Mississippi One - Text
INFORMATION PENDING. Contributed by Krista Scott. Running time 00:04:30
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born in the largest city of Mississippi, which is Memphis, uh, although my family never moved to Memphis, Memphis moved out to us, we’d been there since the 1840s in the same area. Uhhh, I now live in Oxford, Mississippi, the reason for that is varied, I taught thirty one years in, uh, Memphis city schools, I went to high school in Memphis and went to college here in Old Miss, fell in love with it, it’s God’s school. Uh, anyway I taught thirty one years in, in the Memphis city schools and retired from there and I when I heard an opening was here and got the opening and taught five years regular here and, uh, two years part-time here, so I’ve retired three times from teaching, I just retired from the last two years. First of all, Memphis has a barbecue contest, Memphis in May, and uh, I was on a team and we won the contest in ‘80 and ‘81. But first of all, southern barbeque is always pork. Uh, secondly, the main thing is not the sauce, ever. Uh, most people think once you put barbeque sauce on something, you know from outside of this area that makes it barbeque. No--no indeed it’s the cooking, and the cooking is long and painstaking. For instance, we cooked a whole hog. This takes fourteen hours. Uh, you baste it some as you go with--put a dry baste on it then, uh, vinegar and water to keep it from catching on fire. Uh, anyway, this, this is what we basically won the contest with, but it, its time-consuming. We b’--turn the whole hog one time, and one only. Uh, but, the it, most people out there their idea of barbeque is, you know heat something up and slap a little barbeque sauce on it or another idea is when you grill something outside. Well grilling outside on a, on a common little grill is not barbeque, that’s done in fifteen, twenty minutes and, and barbeque is a very thorough, very slow cooking, the temperature, uh, doesn’t get up above about a hundred and sixty degrees within the meat when I’m barbeque-in. Uh, within the middle of the meat, and its, it’s the slowness of it that does it.
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY JESSICA TIDD 17 APRIL 2008, UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR SANDRA LINDBERG