran the boarding house until?
Debbie: She passed away in 1983 in June, had she lived to July she would have been a hundred and two years old. So many, many years of doing it and she would greet everybody at the front door, all these strangers that came into our house to eat, she'd greet them. She hosted her own little table which would hold her and five guests and she would invite some her little lady friends and gentlemen too to come eat with her every day. And then Jack Daniel would send ladies from the distillery to host the other tables, her daughter Miss Lewis Crutcher would come over everyday and host a table and she lived next door. So all she had to do was walk over and she was a widow, so by coming over every day and hosting a table at her Mom's, she never had to cook. She ate dinner, and that was it.
Lucas: And then the proprietress moved to Lynne Tolley, correct?
Debbie: Lynne took over when Jack Daniel's bought it in 1983 after Miss Mary's death. They bought it mainly to preserve the house and they reopened it in May of 1984 by reservation that we do it today and Lynne took over, and she was there until 2014 and then she retired and then I took over after that.
Lucas: Okay, and Lynne was the one that kind of, in a lot of ways drove the more public-facing role of the boarding house, with a number of cookbooks and stuff. She was involved with while also managing that property. So talk about her role in trying to bring this?
Debbie: She was an ambassador, and still is, for Jack Daniel's. She was also Mr. Jack Daniel's great-grandniece, so she could had the connection with the family and she did T.V. and every month she was on "Talk of the Town" out of Nashville, cooking and doing a cooking demonstration. Her mother was one of our hostesses for a long time, Miss Margaret Tolley. So she had a long connection. She had always known as Miss Margaret. She lived in Nashville at the time. They asked her to come back and be the proprietress and she agreed, so she was there for many years and she's the one that taught me everything I pretty much know about it.
Lucas: So the boarding house is celebrating its one hundred and tenth anniversary this year, it was started in 1908 and 2018, but what does the present look like for the boarding house? What can visitors expect as part of their experience when they come meet Miss Mary Bobo?
Debbie: Well, I think it's a unique dining experience because you sit at big tables, you pass the bowls around family style, which people have gotten away from that now, it's more like going to your grandmother's on Sunday for dinner. Each table will have a hostess from Lynchburg to sit with them while they eat, they get history about the house and about Miss Mary Bobo and some of the boarders that stayed there over the years, and they meet people, they introduce themselves and tell who they are and where they're from so they never know who they're going to be eating with, and you know, it's a small world, somewhere in there, there will be a connection, every time.
Lucas: Do you have a story about the most interesting connection that you've heard about in your time of being there, and completely surprised by? Because I know that there are various places around Nashville, where I'm from, you do some southern style dining and you will, as you say invariably run into a connection of some stripe that you never would have thought you'd never have with a with a group of complete strangers.
Debbie: Yeah, one day I had a table myself. I was hosting and had half a table from Tennessee and half a table from Alabama, which I thought it was going to get a little rough there...
Lucas: Depending on the time of year, sure.
Debbie: Yes, because of football, and when they got to talking, they all knew somebody in common and it was just like they were almost all family, you know, but then there was the Tennessee and Alabama thing.
Lucas: So the underlying current of a little bit of hostility might have been there, but at least they had that person in common that they could bond over. So, describe for us what the boarding house looks like right now, there's nine separate dining areas, correct?
Debbie: Nine dining rooms. We hold a hundred and three people at a seating, we can do three seatings a day. We've got three dining rooms on our main level where you walk into the house. We have a gift shop in there. And that's where you go to check in, then upstairs in the old boarding house bedrooms, we have three dining rooms, which were added in 2006, and then downstairs in the older part of the house there's two dining rooms, that used to be the original kitchen part of the house and the floors and the walls down there are bricked because when they cooked down there years ago, when that was built in the 1820's, they cooked over an open fire. So to keep fire from getting out, they brick the floors and the walls, so it's handmade brick, and then when we did do an addition in 2006 and we added a new kitchen when we did that, we added a room downstairs under the kitchen that we now use as a dining room, and we've got it decorated so that it looks older but it is new.
Lucas: And then the menu, what can visitors expect? Obviously until you do a southern style dining experience, I mean, you really don't, you adopted that you would get used to that whole process, but specifically as far as the food goes, what can they expect?
