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(upbeat jazz music) - This time on Tennessee Crossroads, I'll meet an artist who's as much of a storyteller as he is a painter, Vicki Yates finds a shop that's bringing gourmet pastries to downtown Franklin, Tammi Arender visits a creamery in Ethridge, and we take another trip to one of our state parks with photographer John Guider.

I always look forward to those beautiful photos.

Hi, everyone, I'm Ketch Secor welcoming you back to another episode of Tennessee Crossroads.

Hey, when you think about the art you see on this show, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Is it the technique?

Maybe it's the colors or the shapes.

Well, we found one painter who's making a name for himself because of the stories behind his art.

(inspiring orchestra music) - [Noah] I started drawing when I was very young, and I don't remember a time when I wasn't drawing.

- [Ketch] Some people figure out their life's calling early on.

- I'd be at my grandparents' house, and I remember a big stack of Great American Reserve Insurance Company logo paper and just page after page, just draw and draw and draw and draw, and then I started tracing.

- [Ketch] Noah Satter is one of those people.

- [Noah] And then when I was a early teenager, I started to paint, and I guess I'd never stopped since, really.

- [Ketch] Noah is what is called a narrative painter.

- [Noah] Narrative painting is what we do when we tell stories in paint.

It is something that everybody does from an early age.

Child drawings, you see narrative in it.

Here's me, here's my house, and it's a very grounded and real thing to do.

- [Ketch] He likens it to folk music and storytelling, something shared and communal, less about a specific technique or style.

- I think it's a lot more observing, and sometimes, it's observing what the colors are doing.

Even if I'm painting from a photograph, I, as you can see from my palette, I'm not really a neat freak when it comes to my materials, and so there's a lot of chaos.

My wife said recently, "You don't just allow, "but you invite a certain amount of chaos "into everything you do."

Which I think she was talking about my art specifically, but it is generally the case, and so if I'm painting something directly, there's gonna be a color I don't expect or a mark I don't expect, and then I'm responding to that.

It's still observation.

I wouldn't call that invention.

It's just sort of improvisational flow of the materials.

- [Ketch] Noah grew up in Natchez, Mississippi.

His family had roots there going back to the 17 hundreds.

So a future in the visual arts may not have been the most obvious career path, but his journey is steeped in the sometimes darker side of the deep south.

- The role of storytelling in the deep South is, of course, very rich, and there are a lot of storytellers down there, a lot more storytellers and musicians than there are painters, and talk about ancestors and talk about ghosts and talk about history and the dark history that was just everywhere down there.

Slavery, brutality, Jim Crow, whether that was spoken about or not was part of the story.

- [Ketch] And he wasn't afraid to follow that story, even when it became more personal.

- [Noah] There was one member of the family that no one ever talked about.

I became interested in him as a teenager, and that's my great-grandfather.

I couldn't get any information about him, and so I started digging, and with the help of a librarian in Mississippi, Steven Parks, we started to pull this man's story out, and he's now the most well-documented person in the family, and it's a very complex, multi-layered, dark, very human story about mental illness and a southern culture, but the idea that, as a southern narrative painter, I feel compelled to unresolvable questions.

It's like a moth to a flame.

- [Ketch] But the subject matter and narrative painting, well, it isn't always as profound as a long lost relative.

- [Noah] If someone who's been painting their whole life paints a picture of them eating breakfast with their child, that is irreducibly their life and their work.

It's not conceptual.

It's not elitist.

It's not exclusive.

It's very real, and it's very grounded.

Narrative painting has been, for hundreds of years, more aligned with the sort of peasant class than the ruling class.

- And sometimes Noah will even accept the rare commission, as long as the project is the right one.

Of course, one of my favorite works that she ever done is this record cover.

- Jubilee.

- [Ketch] I loved working with you on this and talking about this celebration and a cover that has all the guys walking by the Ryman Auditorium.

- That's right.

I don't know that I've ever mentioned this before, but I put myself in there.

Did you ever see that?

(laughs) - Of course, wearing the shirt and the hat that says, "Oh Sandwich 25."

- 25, baby.

Yeah, so it was really fun doing this.

It was a parade scene, pretty challenging compositionally, but I think it worked out.

- [Ketch] In addition to album cover art, Noah has created works for several books, including What became of Dr.

Smith and The Dutch House.

- Ann Patchett came to me asking if I wanted to do the cover of her book.

She gave me two pages and said, "It's the main character as a girl, black hair, red coat, "fancy wallpaper, bathed in light.

"She needs to be painted."

This is a painting in the book.

So it's painted in the 1950s, but it's painted in the style of Edwardian portraiture, and those parameters were a wonderful funnel.

I had a very specific thing I had to do.

