Residents are mostly happy with their ‘shit town’ featured in an explosively popular new podcast, but there are some minor details they’d like to clear up

'Pretty accurate': S-Towners are proud to be podcasted – except for a few things

The Green Pond Grocery serves as a sort of central agora for Woodstock, Alabama. It’s where people come to pick up lunch plates, cigarettes and the latest news.

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This week the news has focused on S-Town, an explosively popular new podcast set in Woodstock. It made the tiny town famous overnight, in the most literal sense.

“It’s like a cool novel, with a twist,” Amy Hardin told a half-dozen people, who stood in a cluster to hear her report. She works the grocery cash register and hears all. Some in her audience knew the podcast, some didn’t. “It’s also just the ramblings of John B’s mind,” she said.

The series purports to feature a murder mystery and a treasure hunt. But underneath it is a finely drawn portrait of an eccentric resident named John B McLemore.

It was downloaded 10m times in just a few hours and has been largely praised by listeners.

In some coastal journalistic circles, producer Brian Reed stands accused of exploiting McLemore and other residents of Woodstock, like Gulliver descended among the Yahoos.

But if you come here, to Woodstock, you’ll hear people laugh at the idea: John B McLemore was a nut, they say, but he probably had a sharper mind than any of the show’s producers. He knew what he was about.

What does bother people here is not the portrait of them as a violent, sadomasochistic, racist, feral people.

“Seemed like a pretty accurate portrayal,” said Woodstockian Clark Alexander, as he came in to pay for gas at the grocery.

No, it’s things like Reed’s geographical looseness when it comes to differentiating among the towns of Bibb County. Nobody here wants to be confused with the philistines who populate Centreville or Bessemer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy Hardin, who works the register at Green Pond Grocery. Photograph: Matthew Teague/The Guardian

But here’s the thing: no collection of humans has ever cared less what the wider world thinks of their town, which was dubbed by McLemore as “shit town” in the podcast. Even now they’re having T-shirts printed that read, “Shit Town’s finest,” and “Where’s the gold?”

“I don’t think it’s a ‘shit town’. I like my town,” said Justin Hardin. His name won’t be familiar, because his appearance on the podcast was anonymous. He showed up in a scene at the Black Sheep tattoo parlor, where he greeted the world with: “Give ’em a picture. I’m a 6ft, 350lb bearded man in a John Deere hat, with ‘Feed Me’ on my belly. Just so y’all get a clear picture.”

Huck lifts his shirt to show his now-famous tattoo of the same name, arcing across his belly like a rainbow of disaffection. “Take a picture,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck.”

After a moment’s reflection he said, “You know, John was so smart. So maybe to someone that intelligent, this really was a shit town. Yeah.”

He’s the embodiment of Woodstock, in a sense.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Justin ‘Huck’ Hardin – whom the world now knows as ‘Feed Me Guy’. Photograph: Matthew Teague/The Guardian

On his surface, literally, Huck makes a joke of himself. But underneath there’s real self-awareness in the way he describes himself, and in his recognition of McLemore’s brilliance. Genuinely stupid people don’t see genius when they confront it. Huck and Woodstock do.

The notion that this town was exploited by Reed insults the people of Woodstock, who are not slow or confused or intimidated by a visitor from New York. They have a slow drawl but quick wits, and they’re not just literate but literary, in a particularly southern way.

“We talk like this because everybody here knows everybody’s business, so we’re open,” Hardin said, behind the grocery counter. She then referenced Kabram Burt, a friend suspected at the beginning of the podcast of being a murderer. “I remember the night of the stabbing. Kabram in here saying openly, ‘I about got stabbed in my gooch meat.’” (Hardin has a bachelor’s degree in English, and is finishing her master’s in education.)

Across town Anne Stone, the local librarian, was one of the people I spoke with who did take real umbrage on hearing the podcast.

“At one point on the podcast they were driving past John B’s old high school, and he described it as Auschwitz,” she said. Her objection to that scene: “His school is down in Centreville!”

Stone, who considers herself a newcomer to Woodstock after 30 years here, said she hardly recognized the town she heard described in the podcast. “We’re mostly just normal people.”

And she’s right. On the podcast McLemore compared the town to Darfur and Fallujah and assorted scatalogical curiosities. Those descriptions went largely unchallenged, so the general impression on the listener is that Woodstock is unreachably isolated. That was true a couple of generations ago, when everyone in town worked a farm or cut timber. But now, Stone said, it’s just a bedroom community. People commute to either Birmingham, with a metro area of 1.2 million residents, or to Tuscaloosa, where almost 40,000 students attend the University of Alabama.

The other sign of evident displeasure this week came in the form of an editorial in the local Centreville Press. It made two main points: the podcast intimated there’s corruption in Woodstock’s town hall, but never followed through with any evidence. And it positioned a wealthy local family, the Burts, as the story’s villains when they’d done nothing wrong. (At his hardware store the family patriarch, Kendall Burt, told me, “Was nothing fair about it,” and hiked a thumb over his shoulder to say, “Get out.”)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Producer Brian Reed in the field. Photograph: Andrea Morales

In the podcast one of the central questions left unanswered, and maybe unanswerable, is whether McLemore’s young friend Tyler Goodson used him and his family to gain access to a cache of gold and cash. So I went to Goodson’s homemade house, a rambling structure of metal siding and allegedly stolen lumber. A woman came out and handed me a phone number for JD Terry, a local lawyer.

“I’d like to help you,” the lawyer said, just as Goodson himself came tearing onto the property in a home-modified pickup truck. He wore a cowboy hat, sunglasses and no shirt. He gunned the engine as he passed, spun a donut in his yard and disappeared behind the structure.

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“Good news. Tyler’s here,” I said.

“Can’t let you talk to him,” Terry said. “Now – if you’d like to email me any offers you’d like to make ...”

“Are you talking about money?”

“I sure would love to let you talk with him.”

There’s no need, I told him. He had answered my question.

Woodstock is a small, southern town, but its people contain multitudes. Eccentrics, cashiers, storytellers and story-sellers. It has churches, and a leather shop for ostensible motorcyclists. People laugh a lot, smoke too much and die too early. And they’re smarter than they let on.