Dive Bar Jukebox with John Currence
"When I was young and full of grace, and spirited a rattlesnake."
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Welcome back to Dive Bar Jukebox, where every Friday bartenders, writers, chefs, musicians, and a host of dynamic people answer the question: If we were hanging out together at a bar and I put ten credits on the jukebox, what songs would you punch in and why? The answers reveal thoughts on their favorite dive bars along with a hand-picked, annotated 10-song playlist for your weekend listening pleasure.
Please welcome today’s special guest…
John Currence
James Beard Award-winning chef, author, and philanthropist John Currence was born and raised in New Orleans and has lived in Oxford, Mississippi, since 1992 when he opened his first restaurant, City Grocery. The City Grocery Restaurant Group now includes Bouré, Snackbar, and Big Bad Breakfast, which also has outposts in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
Currence is also the author of three bestselling cookbooks, Pickles, Pigs, and Whiskey, Big Bad Breakfast (photographed by Ed Anderson), and Tailgreat.
Currence has been cooking since graduating high school and worked his way through college with kitchen jobs. One of his primary influences in his southern culinary education came under the guidance of Bill Neal at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and later with as the opening sous chef at Gautreau’s in New Orleans. After years working with the Brennan family at several of their famed New Orleans restaurants, Currence went on to open his own fine-dining restaurant in Oxford.
The anchor of The Square in Oxford is undoubtedly City Grocery, a restaurant and bar built in a two-story, former late-19th-century livery stable. Walking up the narrow staircase to the upstairs bar at City Grocery, known simply as “The Bar,” is a familiar rite of passage for regulars and visitors alike, and it’s my favorite place to drink whenever I’m in back in Oxford. In a story I wrote about Oxford’s drinking scene last fall for VinePair, longtime Oxford resident and award-winning writer John T Edge had this to say about The Bar at City Grocery: “It democratizes Oxford because that bar is without pretense, it’s the mechanism that connects us all. When a visiting author comes through town you say, ‘I’ll meet you at The Bar.’ Climbing those stairs is a default mechanism, but it doesn’t mean we ever take that bar for granted.”
Currence also knows a thing or two about hanging out in dive bars and for his Dive Bar Jukebox debut he shares an extended, and opinionated, list of some of his favorites—some long gone and some still kicking. On DBJ we’ve had plenty of bonus tracks, double-albums, and even extended mixes, but when it came time to share his playlist, Currence threw the rules out the window and instead of ten songs came back with 104 songs for a spirited six-and-a-half hour mix of genre-hopping tracks of personal favorites that make up a most excellent soundtrack to mull over while you’re having your next beer and shot.
(Today’s dispatch is a long one and will be truncated in your Inbox. Be sure to click through to read and listen to it in all its glory.)