I can't do that very often, but when it comes up, it can be really fun to do.

- [Ketch] And whether it's commissioned work or the projects he paints on his own, Noah Saterstrom will always come back to one idea, that the art he makes will guide him, not necessarily the other way around.

- [Noah] I don't take on commissions very much, because I can start to resent the levy and most of what I do is whatever I want to do.

That sounds really obnoxious, but the draw to me in the studio is that the paint and the subject tells me what to do.

Whatever it is that I'm doing, I want it to be able to change and evolve in ways that I can't predict.

So I don't really aspire to it being anything in particular except for it to be constantly changing and me to stay with it, you know, pursue it at all costs.

- That's some great work and a great guy, Noah Saterstrom.

Well, our next story will be a treat in more ways than one.

It involves a popular bakery and a popular Crossroads crew member.

Vicki Yates stopped by the Triple Crown Bakery in Franklin recently and brings us this story custom made for folks with a sweet tooth.

(upbeat country music) - [Vicki] The first sound you hear when you enter Triple Crown Bakery is the whirring of mixers, (machine whirs) but the first aromas you smell are freshly baked pastries.

On this early morning, two of the 29 ladies who happily work here at Triple Crown are preparing for the day, taking goodies out of the oven, icing and decorating them for the soon-to-arrive morning rush.

- What can I get for you?

- [Vicki] Triple Crown Bakery is the brainchild of renowned pastry chef, Alena Vaughn, who was inspired to name and celebrate her business after one of the other loves of her life.

- So Triple Crown is the best of three races, and so I grew up loving horses and riding horses and I kind of had an epiphany when I was working at a horse ranch to go to pastry school.

So I kind of wanted to infiltrate the love for horses into the bakery, and so Triple Crown's the best of three.

So I figured, well, we do cookies, cakes, and pastries.

So I'd like to say we do the best of those three.

- [Vicki] Something else Alena does very well is create atmosphere.

- Because we're in downtown Franklin, I wanted it to be homey and inviting.

It definitely has a, we call it Grandma Chic vibe to it.

I'm a maximalist.

(laughs) So I like lots of stuff around me.

I collect lots of things, obviously plates and pie servers and little tea holders.

- [Vicki] As important as the cakes, muffins, and croissants are to customers, they're complimented by the tea room.

Many customers reserve a table to enjoy high tea there.

- [Alena] Well, it's becoming really popular.

We do what we call a casual tea service.

So you get the pod of tea, you get the cup, we serve it with a little cookie on the side.

You can get it for one or for two, and if you don't like tea, we have a coffee service, a French press service.

We also have a hot chocolate service.

So that's fun for the kids and people who just like homemade hot chocolate.

- Great, here you are, and the forks are right there.

- [Vicki] And even though there are croissants as big as your head and cinnamon rolls that will have you rolling your eyes with delight, there's something here for everyone from gluten-free to dairy-free.

Okay, Alena, say I wanna go whole hog and wanna eat.

- Yeah.

- What should I get?

- I mean, I would get this Briosh cinnamon roll.

It's all butter.

- Oh my gosh, but now if I'm watching my weight, where do I go?

- I would maybe choose one of our homemade macarons.

Those are light and airy and naturally gluten-free, and then I would maybe stick with our pavlova, which is a baked meringue with whipped cream and berries, also naturally gluten-free.

- And all of it great.

- Oh, absolutely.

(bright contemporary music) - [Vicki] After all, Alena Vaughn has baked for the best, including cooking icon Julia Child.

- A couple times I got to cook in for Julia Child.

My previous boss, Zov Karamardian, and she was really good friends with Julia, and we would do a lot of benefits for the James Beard Foundation, which Julia really loved to support.

She was the best woman.

Everything you ever wished, she would be.

- [Vicki] Stop by on the weekend and you might see a popup or two on the premises.

- So I like to encourage other women who have budding businesses, because I was there as well, hitting the farmer's market circuits and stuff.

So I encourage my friends or friends of friends to have a little popup in our yard.

We have this beautiful garden space, and it's perfect location for somebody to just, you know, on a Saturday, sell their goods, and it's really fun.

The customers love it.

- [Vicki] And what's the future wish for this already successful business?

- [Alena] I see us maybe having a separate event space, tea space.

I do flirt with the thought of doing some mail order stuff, maybe some like boxes that come once a month with goodies in it, a subscription service of sorts.

I envision us just staying strong, and in this business, we see a lot of people that aren't making it, lately, and I just hope and pray that we do.

- Yum, thanks, Vicki.

We always have time for a sweet treat.

Well, next, you may not think of making cheese as an art, but that's exactly how Morgan Flowers describes it.