Debbie: Every day on the table we will have two meats, six vegetables or side dishes, your bread, your beverage, and your dessert, and it's all inclusive. We do a variety of different food, I never like to say what we're having until we get to the table because it can change right at the last minute but we do like meats, fried chicken, a chicken with pastry which was one of Miss Mary's favorites, we do fried catfish fillet, barbecued ribs, we have roast beef, we have pork roast, we do baked country ham and chicken and dressing in December for Christmas. So that never changes, and then some of the sides, we do all kinds of casseroles, like right now it being summer were having a summer squash casserole, we can get fresh squash, when we get tomatoes, we have tomatoes. We've been having cucumbers because they're coming in now. We do all different kinds of beans, just only things you would find in the south, never something from somewhere else. So, every day we have fried okra now, that's a staple for the south and our okra has been featured in Southern Living. So it's some of the best fried okra, we think, you can get, and we also everyday have Lynchburg candied apples except during December, then we do sweet potatoes with Jack Daniel's in them, but our Lynchburg candied apples we doctor up with Jack Daniel's and that's usually a favorite for everybody.
Lucas: I would imagine so, I'm trying really hard not to drool on this microphone right now because that's making me very hungry.
Debbie: Well now, dessert too, we do different desserts. But if we have a pie or something that we can put whipping cream on, we use real whipping cream that's flavored with Jack Daniel's.
Lucas: Which the recipe for can be found at JackDaniels.com. I found that in my research for talking with you today, along with the fried okra recipe, so you can take a little bit of Miss Mary Bobo's home via those recipes that can be found on JackDaniels.com. So, tell us a little bit about your path to becoming the manager of Miss Mary Bobo's, you're a Lynchburg native, you've been here your entire life, talk about how you got involved with the company, with the boarding house specifically and what else you've done with the distillery and its various outputs.
Debbie: This is going to tell my age, not good. When I graduated high school from Moore County High in 1978, I received the Jack Daniel's Scholarship, which was started in 1972, Jack Daniel's decided to give scholarships away to Motlow State Community College, which the college was founded on land that the Motlow family had, they had donated the land for this two-year junior college. So they gave away four scholarships each year to our little high school which back then, that would have been, you know, we only graduate about 65 people a year or so that was quite a bit. So anyway, I got the scholarship and I started working at the White Rabbit Restaurant which was on the Square at the time and the Lynchburg soda shop which Jack Daniel owned and we dipped ice cream, did that, and then I also got to wait the tables at Miss Mary Bobo's while she was living and coming to the table. So I did that. From there I went to the Visitors Center in 1980. I was hired full time by Roger Brashears to work at the visitors center. And there I dipped lemonade and was a hostess, and also back at that time walked a few tours, so I've tour guided a little bit before then. I'm married. And yes, I married Goose. So when we married in '91, we worked together and we did that right up until '97 and then I moved to Miss Mary Bobo's, we had a daughter and I needed off on weekends, and it just worked out better for me. So I worked from '97 till now at Miss Mary Bobo's, and of course I worked with Lynne Tolley down there, and pretty much learned everything from her and when she retired in 2014, then I was promoted to be the proprietress of Miss Mary Bobo's.
Lucas: So these days what does, and there's probably not one, but what does a typical day look like for you as far as operating Miss Mary Bobo's boarding house?
Debbie: Pulling my hair out. And this is an old house, right? So you can imagine, just one thing after another, I've got a direct line to maintenance most of the time, but no, I get to meet a lot of people that come in, I try to get around to all the tables. I don't host a table as often as I'd like to anymore, because I like to tell people, hosting the table, if you're having a really bad day and you go to a table with people you don't know, and you get to talking and laughing and telling jokes, it can just change your whole day. And you can have just some of the best tables sometimes, and I miss doing that but I still try to get around and speak to everybody and make sure everything's okay for them, and then pay bills and you know do work orders and then do all the normal things that you would do for a business.
Lucas: I think we all know the thing that brings people to Lynchburg in the first place, obviously the distillery and its product, but what do you think are the things that bring them back, time and again? I'm sure you've met people who have come to Miss Mary Bobo's many many times, to the point where they're almost regulars. What are the things about this area, about the boarding house that make them want to come back again and again?
