Updated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Project Led to Mississippi Homecoming


Jimmy Thomas

When the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture first hit bookstores in 1989, critics hailed it as a groundbreaking, comprehensive classification of the country’s most fascinating region.

But that was 1989.

There’s no mention in that first massive volume, for instance, of Bill Clinton, then just the rinky-dink governor of Arkansas. Southern foodways, a body of scholarship that had not even started to rev its engines at the University of Mississippi 14 years ago, did not merit its own section. Perhaps the greatest omission of the work: no article devoted to Johnny Cash, the recently departed Man in Black, whose lasting importance to Southern music deepened in the '90s.

Jimmy Thomas, a 1994 Ole Miss graduate with degrees in English and philosophy, recently moved from Manhattan back home to Mississippi to help change that. Thomas signed on for a five-year project to help update and expand the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. “We’ll be filling in some of the gaps in the subjects,” Thomas said. “I just finished the article on Johnny Cash. We’re also adding Ma Rainey and Woody Guthrie, who weren’t included in the original, either.”

The second edition of the encyclopedia will also address changes in the South since 1989. Several articles on globalization as well as entries on automobile manufacturing will be added. The section on ethnicity is being dramatically expanded to account for demographic changes, and a new volume on linguistics, edited by Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson, will also be produced to address the constantly evolving landscape o Southern phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and colloquialisms.

The new version of the encyclopedia is scheduled to come out in individual subject volumes, Thomas said, rather than 1,656 pages in one back-breaking book. Ann J. Abadie, associate director of the Center and an associate editor of the original encyclopedia, said releasing the work in paperback volumes should both reduce its cost and make it more accessible, especially in school classrooms.

Four to five subject volumes will be released per year. At least 20 percent of the total encyclopedia will be new material, Thomas said. Of the five first subject volumes scheduled for release in 2005, one, Foodways, is entirely new. That volume is edited by John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center.

The update project has actually been in the works for over a year now. One of the encyclopedia’s original editors, Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center, and Abadie are both still working on the project. They hired Thomas to take the reins as managing editor this spring after a highly competitive search.

Thomas, editor of the local entertainment weekly Oxford Town from 1997 to 2000, had been working in Manhattan at Guideposts magazine. The Leland, Mississippi, native and his wife, Annie Walker Thomas, an Oxford native, enjoyed New York City but dreamed of going home. “We just couldn’t get good catfish up there,” Thomas said. “And the winters were brutal.”

The young couple were nudged south by Annie’s father, who mailed them a clipping from the Oxford Eagle announcing that the Center was looking for a project coordinator for the encyclopedia. “I looked at Annie and said, ‘You want to go home?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And that was it,” Thomas said. “I did everything I knew to do to get this job.” Thomas works from an airy office in a turret in the antebellum Barnard Observatory, a space, he notes, that would cost him a fortune in Manhattan. His wife opened a funky, New York-influenced boutique called Metamorphosis near the Oxford Square.

As managing editor of the encyclopedia, it’s his responsibility to contact the original contributors, of which there are more than 800, and either solicit new articles or revisions and updates to existing ones. “The people I’ve contacted so far are so happy to contribute to this project again,” Thomas said. “They’re honored to write for such a prestigious volume, and they all write for free.”

Thomas is also hunting for new contributors and uses events like the Porter L. Fortune History Symposium and the Southern Foodways Symposium at the University to cherry-pick some of the nation’s leading scholars and talents.

Early in 2005, look for the first five subject volumes in the series from the University of North Carolina Press: History, Manners, and Myth; Religion; Foodways; Geography; and Ethnicity. New volumes are scheduled to be released each year after that.

The Thomases, Mississippi ex-pats in the tradition of William Faulkner and Willie Morris, will likely find another reason to stay in Oxford by then. “I’m very excited to be back in Oxford and to be able to work on a project like this with people like Charles Wilson and Ann Abadie,” Thomas said. “I feel very, very lucky.”

Angela Moore
Photograph by Bruce Newman