Tammi Arender takes us to Giles County where Flower's Creamery is all about getting the highest quality milk to make the highest quality cheese.

(bright folk music) - [Morgan] I joke that I didn't grow up on a farm, but I got here as fast as I could.

- [Tammi] Morgan Flowers is a city girl with a law degree.

So what is she doing at Flowers Creamery and Dairy Farm in Giles County, Tennessee?

- I grew up in town.

I didn't know much about it, and I met my husband and started farming with him and fell in love with it and wanted to add this value added part of the business to increase farm income and to make the farm profitable and to feed our local community with what we've worked so hard to produce.

- [Tammi] Since Morgan grew up in Franklin and had no connection to a dairy farm, she let love guide her, a love for her husband, Brian, a love of animals, and a love for cheese.

- Brian also wanted to do cheese.

He had worked on it for a long time, but one of the things is there's no lactose in cheese or very small amounts, and so if you have trouble processing that, it's easier dairy to start out with, and then two, it's storable.

So it was easy for us to build up cheese that we had made and store that, and so we got into the market.

So it was a little bit less risky than milk.

We just also really like cheese.

- [Tammi] And that cheese is made from their jersey cow's milk.

They have 100 Holsteins and 50 Jerseys, and Morgan says, you may not realize that the milk from those two breeds are different.

- [Morgan] There is a lot of difference.

So a Holstein is a large cow.

They produce a high volume of milk, which is great if you're selling that at a commodity price, but the Jerseys produce higher butter fat content.

So that is a good, good fat for products like cheese or butter, ice cream, things that use the fat to make the product.

It's a very healthy fat.

It's worth a whole lot more money on a milk check, but it also makes our product really creamy and really good.

- [Tammi] So that creamy Jersey milk is captured and blended with microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast, and mold.

They thrive on the milk sugars and proteins, and today, it's being turned into cheddar.

The Flowers actually produce eight different types of cheeses, and they all start with the same process.

- The cheddar is a very dry cheese.

So a lot of the cheeses start out very similarly, mostly have the same ingredients except the anato, which is the coloring.

It's an all natural coloring that we use for yellow cheeses, but most use the same products in terms of the starter culture, but at the end of the process is really when the cheeses take form.

(upbeat country music) - Flower says it was quite the learning curve when she and Brian decided this was the value-added product they wanted to focus on.

She says it's part science and part art.

- For cheddar, we wanna do the traditional cheddaring process, which leeches out a lot of the whey that's still in the curd.

We make mats, we flip those, make sure that we get as much whey out as possible, and then what we're left with are these big mats of cheese curd, and so we mill those and make little finger curds like that you would buy to fry or to eat.

- Once the whey is discarded, which they actually use to boost their feed for their cows, you're left with blocks of cheese.

Well, you're left with cheese, and then human hands manipulate and flip into these blocks.

The Flowers like turning these into finger curds.

Then the curds are packaged and ready for sale.

So it takes about eight hours to make a thousand pounds of those cheese curds, and of course, here's my favorite part, right?

We're gonna get to taste test it.

Oh my goodness, she's right.

That is so creamy, and I'm gonna go home and fry the rest of these.

- [Morgan] It's extremely gratifying to see a product that I made on a grocery store shelf and to know that my neighbor comes to my store to buy it.

So that's just adding nutrition that may not be available in certain parts of rural Tennessee due to food deserts or what have you.

So we have a little store here that we sell our products and we sell other products as well, and we like to do that in conjunction with our Amish community.

So typically they have produce available but not perishables, and so we sell perishables in our store so people can do a whole tour of Ethridge and get all kinds of groceries that are grown here locally.

- [Tammi] While the Flowers run what's considered a small operation by most dairy farm standards, she says they can have a big impact on their community here in Ethridge in the surrounding area.

- [Morgan] Community is everything to us, in rural America and rural Tennessee, definitely.

Your community is your family and your friends and your church and everyone you know, and we really like bind together and do a lot of things together and really contribute and help each other out, and so it's really important to contribute something meaningful to that, and so the milk market is kind of interesting in that when you sell commodity milk into the market, it goes all over the US, and you don't really know where it's going some of the time, or it changes where it goes and ends up being a brand that may go to a different part of the country from where it's even processed, and so it's really neat to know that we grow the feed in this soil, we milk the cows here, people know us, they know the quality of our products, and they come here to purchase from us, and we provide them with nutrition.

- [Tammi] They sell their cheese and milk too here at their on-farm store, but they also sell at farmer's markets and online in hopes that others will notice a difference on their dinner tables.

- I hope that it elevates the flavor profile of their food a little bit just because it's not mass-produced, and it is real cheese, and it's all natural.

So everything we do is the highest quality inputs.

