I can't remember the first time I met John T. Edge. I do remember that I had heard about an organization at Ole Miss called the Southern Foodways Alliance. I was told that it was run by a fellow who was a bit of a savant when it came to Southern culture and food. He sounded like my kind of scholar.

Before long, I was attending SFA events in places such as Greenwood, Miss., and Louisville, Ky. I fielded calls from Edge about good places to eat in rural Arkansas, bought every book he wrote, and helped the organization's filmmaker with a series of short documentaries that were filmed in Arkansas.

Along the way, Wright Thompson, a native of Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta, became another of my favorite writers. Like me, Thompson began his career as a sportswriter.

The University of Missouri has turned out more quality sportswriters than any school I know, including friends and former Arkansas Democrat colleagues such as Kane Webb and the late Bob Holt. That's where Thompson, now 50, attended college after graduating from Lee Academy in Clarksdale.

Between his junior and senior years at Missouri, Thompson was an intern at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He later was a sportswriter there and at the Kansas City Star. He joined ESPN as a writer in 2006. It's Thompson's voice of gravel (I think of it as a young Paul "Bear" Bryant voice) that you hear during the first two rounds of The Masters each spring as he does audio essays for ESPN.

I was appointed to a federal-state partnership known as the Delta Regional Authority by President George W. Bush in 2005. The DRA headquarters is in Clarksdale. I continued to live in Little Rock but averaged two nights a week in Clarksdale for the next four years. I got to know lots of local folks and was told that I should read Thompson's work. I started then, and I haven't stopped.

His father, Walter Thompson, had been a prominent attorney in Clarksdale. Walter Thompson, who died of cancer at age 58 in 2004, was an important figure in Democratic politics in the state. He served as Mississippi finance chairman for John Glenn's 1984 presidential campaign and later became a strong supporter of Bill Clinton. The elder Thompson also played a role in transforming Clarksdale into a destination for blues........

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