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Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute
of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters
at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.
The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.
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2002
Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award
James Willis
James Willis of Memphis, Tennessee, has been tending the
pits at Leonard’s
Barbecue – the purported
originator of the Memphis style sandwich -- since 1938. You can still
catch him
in the pits on Thursday mornings. Following is an excerpt from an SFA
oral
history done by Brian Fisher in 2002.
James Willis:
I started working for Leonard in’38. I was about 14. I was born in ‘23 and that
was thirty-eight.
At that time you know, times were tough. You got your little old job,
you kept
it because you had so little money you know. Back then folks were working
for
five and six dollars a week. I started working for Leonard for seventy
cents a
day. That’s what they paid me to pick-up trays, seventy cents a
day. I was
glad to get that. Some people wasn’t making that.
I was pickin’ trays. You
know. They used to carhop…Well I was workin’ and I picked
the trays up off the
cars and bring them back take the mess off. We had a gentleman cooking
named
Tom Tillman…I stayed on one street and he stayed on the next street.
He’d
holler at me and I’d holler at him. When I wasn’t doing anything,
I’d go out
there and sit with him. And that’s how I learned.
I learned everything from him…Showed me how to trim it. Showed
me when to turn
it. When to make a fire. Tell when I did a batch of tough meat, tell
me what I
did wrong. Now you can go out there and cook you a batch of barbecue
now and
you come up with nothing. It’s tough. That’s the reason I
said it takes
patience. You don’t go out there and cook a batch of barbecue and
it come up
tough.
Leonard’s never cooked
during the daytime unless it was for help-out. Always at night back then
at
Leonard’s. Leonard’s purpose for cooking at night was so
that he’d have a
night watchman. That was his purpose see. He’d have somebody at
his place all
the time. Always at night back then at Leonard’s.
People will tell you about
barbecue. Anybody can cook barbecue. I’m not lying about it.
It just takes time, if
you’re cookin’ it. But now you can have a place here and
I can have place
here. And this man here makin’ sauce and go down here and get that
man’s meat.
I can come here and get this man’s meat. And I can make me a sandwich
and put
that sauce on either one of them and you can’t tell the difference.
See, your
sauce is your barbecue.
People can holler about it
but now I just tell you a fact that barbecue, you got to have a sauce.
You
ain’t got a sauce. You ain’t got no barbecue. You know, that’s
where your
business is. Them other ingredients that slaw and that sauce that makes
the
barbecue. Now, if you, cook barbecue all day long and you ain’t
got no good
sauce, you ain’t got no barbecue. Sauce separates you from the
money.
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Help the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrate, preserve, promote,
and nurture the traditional and developing food culture of the American South.
Join us.
Each fall, the SFA (with support from the Fertel Foundation) honors an
unsung hero or heroine, a foodways tradition bearer of note, with the Ruth
Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award.
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