Jones, an actor, former congressman and now an author, was the good old boy warm-up act for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

"The party has forgotten the Waffle House Democrats," Jones would say, wearing an ever-present baseball cap. But Edwards, who grew up in mill towns, would remember them when he gets to the White House because he had not gotten above his raisin', he said.

I knew he had played Cooter Davenport in the hit television series "The Dukes of Hazzard" (1979-85.) I also knew Jones had served two terms in Congress from Georgia. But until I met him, I never realized that Jones was an Eastern North Carolina native who bled Carolina blue.

Jones is coming to the Triangle this week, plugging his readable, candid new autobiography, "Redneck Boy in the Promised Land."

It is a story of how Jones, 66, a native of Tarboro, grew up poor in railroad worker housing in Virginia, without electricity or indoor plumbing in his early years.

As a UNC-Chapel Hill student, Jones got hooked on acting and politics. The Playmakers Theatre gave him his first stage. And the civil rights movement gave him a cause. Jones was arrested at sit-ins at the Tar Heel Sandwich Shop and The Rock Pile in bids to get them integrated.

Several friends were sentenced to six months of hard labor at a state prison farm for the sit-ins.

At an integrated party at a home in the University Heights neighborhood, Jones was shot at by angry whites. Even in Chapel Hill, things could get rough during the civil rights movement.

Though Jones succeeded as an actor, his personal life was often a mess. A heavy-drinking, women-chasing good old boy, he eventually became an alcoholic. He would have five wives.

After hitting bottom at age 36, Jones sobered up. Soon afterward, he won Hazzard County fame with Boss Hogg, Daisy Duke, The General Lee and the rest of the cast.

His TV fame enabled him to run for Congress. When reporters asked about his checkered background, Jones replied with humor.

"There was a time in my life when I spent 90 percent of my money on whiskey and women," he said during his campaign. "The rest of it I just wasted."

Later, he was asked whether he smoked marijuana.

"I experimented with it twice," Jones said, "once from 1957 until 1961 and once from 1963 until 1978." He said he never exhaled.

Jones was elected to Congress in 1988 but lost his seat four years later.

He hit the campaign trail again last year, because he liked Edwards' little-guy populism -- and because his buddy Dave "Mudcat" Saunders worked for Edwards.

"John was a terrific candidate," Jones said last week while on book tour in Tennessee.

But he could never raise the money or gain the media attention of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. People criticized Edwards as an angry populist.

"I think 80 percent of people in this country are angry populists," Jones said. "In the end, it was just a matter of the dough."

Though he thinks Republican Sen. John McCain is "a great guy," Jones is now a redneck for Obama.

Jones will appear at The Regulator in Durham on Wednesday, Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh on Friday, and McIntyre's Fine Books in Pittsboro on July 10. All events are at 7 p.m.