The southern potting tradition has evolved through three phases, each determined by the needs and living styles of its time: early lead-glazed earthenware patterned after British and European ware; 19th century utilitarian stoneware of indigenous style; and the brightly-glazed earthenware of the past sixty years showing eclectic inspiration.

Today, the thirty-five principal traditional pottery shops still operating in the South lie in a crescent swath from Kentucky through North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to Texas. During the 19th and early 20th centuries there were hundreds of small potteries supplying ware essential to farm and homestead throughout the agrarian South. Notes a Mississippi potter, "They were like hillside sawmills, scattered around the countryside. Sometimes they had their kickwheels out under a shade tree." Southern potting has always been a family enterprise, combined with farming, with children helping in the shop as well as in the field, learning skills as they grow. Waymon Cole remembers that, when he was young, "We didn't have to buy nothing at our house but coffee, sugar, sody and salt."