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ORAL HISTORY
Billy Frank Latham
The restaurant industry is recognized as tough work. Compared to the life of a farmer, Billy Frank Latham finds restaurant ownership to be quite easy.
Billy Frank grew up on a farm just six miles outside of Henderson. The son of farmers, he was a farmer himself until the late 1990s. But like so many independent farmers, he could not compete with big agribusinesses and had to end this career. He always loved to eat barbecue, so decided to give it a try, investing in a long-established pit-house.
In a novel twist to the barbecue sandwich, Billy Frank adds sauce to the meat before putting it on the bun; he then mixes sauce and pork to form a patty. He says customers like that their barbecue doesn’t fall out of the bread.
We first visited Bill’s Bar-B-Q in 2003 as part of our initial foray into documenting rural Tennessee ‘cue. Visit the original Bill’s Bar-B-Q page.