Debbie: The people, they love the people of Lynchburg. We've got a man, Mr. Rodriguez who lives in Huntsville, Alabama, he's single, his children are living or he's got a daughter I think lives in New York, so he's kind of alone and by himself. Every Wednesday, he comes to Lynchburg. He comes to the Squire's office and talks to them because he's a Tennessee Squire then he leaves there and comes to Miss Mary Bobo's and he eats with us every Wednesday, and when he doesn't come then we worry because we think there's something wrong with him. And so he's a regular for us, and he comes because he loves the conversation, he sits and he talks and he'll talk to all of our guests that come in. He'll sit in the living room on the couch and he'll sit and talk to whoever's there. Then at the table whoever is furthest away from Lynchburg and has come to Miss Mary Bobo's to eat, he'll give them usually a truffle that he gets in town, or maybe whatever Squire thing he's gotten that day. he gives that out to them. So he loves it. He loves it. He's our best advertisement.
Lucas: I was going to say, unofficial staff member that does a lot of recruiting for you
Debbie: But now we have a lot of people like that. We've got friends from Pulaski that come a lot and we know them, other people from lots of different areas and every year, you know, we have the people that come back every year. Like at Christmas, we have a orthodontist's office in Tullahoma and they book the house four times at one o'clock during December, they bring every dentist office that recommends a patient, so they come and eat with us and have been doing this since before I got down there in '97. I mean, they've been doing it for years, to have their Christmas parties.
Lucas: That's awesome. I think one of the great parts about the spirit of Jack Daniel's and the distillery itself, is this sense of wanting to give back to the various communities that it's involved in, not only here but certainly around the world, you mentioned the scholarship program that you were a beneficiary of, talk about what that program does today and how your student workers interact with that, tell us a little bit more about that.
Debbie: Now we call it a co-op program because three years ago the state of Tennessee decided to give scholarships away to make it free to go to any Community College or any of the technical schools in the state of Tennessee. So as long as you did three mandatory meetings and you did eight hours of public service every semester, your school was paid for. So, we no longer had to give the scholarship at that time, but we still wanted to do something because that's who we use all the time now to waiter tables, and now we use, I think now we've got 15 students on the program, but we decided to do it like a co-op program and so they go to school at Motlow, their tuition is all taken care of, we just pay for their books and any fees they might have, so essentially they're going to school practically free. They make minimum wage, they get any tips left on the table and then they also get a little allowance of about $100 a month to buy gas or whatever, so it's a great program that we've got set up and we get some of the best kids to be on the co-op program, the best of Lynchburg. And now when we say we get maybe seven students a year that's over a tenth of the graduating class. So they have to maintain of course a C average while they're in school. But we've had them to go on to UT we've had them go to Vanderbilt, we've had them to go to Tennessee Tech, just all over to finish up their school, and some of them of course have paid off, some of them, a lot of them work here Jack Daniel's in different areas, and several teachers in our school system are former scholarship students.
Lucas: So they're giving back as well, that's tremendous. But they are, a lot of them are working as those table hosts, correct? As far as what they do or are they in kind of the back end?
Debbie: Well, they actually serve and do all that, now our hostesses are all retired ladies from here in Lynchburg. They're paid to talk and eat. So they have a really hard job.
Lucas: That's not a bad gig. I get paid to at least talk about Jack Daniel's. I don't get the eating part..
Debbie:. Yeah, and several students stay and work with us even when their scholarship is done, or their co-op program is done. My daughter was actually a co-op student and now she's stayed and she's working at Miss Mary Bobo's, but hopefully soon she'll be coming up to the Visitor's Center do something there. So she's going to Trevecca University in Nashville and they do a co-op program with Motlow. She goes one night a week for 18 months and she'll graduate with her Bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Human Relations.
Lucas: That's awesome. So do you have a single most memorable moment from when you were a host with the tables?
Debbie: Yeah, I can tell you a pretty good story. One day we had a group that was coming, it was actually a Brown-Forman group, or a Jack Daniel's Group. They were coming in to pick a barrel of our Single Barrel whiskey, and normally when they do that they come and eat at Mary Bobo's. Well, the kids came in, the students, and they motioned for me to come to the hall. So I did, and they said "Miss Debbie, Miss Debbie, do you know who that is at your table?" And I said "Well, no, I don't really know," I said "I've got some people here buying a barrel of Single Barrel" and they said "Is that Eric Church at your table?"
Debbie: I said, "I don't know, who's Eric Church?" and they said, "You know, he's a big country music singer." Now y'all, this was just when he had first come out. That was my defense, I hadn't heard of Eric Church before so I just went in and I said, "Hi are you Eric Church?" and he said "Yes, I am" and I said "Well these kids were asking me if that was you that would like to have through picture made with you." So he says "Sure!" and he had his wife with him. So he got up. He did all the pictures, his wife actually took the pictures of him and all the students.