So anything that we add to the cheese is just really special, and we've picked it out specifically for our cheese flavor profile.

So I just really hope that it makes them understand that processed cheese singles are not the end-all-be-all for cheese, that it's worth investing in something that may taste a little bit different, may be a little higher end, and that way it makes their food that they cook at home taste better to them as well.

- Thanks, Tammi, it's interesting to see how much work goes into making a tasty cheese.

Well, for our last segment this time we turn again to acclaimed photographer John Guider and his series on our Tennessee state parks.

This week we visit one of the newer state parks in the system, Savage Gulf State Park.

(woodpecker knocks in the distance) (upbeat jazz music) - Savage Gulf State Natural Area was first established back in 1973.

When it was first established, it wasn't near as big as it is today.

It was only, I think a few thousand acres, but it's expanded over the years.

We're almost 20,000 acres now.

My name's Aaron Reed.

I'm the park manager here at Savage Gulf State Park.

I've been a park ranger and a park manager here for 13 years.

I grew up pretty close.

I'm from Dunlap, Tennessee, Sequatchie County, which is just the next county over.

So I'm about an hour from home here.

I grew up on a little farm there at the foot of the mountain and my parents just spent all the time that we could outside, and the outdoors is really what got me started, I guess, loving outdoors with my parents.

When the park was first established, it was managed under South Cumberland State Park, but then several years ago, the state legislature decided it would be best to break Savage Gulf off into its own standalone state park.

So the name Savage Gulf came from one of the original settlers, Samuel Savage.

He was one of the first people to live in the Gulf, and his family was one of the more prominent families that lived in the gulf.

(tribal flute music) Before Savage Gulf became a park, there were some old homesteads here.

A lot of the land was owned by timber companies.

A lot was owned by mining companies.

If you were to walk the gulfs today, you'll find lots of old foundations of old homesteads.

There's a couple cemeteries down in the bottom of the gulf.

There's a foundation for an old schoolhouse.

There was a small, little thriving community that lived down in the bottom of Savage Gulf.

Probably back in the forties, fifties, and sixties, people were already moving outta the park before the park was established.

I don't think there was anybody living there.

There's one original homestead cabin that has survived and is down in the bottom of Savage Gulf.

It's called Decatur Savage Cabin.

You can hike there on our trail system.

It's a tough hike from Stone Door to get there.

It's about a eight mile round trip hike, I guess, but we maintain a cleared field there.

There's some interpretive signage, and the old original log home is there too for you to look at.

(calm jazz music) (water rushes) We have about 55 miles of hiking trails, we have nine back country campgrounds, and we have numerous overlooks, numerous waterfalls, some easier to get to, some a little bit more difficult, if you're up to the challenge.

The most popular site here at Savage Gulf State Park is the great stone door, and it can be accessed from a two mile round trip hike from our north entrance in Beersheba Springs.

It's one of the most beautiful overlooks in the whole state.

There's a huge rock outcropping out there where you can really see out across the entire park and get a good feeling about the vastness of Savage Gulf.

All seasons at Savage Gulf are different and special in their own way.

I particularly love the spring and fall.

In the springtime, the waterfalls are full of water, and the wildflowers are popping out, and the buds are coming out the trees.

It's just a special time, but then in the fall, we have beautiful overlooks, and they're some of the best places in the whole state to see fall colors.

(calm jazz music) A few years ago, the state legislature appropriated a little bit over a hundred million dollars for a large capital project here at Savage Gulf.

The property includes a 55 acre lake, and there's gonna be lots of new things to do there.

We're gonna have a trail around the lake, there's gonna be a boat dock and boat rental, there's gonna be a new visitor center there, there's gonna be some RV campgrounds, some car camping campgrounds, and a really neat thing that I'm excited about is there's gonna be 16 yurts, and it's a really unique camping experience that you can't find in any other state park.

From all the staff here at Savage Gulf State Park, we hope to see you soon.

- Beautiful photos of a beautiful state park.

As always, thanks, John, and thank you for joining us again here on Tennessee Crossroads.

That's all the time we have, but you can always continue the fun on our website Tennesseecrossroads.org or find us on the PBS app, but more importantly, join us back here next time.

See y'all again real soon.

(upbeat jazz music) (bright folk music) - [Promoter] Tennessee Crossroads is brought to you in part by.

(bright folk music) - Students across Tennessee have benefited from over seven and a half billion dollars we've raised for education, providing more than 2 million scholarships and grants.

The Tennessee Lottery, game-changing, life-changing fun.

(bright country music) - Discover Tennessee Trails and Byways, where adventure, cuisine and history come together.

With 16 scenic driving trails, you can discover why Tennessee sounds perfect.

Trips can be planned at tnvacation.com.

(upbeat rock music)