Two Carolinians Inducted Into the Barbecue Hall of Fame
Famous Carolina 'cue gets its due
Posted September 21, 2021
09-21 2021
This weekend in Kansas City, two Carolina barbecue greats—Rodney Scott and Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss—were formally inducted into the Barbecue Hall of Fame at the American Royal World Series of Barbecue.
Election into the Hall of Fame is considered barbecue’s top honor, and inductees are selected based upon the significance of their contributions to the barbecue community. The Carolinas have long been underrepresented in the Hall—before this year there were just two Carolinians amid the three dozen inductees—but with two more joining the ranks this year the playing field is starting to level out a bit.
The class of 2021 includes three inductees plus two legacy honorees. Scott is joined by Ollie Gates, the famed Kansas City restaurateur and philanthropist, and author/educator Meathead Goldwyn, the founder of AmazingRibs.com and author of the best-selling cookbook Meathead: The Science Of Great Barbecue And Grilling. On the legacy side, which honors barbecue greats who have since passed away, Cabaniss shares the honors with another Kansas Citian, the legendary restaurateur Arthur Bryant.
Here are the stories of our two newest Barbecue Hall of Fame honorees.
Rodney Scott: Pitmaster, Chef, Entrepreneur, and Whole Hog Evangelist
Rodney Scott is the first South Carolinian ever to be named to the Barbecue Hall of Fame. Born into a barbecue family, he grew up working in his parent's combination general store and barbecue restaurant just outside of Hemingway, South Carolina. Though reluctant to go into the family business as a young man, he eventually decided to embrace the life of shovels and smoke, and he went in whole hog.
As Scott began taking a more active role in running his family’s operation, he focused on perfecting his cooking techniques. He also pushed his father to do a little more on the marketing front, like adding eye-catching light blue paint to the restaurant.
For years Scott’s Bar-B-Que flew way below the radar screen of food media. Charleston writer Jeff Allen came across Scott’s in 2006 and included it in a whole hog barbecue tour he wrote for the Charleston City Paper, but it wasn’t until John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance profiled the Hemingway operation in the New York Times in 2009 that folks outside the Pee Dee discovered what seemed at the time like a throwback to an almost lost era.
The media attention led to a new role for Rodney Scott: traveling whole hog ambassador. In 2010, he was invited to cook at the Charleston Wine + Food Festival, his first time participating in such an event. Many more invitations followed. He towed his pits into the heart of Manhattan to serve whole hog barbecue at the Big Apple Barbecue Festival. He flew halfway around the world to cook at festivals in Australia. In the process, he introduced 21st century diners to an almost-lost method of cooking and helped inspire a new generation of pitmasters and restaurateurs to tackle whole hogs, too.
Seven years later, Scott shifted to the next phase of his career when he moved down to Charleston and opened a restaurant under his own name, Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ. The move created rifts within his family—especially with his father—but he was transitioning into a new role as an entrepreneur and restaurateur. No longer the guy back in the pits all day, he spent less time managing fire and grease than he did hiring, training, and managing staff—the thing he has cited as the biggest challenge in opening his restaurant.
But that was just a beginning. Along with business partner Nick Pihakis, Scott is in the process of creating a multi-state chain of whole hog barbecue restaurants. The second Rodney Scott’s BBQ opened in Birmingham in 2019, and the company established an Atlanta outpost this July. Another is on the way for Trussville, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham, with more likely to follow.
Along the way Scott added even more titles to his increasingly lengthy resume. He won the James Beard Foundation’s award for Outstanding Chef Southeast in 2018, and in March of this year he published a very well received book, Rodney Scott's World of BBQ. Part memoir and part cookbook, its the first barbecue book to be published by an African American restaurateur.
And now Rodney Scott has been inducted into the Barbecue Hall of Fame, but there’s no sign that he plans to slow down and rest on his laurels any time soon.
Mama B: Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss
The name “Lyttle Cabaniss” is probably unfamiliar to all but the most die-hard Carolina barbecue fans, but her middle name might ring a bell. Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss was the driving force behind Bridges Barbecue Lodge, the classic restaurant in Shelby, North Carolina. Her contributions to the Piedmont barbecue tradition have now earned her a spot in the Barbecue Hall of Fame.
Cabaniss’s career offers an prime example of the essential if underappreciated role that women have played in developing and preserving American barbecue traditions. Though it was often their husbands’ names that appeared on the restaurant signs, many of the Carolinas’ most beloved barbecue joints—and indeed many of America’s classic barbecue joints—owe their success and longevity to the women who kept everything running.
Cabaniss and Bridges Barbecue Lodge are prime examples of that, and she ensured the survival of a multi-generational barbecue business—one that that has now been passed down through three generations of women.
No one would say that Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss didn’t know how to work. Born Agnes Lyttle Truesdale in Kershaw, South Carolina in 1916, she was one of ten children. Her father died when she was a child, and young Lyttle dropped out of school after the third grade to help support her family.
It was the heydey of textile manufacturing in the Piedmont, and like so many of her peers, Lyttle Truesdale went to work in the mills. By 1937 she had moved across the North Carolina line to Shelby and was working at a cotton spinning factory called Eton Mills. That’s where she was set up on a blind date with Elmer Leroy Bridges, better known as “Red.” The two were married sometime around 1940.
Red Bridges was not a mill worker but a barbecue man. As a teenager, he had gone to work for Warner Stamey, the legendary pioneer of Piedmont North Carolina barbecue. (Stamey, along with Wayne Monk, is one of the Carolinas’ previous two inductees to the Barbecue Hall of Fame). Stamey had learned the trade from Jess Swicegood in Lexington before moving down to Shelby, where he opened a restaurant on South Washington Street.
