Bless your heart! Being from the South, I am sure you've had good Southern green beans MANY times. It's definitely not a secret recipe, but most Northern people only like their green beans very quickly cooked (just a few minutes, like steaming broccoli) and lightly seasoned. The "Down South way" is to cook those beans ALL DAY LONG! I normally buy about 4 pounds of fresh green beans, wash them and break them (removing the lower tip where the bean meets the stem it is growing from). In a large pot I fry up 6 strips of bacon (along with some bacon grease, and leftover ham, whatever is handy). As the bacon fries, I add minced onion, salt, garlic salt, pepper, dried onion flakes work well, too. You want this to brown enough to have a lot of flavor. Then I add 2 cans of chicken broth, scraping the bottom of the pan to get all that good bacon drippings incorporated into the liquid, then add the fresh green beans and then fill with enough additional water just to cover the top of the beans. Bring to a boil, add 3 or 4 tablespoons of basil, put the lid on and simmer for a few hours. I check the beans often and let them cook until they are SOFT. Some varieties of beans accomplish this in just an hour, others take a bit longer. Summertime beans have plenty of flavor and don't need as much seasoning. Who knows where they get them from in the winter and due to that fact, you may need more seasoning, dried onion, pepper, etc.
I have fond memories of sitting on my grandmother's front porch swing down in Kentucky with my mom, aunts and grandmother, all breaking beans - laughing and talking for hours. Even the smallest children knew how to break beans! When all the beans were broken, my grandmother would spend a day or two canning them for the winter. It was a lot of work for her, I am sure, but even on the coldest days, they had the taste of summer at dinner time - and the memories of who helped break the beans that year. Poor woman, she did this not just with green beans, but also lots of other veggies from her garden and fruits for homemade pies, jams and jellies. She lived on her own til just 6 weeks shy of her 100th birthday, so there must be something good about it! Sorry this was so long!