South Carolina ETV is looking to bring a glimpse at the region’s rich musical history to the rest of the nation with a brand new series.
Southern Songwriters, which debuted Oct. 3, takes viewers on a curated tour of a small South Carolina town each episode, briefly highlighting the community in bits that cut away from an intimate live performance by host Patrick Davis and a few of his musically inclined friends. (Think VH1’s Storytellers plus the place-setting pieces of Antiques Roadshow.) Guests in the first season include Sugarland’s Kristian Bush, American Idol alum Taylor Hicks, Shawn Mullins, Lady A’s Charles Kelley and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ Dan Tyminski, all of whom lead off their songs with a little info about the track they’re about to perform.
Davis — who grew up in Camden, one of the first season’s stops, and who’s written for Guy Clark and Jimmy Buffett — says the show came about after ETV enlisted him to host and perform for a one-hour special that aired on the station before the premiere of Ken Burns’ Country Music in 2019. “I put together a very local little show for them, bringing some of my Nashville guys down, and that show ended up winning a regional Emmy [for director Renee Lawson],” Davis explains. “They were excited about that, so we talked a little bit more, and they asked if I would be interested in trying to start a show in some capacity.”
The series is equal parts Austin City Limits and Anthony Bourdain, according to Davis, with the aim of combining the beauty and intimacy of a typical public television musical series with some bite-sized history lessons. Not every songwriter or musician featured on the show is originally from the South, but all have deep connections to the region through their work in Nashville or elsewhere.
The four season one episodes were filmed in Camden, Greenwood, Columbia and Sumter, and production funding was provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, the city of Columbia and its tourism board, and a number of charitable trusts and organizations.
A South Carolina story
While the show premiered on ETV and is certainly South Carolina–centric in its first season, it’s also being distributed nationally by American Public Television and is available on the PBS app. It’s been picked up by stations around the country so far, including WFYI, WLIW, KLCS, WGTV and KQED.
Landon Masters, ETV’s Chief Public Information Officer, says that having that distribution helps get the state’s stories to a wider audience. Viewers can connect to the show’s sound or the songwriters’ stories but can also learn a little bit about native son Larry Doby, who was the first Black player in Major League Baseball’s American League, or get a glimpse inside the Greenwood Genetics Center, where cutting-edge research is being done on DNA sequencing and gene therapy.
While the interstitial segments aren’t long, running two to three minutes and appearing only a few times during each one-hour episode, Masters says he hopes that viewers will be motivated to learn more about the people and places the show highlights. The Sumter episode, for instance, touches on former New York Yankee Bobby Richardson.
“If someone watching didn’t get enough info from Southern Songwriters, they could watch this hourlong documentary [ETV made] that’s about Bobby Richardson specifically to learn more,” Masters says. “We hope that our show encourages people to do more research and to continue learning.”
In fact, the show’s teaching potential is part of the reason ETV pursued the idea in the first place. While Masters says the station liked the idea of reaching out to local communities for tapings and providing high-quality musical content, Southern Songwriters also appeases the station’s desire to educate.
“Public media viewers want to learn, and they want to know more,” he says. “Part of learning about something isn’t just appreciating it on a surface level, but also going a little bit deeper to learn the stories behind the songs and the historical context around the locations where these concerts were filmed.”
“Public television is about arts and community,” says Davis, “and it’s about reminding people that there are a lot of beautiful things out there to learn more about.”
Traveling ‘Songwriters’
So far, response to the show appears to be overwhelmingly positive. Masters says that even before the show aired, local crowds were excited to come to tapings where they could see big-name musical talent. Since the show’s launch, ETV has hosted screening events throughout South Carolina, including one at the governor’s mansion attended by Davis.
Though Masters says it’s hard to know the full extent of the national feedback since some adopting stations have yet to air the show, the comments that have come in have been enthusiastic, with stations asking when they’ll be able to get more episodes.
Aundrea Hart, television PD at Indianapolis’s WFYI, says she picked up Southern Songwriters to fill her station’s regularly scheduled music block on Saturday afternoons. Calling it a “logical fit for that time slot,” Hart says Songwriters performed relatively well, averaging a .08 rating and offering audiences “the opportunity to travel and experience music from other regions of the country from the comfort of their own homes.”
“Indianapolis is known as the ‘Crossroads of America,’” Hart said in an email. “We have racing, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and sports corporations located in Indy that bring people to the region from all over the country for their careers. Paired with the diverse musical tastes of native Hoosiers and the active music scene in the city, Southern Songwriters has the ability to appeal to our diverse audience.”
Scoring a second season
Hart also says that WFYI would most likely pick up a second season of Southern Songwriters, airing it in that same musical slot. And while Masters and ETV are hesitant to push the lens past the first season, they admit they’ve been in discussions about what a second season could look like and what they’d want it to accomplish.
Davis would like to do at least half of the episodes of a new season in South Carolina but would be open to pursuing locations outside the state for the other half. He’s scouting locations in Georgia and North Carolina to see if they could accommodate both a stage show and a TV crew. He’s also been approached by people he works with on the Northern California–based Songwriters in Paradise live event series to do an episode amid the vineyards in Sonoma or Napa County, though he’s not sure whether that will go anywhere.
Either way, Davis says he’s into Southern Songwriters for the long haul. “I’ve always thought that you don’t do anything half-assed,” he says. “I don’t want to just do one season of four episodes. I want to talk about where it could be 10 years from now. This show could be a very exciting part of not just ETV’s annual calendar but also of the public television calendar for years to come.”