James Eddie McCoy - Oxford, NC

"I'm curious. I'm nosy." - James Eddie McCoy

Eddie McCoy owns a janitorial service in Oxford, North Carolina, a tobacco town of some 10,000 people. A decade ago, badly injured in a car wreck, Eddie's business nearly came to a close. A man who had always been on the move was now unable to work. Frustrated, Eddie went to a doctor who told him, "Try using your head instead of your hands."

Eddie took his passion for local history and a scavenged cassette recorder, and began taping his town, starting with some of Oxford's oldest citizens.

A self-made historian, Eddie has done some 140 interviews since 1979, and knows just about every detail of the life and lore of Oxford: his neighbors, his friends, and total strangers. Eddie records the who, what, when, where, and why of slavery times, of sharecropping, of the civil rights era, of who poured the first concrete in Oxford.

Audio interview with Eddie McCoy