Billy Edd Wheeler

Sometimes laughter is the best medicine. In the midst of all that may bother us--crime, drugs, poisons in the water, poor health--people still take time to make each other laugh. If you listen on the street corners, in the cafes, at the kitchen tables of America, you'll hear people telling funny stories and jokes. Hometown humor helps pull us through. In this book, Loyal Jones and Billy Edd Wheeler have gathered the best of America's hometown humor. The selections range from one-liners ("My wife's cooking was so bad, the flies got together to mend the screens") to epigrams ("To do good is noble, but to tell others to do good is also noble and a lot less trouble"), to longer stories (like the one about why the Devil tried to give Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart back to St. Peter after they were assigned to his place). Contributors include regular folks, as well as celebrities like Sarah Ophelia Cannon (a.k.a. Minnie Pearl), Tom T. Hall, John Ed McConnell, the late Sen. Sam J. Ervin, and the nine students of the Clinton County Elementary School in Clinton County, Kentucky.

As you chuckle through these tales you find the thread of self-effacing, good-natured warmth that characterizes Appalachia. -Southern LivingFrom the people of the Appalachian Mountains comes a special brand of humor: dry, colorful and earthy, aimed sometimes at the hillbilly's own foibles, but often at the outside world's pretenses, too. As longtime fans of and contributors to Appalachian lore, Jones and Wheeler collected the material for this popular and timeless volume at the Festival of Appalachian Humor sponsored by the Appalachian Center at Berea College. Includes jokes and yarns on such topics as hunting, lawyers and doctors, alcohol, and religion, along with essays on the nature and origins of humor. This hilarious collection based in Appalachia America will teach readers the importance of resourcefulness, trustworthiness and respect.

Billy Edd Wheeler is a veteran of the country music scene, having worked as a Nashville songwriter since the early 1960s. Billy Edd knows country, and, as title-holder to the moniker "Dean of Country Humor," he also knows funny. "It's impossible to attend a recording session in Nashville without hearing lots of stories and jokes," Billy Edd observes. After all, stories and humor form the foundation of country music. Wheeler has gathered jokes from some of the greatest names in country music in what reads like outtakes from a long-running recording session. The list on contributors spans the music scene from Patsy Cline to Jimmy Dean.

Appalachian humor can be dry, colorful, and earthy. The chapters vary greatly ranging from topics of Love and Marriage; Schools, Religion; Lawyers; Mountaineers and the Law; Animals and Hunting; Mountaineers and City Folks; Health and Medicine; and Rural Life. In Curing the Cross-Eyed Mule, songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler and folklorist Loyal Jones have combined to give you the biggest serving of Appalachian mountain humor since their bestselling Laughter in Appalachia.

The phenomenal success of Laughter in Appalachia, Loyal Jones' and Billy Edd Wheeler's first collection of humor (now in its twelfth printing), says something about the importance of humor in our lives, and the talent Jones and Wheeler have in finding the best of it. More Laughter in Appalachia, their fourth collection of Southern mountain humor, may well be their funniest and most comprehensive collection to date. Packed with humorous jokes, anecdotes, poems, riddles, and song, not to mention a nineteenth-century sermon a backwoods political speech, and a comical arrest warrant, this collection is thick with artifacts of Southern wit. Whether you are interested in humor as part of our cultural heritage or you just want a good laugh, you will find this mountain of Southern humor heartwarming and sidesplitting.