Podcasts about South Carolina, United States

The hearing that sets the tone here is about the state song. On City Quick Connect Podcast from the Municipal Association of South Carolina, the hosts replay a committee meeting in which Patrick Davis, named the state's poet laureate, sings his proposed song and Representative Teeple from Charleston reads the lyrics back to ask what "senioritas of the night" means. That is the Columbia listening in miniature. The other dominant room belongs to the Gamecocks, where a 26-2 baseball loss to Arkansas becomes a coaching change in one weekend; Sports is the largest filing among shows about the state, and the playable sports talk is all Gamecocks. Behind both sits a run of history large relative to everything else on the page.

What South Carolina is

South Carolina is a southeastern U.S. state on the Atlantic coast. Columbia, the capital, sits in the middle of the state; Charleston, the best-known city, is on the coast in the region called the Lowcountry, with the Upstate toward the mountains. It was one of the original thirteen colonies, the first state to secede, and the place where the Civil War began at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Columbia: the Dome, the tape and the chamber

City Quick Connect's other clips have Billy Webster launching a Democratic run for governor from a Columbia-area Bojangles, and Josh Kimbrell getting the energy vote while Alan Wilson gets the composure vote. South Carolina Lede works with tape: it plays Lindsey Graham on Fox News Sunday saying Iran is "two weeks away" from 90% enriched uranium, then annotates him, down to the reminder that the Iwo Jima he invoked cost nearly 7,000 lives; elsewhere Rahm Reddy calls South Carolina campaign finance a "blind date". Small Business "Backbone" Podcast belongs to the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, and Frank Knapp's guests include legislators; its hardest clip is Rep. Brandon Guffey on losing his 17-year-old son to sextortion and on Gavin's Law, which makes the crime a felony.

The Gamecocks

GamecockCentral Podcast Network sounds like a sports room thinking out loud, a brisk panel letting a point sprawl until it settles. Its baseball clip holds a whole weekend: after the Florida series the panel expected an Arkansas sweep, Friday night ended 26-2 against Dave Van Horn's team, and by the time they sat down the coach had been fired. Another clip has that coach's own words, that he had 'a one-year plan' and did not come here to be 'mediocre'; there is basketball too, Olivia Miles 6-for-20 and Marta Suarez 4-for-17 with South Carolina pulling away anyway. TheBigSpur.com Podcasts, from 247Sports, is the other Gamecock desk; its Christmas-week special has Dylan Stewart, projected as a very high NFL draft pick, returning for a final season.

Two flags, and the harbor

The history clips cluster around 1775 and 1861, and the 1775 flag comes in different colors. On Charleston Time Machine, from Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston County Public Library, two British officers record it on November 22, 1775 as "a white crescent in a green field"; on Walter Edgar's Journal, working through "South Carolina from A to Z", William Moultrie calls it "a blue flag with a crescent in the corner". Time Machine's clips also reach Butcher Town and the city's 1857 slaughterhouse ordinance; Edgar's is the patient one, an experienced interviewer letting a guest unpack Robert Smalls's escape from Charleston Harbor in the steamer Planter.

For 1861 there is Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 (version 2) by Abner Doubleday (1819 - 1893), a formal memoir read in numbered chapters, in which Beauregard notifies Anderson at 3.20 a.m. that he will open fire in an hour and, at the evacuation, before a crowd that "poured into Charleston in vast multitudes, to witness the humiliation of the United States flag", a salute gun explodes and kills the gunner Daniel Howe. Footsteps for Freedom, whose episodes here date from 2019, covers Kings Mountain: a roundtable reconsidering Patrick Ferguson as a disciplined officer rather than a simple villain, and sixteen-year-old Robert Henry surviving a bayonet through his hand.

Beaufort, and the Charleston shows

The Inner Coastal Podcast covers Beaufort, Port Royal and the Sea Islands, and its clips make the town's case for itself: one of the first places in the country where formerly enslaved people owned land and homes; Sheldon Church bringing the classical revival to American architecture before Jefferson's University of Virginia; Marshview Mercantile, which Sondra Smith says became "more of a gathering place". Charleston has a page of its own; its shows here are Charleston Time Machine, the Doubleday memoir and Retire Y'all Charleston, Adam Curran's conversations with guests such as Robert Leheup of Bullets and Band-Aids.

Crime, from Pickens to Horry County

Carolina Crimes treats the state as a crime map. Its Willie Earle clips follow thirty-one Yellow Cab drivers to Pickens, where Earle is dragged from the jail, beaten and shot in the face; its Fernando Garcia clip turns on a call from jail asking the Baptist Association to destroy a box of videotapes, which they reported to police instead. Missing in the Carolinas straddles the state line, Durham and Charlotte titles beside "Springtime Disappearances in South Carolina"; its South Carolina clips have Todd Kohlhepp losing his prison tablet over plans to sell signed memorabilia, and forensic genealogy naming Horry County John Doe as Malquan Tyreek Hawkins after seven years.

Charter schools and the Guard

Kids First Podcast - A Charter School Podcast with Chris Neeley and SC Public Charter School District Kids First Podcast both come out of the South Carolina Public Charter School District, interview-built and unhurried. Neeley, the district's superintendent, interviews Trey Walker, chief of staff to Governor Henry McMaster, about Clemson LIFE for adults with intellectual disabilities; the district feed goes school by school, to Pee Dee Innovation and Leadership Academy, where Friday mastery of 80% sends students home at noon while others stay for intervention or STEM, sign language and kickboxing. Palmetto Guardian, the South Carolina National Guard's podcast, has a prevention clip on the state's first decline in overdose deaths in a decade, and Karma Simmons on why DHOX comments stay anonymous yet reach commanders.

Business and weather, across the state line

The Carolina Business Leadership Show and Carolina Weather Group both treat the Carolinas as one place. The former's clips share an arc of military service into business, John Faust's Air Force avionics behind a debt-free HVAC company and Jason Hall's Army years behind seven businesses in seafood, books and telecom; the latter's snow clip cuts from Sam Walker on the northern Outer Banks to Frank on a porch near Gaston, south of Columbia, where the snow was not yet sticking to the roads.

Where to start

• For the State House: City Quick Connect Podcast from the Municipal Association of South Carolina, then South Carolina Lede.
• For the Gamecocks: GamecockCentral Podcast Network's baseball weekend, then TheBigSpur.com Podcasts on Dylan Stewart.
• For history: Charleston Time Machine and Walter Edgar's Journal on the 1775 flag, then the Doubleday memoir for Fort Sumter.
• For crime: Carolina Crimes on Willie Earle, and Missing in the Carolinas for cases that cross the state line.

The South Carolina feed on this page plays clips from these shows.