2022 Lifetime Achievement Award: Helen Turner
In a historically male-dominated business, Helen Turner has owned her own barbecue restaurant for twenty-six years. “I had people come in, men pretty much, and say can’t no woman do this job,” she told USA Today in 2021. “But I done proved everybody wrong.”
Turner is owner and pitmaster of Helen’s Bar-B-Q in Brownsville, Tennessee. While her husband, Reginald, lights the fire in the mornings, Turner does nearly everything else on her own: tending the meat, preparing sandwiches, cooking sides from scratch, and making sure regulars are taken care of.
Turner was born and raised in Brownsville as the oldest of ten children. As a mother of two, she worked part-time serving customers for Linda and Curly Spellings, the previous owner of the space that is now Helen’s Bar-B-Q. When Linda Spellings sold the business to Dewitt Foster, he called Turner to ask her to come make the barbecue sauce. They became business partners and, when Foster retired, Turner took over. In 1996, Helen’s Bar-B-Q was born. To this day, only Turner knows the ingredients in her famous sauce.
Over the decades, Helen’s Bar-B-Q has earned accolades from local and national publications for Turner’s ribs and slow-smoked pork shoulder. In 2012, the Southern Foodways Alliance honored her with the Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame award, which honors a relatively unsung hero or heroine, a foodways tradition bearer of note. One year later, SFA crowned her the first-ever queen of barbecue.
Each year since 1999, when SFA first honored Edna Lewis, the SFA presents the Lifetime Achievement Award to an individual whom all thinking eaters should know, the sort of person who has made an indelible mark upon our cuisine and culture, who has set regional standards and catalyzed national dialogues.
In recognition of that life of work, SFA commissions a portrait by Oxford, Mississippi artist Blair Hobbs and produces a film to share the story of the honoree. The 2022 film, HELEN: The Legenda, directed by SFA Pihakis Documentary Filmmaker Zaire Love, premiered at the 25th Southern Foodways Symposium on October 22. A Maker’s Mark toast to Turner’s life and legacy follows the premiere, featuring cocktails and mocktails from Edward Crouse of Babas in Charleston, South Carolina.
