Alabama’s white sauce is now sold in bottles nationwide, but its history is tied to one Decatur pitmaster and a backyard pit dug in 1925. This account draws on the Encyclopedia of Alabama’s entry on Big Bob Gibson BBQ, written by historian Mark A. Johnson, and the Southern Foodways Alliance’s 2006 oral history interview with Gibson’s grandson, Don McLemore.
A Railroad Worker’s Weekend Pit
Robert “Big Bob” Gibson worked for the L&N Railroad in Decatur, Morgan County, when he started tossing hickory coals into a dugout pit behind his house on Danville Road in 1925. According to the Southern Foodways Alliance interview, Gibson stood six-foot-four, weighed more than three hundred pounds, and was known as a big, good-humored man who was easy to talk to. He cooked on weekends at first, feeding friends and neighbors off boards nailed to a sycamore tree. Don McLemore, who joined the family business in 1973, recalled that his grandfather did not raise his own animals. Instead, per the SFA transcript, “he’d buy a whole hog and cut it up himself” and use nearly every part of it — shoulders, hams and ribs — rather than cooking the carcass intact on one pit, the method associated with Eastern Carolina whole-hog pits. Gibson also smoked whole chickens, splitting and seasoning them before three hours over hickory smoke, per the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
From Backyard to Restaurant
Word of the weekend cooking spread enough that Gibson quit the railroad. He first partnered with his brother-in-law, Sam Woodall, opening a stand on Moulton Road called Gib-All’s. That partnership lasted about a year, according to McLemore’s SFA interview, before Woodall left to go into business with his own brother, and Gibson continued alone under the name that stuck: Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q. Over the next two decades the operation moved several times around Decatur, including a stretch of roughly ten years at two locations on Highway 67 near present-day Priceville, before Gibson resettled the business in Decatur in 1952. That year, his daughter Catherine “Punk” McLemore took over daily operations in exchange for half ownership — a detail confirmed independently by both the Encyclopedia of Alabama and McLemore’s own recollection of his mother joining the business.
The White Sauce
Gibson is credited by his family, and by both sources here, as the inventor of Alabama’s mayonnaise-and-vinegar white sauce — a mixture the Encyclopedia of Alabama describes as mayonnaise, vinegar and black pepper, dunked over chickens straight off the smoker. McLemore, in the SFA interview, said his grandfather’s authorship has never been disputed within his own knowledge, though he admitted the family does not actually know how Gibson arrived at the recipe. The sauce was developed strictly for chicken, to keep the meat moist through hours of hickory smoke; Gibson also kept a vinegar-based sauce for pork and a Brunswick stew cooked in a black wash pot, a recipe McLemore said the restaurant still uses today. Decades later, other Alabama restaurants began putting their own white sauce on the table, with some labeling it an original recipe — a claim McLemore disputed in the interview, saying those competitors had only adopted white sauce recently, by comparison to his grandfather’s decades of use.
Where the Two Sources Disagree
The record isn’t perfectly clean on two points. The Encyclopedia of Alabama states the family built a larger restaurant on Sixth Avenue in 1987 because their landlord would not allow them to remodel the existing building. The Southern Foodways Alliance’s separate profile page, however, describes the move differently, stating the original restaurant burned to the ground in 1988 and the family rebuilt next door, saving the original neon sign. The two accounts do not name the same trigger or year for the same relocation, and neither source resolves the discrepancy. Likewise, the Encyclopedia of Alabama dates the opening of the Danville Road second location to 1992, while McLemore’s own oral history interview places it around 1990 or 1991. Both are close enough to represent the same event, but the exact year is unconfirmed.
Growth Into a National Name
After Gibson’s death in 1972, five grandchildren and their spouses took over. The business gained a national competitive profile after Chris Lilly, a native of Florence, Alabama, joined the family in 1992 following his marriage to Gibson’s great-granddaughter, Amy McLemore. Under Lilly, the Big Bob Gibson team began competing at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, first placing in 1997 for a tomato-based sauce. Per the Encyclopedia of Alabama, the team has since won the contest’s grand championship five times — 2000, 2003, 2011, 2014 and 2017 — and the pork shoulder category twelve times between 1999 and 2025, for thirteen total category wins. In 2025 the restaurant marked its hundredth year in business, and in July 2026 Southern Living named the white sauce to its “Southern Food Hall of Fame” list of fifty iconic foods.
A Regional Distinction Worth Noting
It’s worth being precise about what “whole hog” means in Gibson’s case, since it differs from the single-carcass pit cooking associated with parts of the Deep South and the Carolinas. Gibson’s practice, as his own grandson described it, was buying whole animals from local farmers and butchering them into standard cuts before smoking — a meat-market-adjacent approach rather than the intact, all-night single-pit method. Both sources agree on the outcome, though: a backyard sideline that, within a single family’s ownership, became one of Alabama’s most decorated barbecue names.
Keep reading
- Alabama White Sauce: Chris Lilly and Big Bob Gibson’s Method for Smoked Chicken
- Skylight Inn and Eastern NC Whole-Hog Barbecue History
- Memphis Barbecue: Pork Sandwiches, Ribs and Beale Street
- Kentucky Mutton Barbecue and the Owensboro Dip