a person · NCJerry Bledsoe

Jerry Carroll Bledsoe (July 14, 1941 – December 31, 2025), a Greensboro newspaper columnist and author, born in Danville, Virginia and raised in Thomasville, who wrote for the Greensboro Daily News, later the News & Record, for twenty-three years and became a true-crime writer with Bitter Blood (1988), a number-one New York Times bestseller. In barbecue he was Lexington's man: the self-styled 'world's leading, foremost barbecue authority' in a decades-long mock war of columns with Dennis Rogers of the Raleigh News & Observer over ketchup in the sauce.

Bledsoe delivered the Thomasville Tribune at nine, served three years in the Army after high school, and worked at papers in Kannapolis and Charlotte before the Greensboro Daily News, where his columns of the 1970s and 1980s made his name; he was later a contributing editor at Esquire. The barbecue war was one of those columns' running jokes: Bledsoe for the Piedmont's chopped shoulder with its red dip, Rogers for the east's whole hog and clear vinegar, each claiming a title — Bledsoe the world's leading, foremost barbecue authority, Rogers the oracle of the holy grub. Bledsoe wrote that Rogers had ruined any chance of the state being distinguished in its barbecue; Rogers wrote that people who would put ketchup in sauce fed to innocent children were capable of most anything. The joke outlived the columns. When bills to make the Lexington Barbecue Festival the state's official barbecue festival divided the General Assembly in 2005, ABC's World News Tonight came to Greensboro, and Bledsoe gave them 'America loves ketchup' and called vinegar an astringent thing that ruins the taste buds. In 1996 he wrote 'Slaw Crazy', an essay holding that barbecue is always served with slaw in North Carolina and always has been. Bitter Blood, on the Lynch–Newsom–Klenner murders of 1984–85, was followed by Blood Games (1991), Before He Wakes (1994) and Death Sentence (1998); he founded Down Home Press to publish books about North Carolina, and in later years wrote for the Rhino Times, including a long series on the Greensboro police. He died on December 31, 2025, at 84.

Died December 31, 2025, at 84. The Rhino Times, where he last wrote, marked his death the next day; The Assembly's tribute, 'A Hell of a Writer', ran on January 12, 2026.