Let Us Now Praise Famous Cooks music and lyrics by Price Walden
Program Note I will never forget the day John T. Edge and I met in his office to talk about what this piece would become. We had each, serendipitously, brought copies of White Trash Cooking, seeing in this one volume all the stories and hopes we wanted to share with the world. After lots of reading and two amazing days of research at the University of Florida library, I found a kindred spirit in Ernest Matthew Mickler and his two books, White Trash Cooking and Sinkin Spells, Hot Flashes, Fits, and Cravins. I saw myself and the women I grew up with in Booneville, Mississippi, on every page, and I knew these were the people we should celebrate. Ernest Matthew Mickler was born in Palm Valley, Florida, in 1940. After a brief career as a country singer and earning an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California, Mickler went back to his Florida roots and cobbled together White Trash Cooking, a collection of 229 recipes and 46 photographs from his travels. Harper Lee called it “a beautiful testament to a stubborn people of proud and poignant heritage,” while Colman Andrews called it “the best American cookbook of the century, by far.” In 1988, Mickler tragically died of AIDS, the very next day after the publication of Sinkin Spells, Hot Flashes, Fits, and Cravins. What follows is a song cycle in name, but, at heart, it is a series of portraits of six women and one man, all either from or suggested by Micklerʼs recipes and writings. In a culture of class warfare and elitism, we have forgotten the skill and ingenuity it takes to produce a cuisine this rich and varied. In this age of “white trash” theme parties and poverty tourism, I hope to restore depth and grace to our cultureʼs caricatures of the human beings that Ernie and I found so much beauty and vitality in. Let Us Now Praise Famous Cooks is a set of six songs, lovingly dedicated to Sarah Taylor Ellis, and performed in memory of Ernest Matthew Mickler, a Renaissance man for the rest of us.