If there’s one consolation during the scorching, often unbearably humid days of summer, it’s the prospect of being outdoors with friends and family, swapping stories and enjoying a cold beverage as a huge variety of food cooks on a nearby grill, filling the air with the mouthwatering aroma of a good old-fashioned barbecue.
Here, on Fourth of July weekend, LIFE.com offers up a selection of photographs celebrating one of the season’s time-honored traditions: the picnic and barbecue, or barbeque, or BBQ. However you spell it, it still translates as “delicious.”
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Backyard barbecue, 1953.Gordon Parks—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesOne of only thirteen American women — known as the Mercury 13 — to participate in NASA's Mercury space program, Jerrie Cobb (left) barbecues in 1959.Ralph Crane—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesJerrie Cobb keeps watch over the grill, 1959.Ralph Crane—TIME & LIFE Pictrues/Getty ImagesBarbecue, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1953.Eliot Elisofon—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesFamily barbecue, 1960.Ralph Crane—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesFamily barbecue, 1960.Ralph Crane—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesEliot Elisofon—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesBeach barbecue, Massachusetts, 1953.Eliot Elisofon—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesBeach barbecue, Florida, 1956.Lisa Larsen—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesFraternity picnic and barbecue, UCLA, 1940s.Walter Sanders—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesFlorida barbecue, 1961.Lynn Pelham—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesVermont barbecue, 1957.Walter Sanders—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesVermont barbecue, 1957.Walter Sanders—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesJohn D. Lodge (in the suit), the governor of Connecticut from 1951-55, surveys the scene at a salmon barbecue in 1953.Ed Clark—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty ImagesA gathering of well-dressed guests at a barbecue in Fairfield County, Conn., 1949.Nina Leen—TIME & LIFE Pictures/Getty Images
