Spring is here and there’s nothing that celebrates Spring quite like a Southern festival…good music, good food, good company!

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, here’s a roundup of some of the best Southern food festivals for Spring and Early Summer 2008.

Highlights of the season include Charleston, SC’s world famous Spoleto Festival, the International Bar-B-Q Festival in Owensboro, KY, Tryon, NC’s Blue Ridge Barbecue Festival, and the Appalachian Evening Summer Concert Series and Appalachian Dinner in Robbinsville, NC.

Please feel free to enjoy our Southern Coastal Life MP3 Playlist which is filled with 30+ streaming songs that celebrate the pleasures of Southern food, fishing, surfing, and life spent on the water. (Additional music will be periodically added.)

Artists include: The Andrews Sisters, Andy Griffith, Van Morrison, Elijah and the Ebonites, The Weavers, Tom Waits, James Taylor, Carl Perkins, The Drifters, Dizzy Gillespie, Smiley Burnette, Fats Waller, Martha and the Vandellas, Hank Williams Sr., Tim McGraw, Jimmy Buffet, James Taylor, Ryan Adams, Stringbean, Little Milton, Louis Jordan, Dar Williams, and The Preservation Hall Band…good stuff!

You can listen to it here.

A barefoot chef from Asheville, North Carolina won the Oyster Shucking Competition in Charleston, South Carolina’s 25th Annual Lowcountry Oyster Festival.

Named one of the top 20 events in the Southeast by the Southeastern Tourism Society, two tractor-trailers filled with 65,000 pounds of oysters rolled onto the grounds at Boone Hall Plantation to kick off the festival.

Winner Tres Hundertmark, chef/owner of The Lobster Trap of Asheville, NC, shucked an average of one raw oyster every 2.6 seconds.

“I had just placed in a shucking competition in Connecticut,” Hundertmark commented. “So I felt I would at least rank in the top 5.” But even Hundertmark didn’t expect to take 1st place.

The Oyster Shucking Competition entailed opening as many raw oysters as possible in 3 minutes. Hundertmark blasted the opposition away with an amazing 69 oysters in 3 minutes. (That’s 1 oyster every 2.6 seconds, beating the five-time champ by 5 oysters.)

Located in downtown Asheville, NC at 35 Patton Avenue, Tres Hundertmark has cooked for such restaurants as the House of Blues in New Orleans, Louisiana, Beau Rivage Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, the Chanticleer on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, and at the track at Kentucky’s Churchill Downs.

• Hog jowls for joy! (from Piggly Wiggly Supermarkets)