Untold and Unfiltered: The Tennesseans Grabbing the Mic on History's Forgotten Stories

There's a story about a 1962 sit-in at a lunch counter in a small West Tennessee town that almost nobody knows. It wasn't in Memphis. It didn't make national papers. The people who participated are mostly in their eighties now, and for decades the event lived only in their memories and in a few faded photographs kept in a shoebox under a bed in Brownsville.

That story is now the subject of a six-episode podcast series with over 80,000 downloads.

The person who made it happen is DeShawn Merritt, a 34-year-old high school history teacher who started recording interviews with elderly neighbors on his phone during the pandemic because he was terrified the stories would disappear. He had no production budget, no media connections, and no idea how to edit audio. He learned on YouTube, bought a $60 microphone, and launched his podcast — "Haywood County, Unwritten" — from the desk in his childhood bedroom.

"I kept thinking someone else would do this," he says. "Someone with credentials, with funding. And then I realized — if I keep waiting for that person, these folks are going to be gone and the stories go with them."

The Platform Shift That Changed Who Gets to Narrate

For most of Tennessee's history, the stories that got told — the ones that made it into books, documentaries, museum exhibits, and school curricula — were filtered through institutions that had their own ideas about what was important. That meant a lot of stories didn't make the cut. Black communities. Rural women. Indigenous history. Labor movements. The weird, the local, the unglamorous.

But something has shifted. The same technology that lets a teenager in Cookeville build a following for her vintage clothing hauls is letting a retired librarian in Greeneville record oral histories of Appalachian midwives. The same algorithm that surfaces cooking videos is surfacing three-minute explainers about the history of Tennessee's sundown towns, made by a college student in Murfreesboro who just got mad enough to start talking.

"The gatekeepers are still there," says communications professor Dr. Annette Childs, who studies regional media. "But the gates aren't the only way in anymore. People are going around them, over them, through the cracks. And what's coming through is extraordinary."

TikTok History Lessons Nobody Assigned

Marcella Torres grew up in Shelby County hearing her grandmother talk about the Beale Street she remembered — not the tourist version, but the working neighborhood, the churches, the barbershops, the jazz clubs that weren't marketed to anyone outside the community. When Marcella started posting short videos about that history on TikTok two years ago, she expected maybe her cousins to watch.

Her most-viewed video — a three-minute piece about the demolition of a historic Black business district in Memphis in the 1960s — has been watched over 400,000 times. She's been contacted by descendants of families who had no idea their relatives were part of the story she was telling. She's been invited to speak at community events. A documentary filmmaker reached out about a potential collaboration.

"I'm not a historian," Marcella is quick to say. "I make that really clear. I'm a person who does research and cares deeply about this. I tell people to go check my sources, which I always post. I want people to go further than my video."

That intellectual humility is something you encounter consistently among the best of these grassroots storytellers. They're not trying to be the final word. They're trying to be the first word — the entry point that gets someone curious enough to dig deeper.

Town Halls, Folding Chairs, and the Old Way

Not everything is happening on a screen. In Cocke County, a community storytelling series called "Newport Speaks" has been running monthly events at the public library for three years, drawing crowds of 40 to 80 people to hear neighbors tell stories about local history, family memory, and community change. The whole thing was organized by a woman named Patricia Seal, who retired from the county extension office and decided what her town needed most was a room where people could talk and be heard.

"We've had people come in and tell stories about the 1940 flood that I've never seen written down anywhere," she says. "We've had a woman talk about what it was like to be one of the first Black nurses at the county hospital. We've had a man talk about the Cherokee family history on his mother's side that his family kept quiet for three generations."

Patricia records every session on a simple digital recorder and posts the audio to a community Facebook group. It's not polished. The sound quality is variable. Sometimes someone's grandkid starts crying in the back row. None of that seems to matter. The Facebook group has 2,300 members in a county of 36,000 people.

Legends, Mysteries, and the Stories That Refuse to Die

Not every overlooked story is a solemn one. Some of Tennessee's most engaging grassroots storytellers are working in the territory of local legend, regional mystery, and the gloriously strange.

A podcast called "Tennessee Peculiar," hosted by two friends from Cookeville named Josh Abernethy and Traci Voss, covers everything from unexplained disappearances in the Cumberland Mountains to the disputed history of a small town that claims to have invented a version of country music before Nashville got famous. Their tone is irreverent and funny. Their research is surprisingly thorough. They've built a listener community of nearly 30,000 people who submit tips, share family stories, and occasionally show up to live recordings at small venues across the state.

"We're not trying to replace serious journalism," Josh says. "But we do think the weird stuff matters. The legends, the unsolved stuff, the 'nobody ever talks about this' stuff — that's part of Tennessee's story too. It deserves someone to take it seriously, even while laughing about it."

Who Gets to Tell Tennessee's Story?

That question — who gets to tell it — is really what all of this comes down to. For a long time, the answer was narrow. It was academics, journalists, and institutions with the budget and the platform to reach people. Those voices still matter. But they're no longer the only ones that count.

DeShawn Merritt is wrapping up a second season of his podcast, this time covering labor history in West Tennessee's agricultural counties. He's still recording in his spare room. He still teaches full-time. He still answers every listener message personally.

"People keep asking me when I'm going to do this full-time," he says. "I tell them I already am. This is the work. The podcast is the work. The classroom is the work. It's all the same thing — trying to make sure people know where they come from."

Tennessee's story is bigger than any one voice can hold. But right now, more voices are reaching for it than ever before. And that, more than anything, feels like progress.