Red Bridges worked for Stamey for several years, learning the Lexington style of cooking pork shoulders over direct heat on hickory-fired brick pits. In 1938 Stamey closed his Shelby restaurant and moved back to Lexington, and Bridges ended up managing the barbecue operation of T. B. DePriest, who ran a barbecue stand as a sideline to his service station.
In 1942 Red Bridges was drafted into the army, and he served as a cook until he was honorably discharged in March 1946. Not long after, he and Lyttle purchased an old hog and cattle auction facility called Dedmon’s Livestock Barn and started selling barbecue there.
Their original restaurant, like Warner Stamey’s, had sawdust on the floors, and they moved locations a few times in the early years. In 1953 the Bridges build a new, thoroughly modern restaurant, complete with air conditioning, in its current location on Highway 74 on the east side of town. They named it Bridges Barbecue Lodge. The following year the couple had a son, Eddie Leroy, who died in infancy, and they later adopted a baby girl they named Deborah Jane Bridges.
In the 1950s, Red Bridges was more famous for catering large barbecue events than he was as a restaurateur. In 1956, when the Firestone Tire & Rubber company in Gastonia staged a barbecue for its 2,300 employees, the Gastonia Gazette noted, “Red Bridges, the barbecue king of Shelby, has been hired to fix the food.” The following year, the same newspaper reported on a barbecue dinner hosted by the local American Legion post and noted, “the food will be served by Red Bridges, known over the state for his tasty barbecue.”
The Bridges family recalls that it was Lyttle, not Red, who was the driving force behind the restaurant. “My grandfather, you know, he just liked to talk to everybody is what I heard,” Natalie Ramsey told interviewer Rien Fertel in 2011, “while she did everything. [He] did a lot of the catering . . . but Mama B was the one running the restaurant.”
Red Bridges died suddenly of heart failure in 1966 at the age of 48, but Lyttle kept the restaurant right on going. In the early 1970s, she married B. L. “Boots” Cabaniss, but he died of cancer just a few years later. Though newspapers and books would call her Lyttle Bridges for the rest of her life, her legal name was actually Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss. The employees and customers of Bridges Barbecue Lodge called her simply “Mama B.”
Though her first husband was nicknamed Red (for reasons no one remembers), Cabaniss was the one with red hair—and a fiery temper to match. Her family and employees remember her as a tough, demanding, but very loving boss, always on top of every detail of the restaurant and making sure things were done to her satisfaction.
For almost five decades Mama B was at the restaurant five days a week from sunrise to sunset. She groomed the next generation, too, and daughter Debbie Bridges Webb, after pursuing a career in modeling, returned to the restaurant and ran it alongside her mother. Though they had a regular pit man who cooked overnight, either of them could go back to the pits and cook when needed.
“Lyttle has valued continuity,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote in a profile of the restaurant in 1999. “When Debbie thinks about innovating, she grins and nods in her mom’s direction. ‘She’s a hard person to change.’” Mama B refused to let her daughter add barbecued chicken or turkey to the menu, despite the many requests they got from customers trying to eat healthy. Barbecue meant pork, and she wasn’t about to budge.
More important to the restaurant’s legacy, at a time when many owners were switching to gas-fired pits, Cabaniss insisted that Bridges Barbecue stick with burning hickory and oak in big brick pits.
Cabaniss could be quite feisty in her public opinions, too. In 1982, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture solicited public comment on how to define barbecue, the Charlotte Observer called Lyttle Bridges for comment. “I think if you don’t know about it, you better stay out,” she told the reporter. “I’m doing the very best I can do. I don’t put my nose in their business, and I think they should keep their nose out of mine.”
In the late 1990s, heath issues finally forced Cabaniss to slow down, and her daughter Debbie took over the day-to-day operations. Described by one newspaper as “a redhead in her 70s, with rosy makeup and sparkling rings,” Mama B still made occasional appearances at the restaurant, holding court with longtime customers from a stool at the curved bar near the kitchen.
Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss died in 2008 at the age of 91, leaving Bridges Barbecue Lodge as her legacy to the town of Shelby and to the Piedmont North Carolina barbecue tradition. The restaurant is now operated by the third generation of the family. Granddaughter Natalie Ramsey started out as a waitress at age 16, and she and her brother, Chase Webb, are co-owners today. They have made a few adjustments to accommodate changing customer tastes—there is chopped chicken on the menu today, for instance—but the fundamentals remain unchanged.
If you find yourself in the Charlotte area and hungry for barbecue, it’s worth investing an hour to drive west to Shelby and check out Bridges Barbecue Lodge and the legacy of Lyttle Bridges Cabaniss. The chopped pork barbecue—still cooked over glowing hickory and oak coals the way Cabaniss insisted—and the red-tinged “BBQ slaw” are classic examples of the Piedmont North Carolina style.
And be sure to try a toasted pimento cheese sandwich while you’re at it. It’s Mama B’s original recipe, and it’s absolutely delicious.
About the Author
Robert F. Moss
Robert F. Moss is the Contributing Barbecue Editor for Southern Living magazine, Restaurant Critic for the Post & Courier, and the author of numerous books on Southern food and drink, including The Lost Southern Chefs, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, Southern Spirits: 400 Years of Drinking in the American South, and Barbecue Lovers: The Carolinas. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
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