In 1995, when the late Larry Brown first published (in the Oxford American) the essay "Billy Ray's Farm" about his son's farm in Lafayette County, Mississippi, he was both realistic and optimistic about the challenges of farm life. He could not have known that one day his friend, the renowned chef John Currence, would open Big Bad Breakfast, a new kind of diner featuring local ingredients, including dairy products from Billy Ray's heifers. John T. Edge recently visited Billy Ray and his milking cows at the Brown Family Dairy.
An open letter to the man who put together one of the many collections of America's Greatest Hits: "If you’re really going to anthologize America’s Greatest Hits—your title, certainly not mine—you’re going to need someone who has seen a lot more of the world than the Ivy-League American-Studies major I assume you think you’re looking for."
Reminisces of eating rat-trap cheese: "We ate it in the parking lot, with sleeves of crackers and tins of sardines, its hue a not-of-this-world orange, with a texture that straddled cheddar and polyester. And a red wax rind. Stored beneath a see-through plastic dome. Sliced into wedges with a countrified guillotine."
An essay published in the Oxford American’s Winter 2008 Southern Music issue.
On Elton and Betty White.
