JUNE 2019 // CHARLOTTE 53
He’d wondered for years why no one had ever written
the denitive book about North Carolina barbecue, the
food and culture he’d grown up with near the Virginia
line—and done it right, too, gone deep into the tobacco
farm towns and mountain hollers to nd the authentic
goods. Now he had time, money, and his 1989 Chevrolet
K5 Blazer (which he still drives). He’d do it himself.
Early grabbed a state map and folded it into quar-
ters. Those would be his zones, and he’d start in the
mountains and cover the whole state by quarters to
the ocean. He developed a routine over the two and a
half years he spent on research. He’d leave his oce in
Winston-Salem on Thursday aernoon and roam from
Friday through Sunday, sampling spoonfuls of chopped
pork along the way. “I didn’t know what was out there.
That was the whole point,” Early tells me from across a
scarred oak table at Little Richard’s BBQ in Clemmons.
Little Richard’s is not Early’s favorite, but it’s a conve-
nient eight miles from his home, which doubles as the
headquarters of the North Carolina Barbecue Society.
“I didn’t know where to stay, because these little towns
don’t have chambers of commerce, and I didn’t know
the names of the motels or whatever.
“I had my clothes and sleeping bag, and if I got there
in the middle of the night and couldn’t nd a motel, I’d
just go to a truck stop and pull under a light, sleep in the
truck, and clean up in the truck stop’s bathroom. And
at 4 o’clock on a Friday morning, I was asking people,
‘Where’s the best barbecue?’”
Early did that, or some version of it, in all 100 counties
and compiled his ndings in a book: The Best Tar Heel
Barbecue: Manteo to Murphy, published in 2002, which
led him to found the Barbecue Society in 2006 and close
his law practice the next year. The assorted ways people
answered his question reveal one of the truths about
Carolina barbecue, which is that it’s not just one ortho-
dox thing. Tastes di¢er. People swear by eastern-stylewhole hog and vinegar-based sauce, or western-style
shoulder and dip, or red slaw instead of white, or hush-
puppies as a side instead of Brunswick stew—and those
are just the variations in North Carolina. We’re not
even getting into what “barbecue” means in Memphis
or Kansas City or Texas, what Early refers to as the rst,
second, and third bases of the Great American Barbecue
Diamond. North Carolina is, of course, home.
In his book, Early surmises jokingly that the rst
recorded pig-pickin’ was “on or about June 20, 1584,”
he writes in his book, when the English explorer
Thomas Cavendish landed at Roanoke Island and sam-
pled the natives’ succulent, slow-cooked pork. Best
thing he ever ate, supposedly. Through the centuries,
as eastern North Carolina transformed into an expanse
of hog and tobacco farms, pig-pickin’s became a kind
of celebratory ritual, how farmers and eld hands
marked a successful tobacco harvest. That’s the tradi-
tion Early was born into and soaked in as a boy in the
1940s, when he spent time with his mother’s side of the
family in Vance County, northeast of Raleigh. It was, he
remembers, the only occasion when white and black
people would ditch the oppressive customs of Jim Crow
and stu¢ themselves at a communal table. “They ate
everything about a pig but the squeal,” he says. “I mean,
everything.”
Like so much else in the United States, the tradition
moved west and picked up its own characteristics—
such as the preference for pork shoulder and ketchup-
infused sauce that distinguishes the western (or Pied-
mont) style, which orbits around Lexington. North
Carolinians spend hours arguing over which is better.
But the distinction matters less to Jim Early than the dif-
ference between barbecue—actual, honest-to-Caven-
dish barbecue—and just cooked pig meat. Barbecue is
cooked slowly at low temperature over live coals. That’s
it. That’s the denition. Full damned stop.bout 20 years
ago, toward
the end of a
long career
practicing law and aer a
couple of windfalls from
medical cases, Jim Early
decided to hit the road.
PETER TAYLOR