a person · NCJim Early

James Howard Early Jr. (1939–2021), a Winston-Salem lawyer and cook who founded the North Carolina Barbecue Society in 2006 and led it until his death. His self-published guide, The Best Tar Heel Barbecue: Manteo to Murphy (2002), came out of a search through all hundred counties for pits still cooking pork over wood coals; the society's Historic Barbecue Trail is that list under rules he wrote — wood or charcoal on grates, a house sauce, fifteen years' cooking, no more than two stops in a town.

Early was born in Henderson, grew up in Winston-Salem, took his bachelor's and law degrees at Wake Forest, and practiced law for years before barbecue took over. The search behind the book covered 22,000 miles and about 4,000 hours across the state's hundred counties; he found fewer than thirty restaurants still cooking over wood coals, six of them Black-owned and three owned by women. The society he founded in 2006 set itself to preserve the state's barbecue history and, in its own words, to secure North Carolina's place as the Barbecue Capital of the World; the less formal motto was to cook and eat barbecue as often as possible, preferably among friends. It ran two-day cooking boot camps three times a year — Tanglewood Park in May, Sugar Mountain in July, Castle Hayne in September — teaching whole hog, pork butt, ribs, chicken, brisket and Early's pimento cheese; CNN put the school on a 2012 list of ten cooking schools worldwide, the only one in the United States. He published a monthly magazine, Pigtails, and a second book, Jim Early's Reflections: The Memories and Recipes of a Southern Cook. In September 2017 he closed his law office to run the society full time. He took no side in the east–west argument, and told Our State in 2016 that '99.99 percent of places' now cooked with gas or electricity; the Trail bypasses all of them. He died on June 21, 2021, at 82, weeks after a stroke.

Died June 21, 2021. The society's two web addresses did not resolve when this project checked on September 15, 2026; its Facebook page carries on as a forum, and the Trail's list is reprinted by Our State and others. His 2002 guidebook is held by libraries and sold used.