Lucas: Probably not the first time she's done that. What is your favorite time of year here in Lynchburg and at the boarding house? Are they the same thing or are they separate? I would imagine they could be very different things.
Debbie: I think at the boarding house would be Christmas. We decorate the house so pretty during the holidays. Of course, we get tired of the meal everyday because it never changes, it's chicken and dressing with giblet gravy, baked country ham and then we have all the trimmings, the only thing that changes from December the first to the 23rd is desserts. So we get a little bit tired of that, but it's the people that come, you know, during that time. They're festive, they're in the holiday spirit. They're dressed up, you know, and it's a lot of fun and like I said, we really go all out decorating the house and it's beautiful. So I think Christmas is my favorite time. Now here in Lynchburg I think it would be the barbecue cook-off for Jack Daniel's. That's a lot of fun and it's always beautiful here. Leaves are beginning to change and really pretty and you get so many nice people that have been here and come back for years and years and years and we get to see old friends again. So that makes it nice.
Lucas: And for those for those people who haven't been down here for that event, which I've been here many times for that. I mean, Lynchburg swells to 30,000 plus, you know from a from a town of less than a thousand. What is that like to kind of navigate the area during that weekend?
Debbie: The only day we get to say that we have a traffic jam! It can you take over 30 minutes to get from the distillery, which is at the beginning of town, down to Woodard's Market which is at the end of town. And so, it's not over maybe a mile or so and it just takes forever to get into town, people are everywhere, they park everywhere. It's just a crazy time here in Lynchburg, but it's a fun time, the best of the best.
Lucas: That's true because it's an event that you have to win your way into. So, you know that you have world-class barbecue folks as part of that. What kind of tricks of the trade have you picked up in your now several decades of being involved with the boarding house and what kind of things do you think the future will hold for that venue?
Debbie: Well, the future I don't know. I've got about four more years and then I hope to retire, but I think the the main thing I've gotten from working with the public is, treat people the way you want to be treated. You know it all boils down to being nice to people and and having a good time and that's what they come there for and you know, if you do that, you've done a good job. So our hostesses, that's what I tell them all the time, treat all these guests that come in, you know, like you would want to be treated if you were going somewhere. So I hope that that's the point that we get across when people leave.
Lucas: People come obviously to Lynchburg from all over the world. I know we've talked to Ben Spears, who was our first guest on Around the Barrel about his role as a tour guide, that how a quarter of a million people will come and tour the distillery and obviously you get a portion of that, as well talk about some of the far-flung places people have come from to visit Miss Mary Bobo's.
Debbie: Well last year, we had a record year. We fed like a little over 45,000 people, which was one of the biggest years we've ever had, but we get guests from all over the United States, all over the world. And in fact every month, we do a little survey of where people are coming from. So back in April, which was April y'all and that's not even our busiest season, we had 47 States and we had 28 foreign countries to visit Miss Mary Bobo's. So it's really remarkable they find us because we are not on the beaten path. So, you know, they have to be wanting to come to get to us. Of course now, we've got our own website and that helps a bunch.
Lucas: I was just about to say, at MissMaryBobo's.com, right?
Debbie: Right, and that just started in February. So, you know people can go online now and book their own reservations, which we used to only do it by phone, but I think we've got a link to the Jack Daniels website so I think people more people are finding us, and they're booking ahead and coming, but you always need a reservation. But we do get a lot of people from all over and it's so fun to meet people from other countries. That's really a lot of fun and have them to be guests because you know, they are not used to sitting down at the table and passing the bowls. They're more likely to pick their plate up and walk around and fill it up.
Lucas: I'm sure that's true.
Debbie: So, it's fun.
Lucas: That's really cool Debbie Baxter, Thank you for joining us Around the Barrel.
Debbie: Thank you. This has been really fun, I've enjoyed it.
Lucas: Around the Barrel is the official podcast of the Jack Daniel Distillery. Follow the podcast on the web at JackDaniels.com/podcast. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you gather your on-demand audio. Always remember, with great podcast and great whiskey, please enjoy responsibly. Join us next time for more conversations Around the Barrel. Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly. Jack Daniel's and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks, copyright 2018, Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof, distilled and bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around the Barrel is intended for listeners 21 years of age and older.
