"Now listen here," Sonny Boy said. "What you need to do is go back there in the barn and get you a drink and come out here and mingle with these boys and spit on the ground a few times and say some cuss words when you talk to 'em."

Few people understood rural politics better than Sonny Boy.

Joyner, who died last week at age 87, was the longtime political boss of the peanut fields in the northeastern part of the state.

He was a throwback to an earlier age -- when politics was dominated by local courthouse organizations, bosses could deliver the votes, and political patronage was the coin of the realm.

There used to be a lot of Sonny Boy Joyners in North Carolina -- R.W. Goodman of Richmond County, the Ponder brothers of Madison County, Cumberland County Sheriff Ottis Jones.

While some assume that the tobacco, cotton and peanut fields of Eastern North Carolina only grow conservatives, there has also been a populist streak -- the small farmer not quite trusting the big bankers of Charlotte, let alone Wall Street.

Sonny Boy was instrumental in electing a series of progressives in North Carolina -- Kerr Scott to the Senate in 1954, Terry Sanford as governor in 1960 and Jim Hunt over several elections.

In 1972, only two of North Carolina's 100 counties went for unpopular Democrat George McGovern for president. One was Orange County, and the other was Sonny Boy's Northampton County, where Joyner, who was white, learned early to work across racial lines.

"The Democratic Party has done more for the little man than any organization in the state," Sonny Boy once remarked.

Sonny Boy was rewarded for his work -- Sanford named him to the agriculture board, Bob Scott appointed him to the commerce and industry board, and Hunt to the transportation board. There is a stretch of road in Eastern North Carolina known as "T.G. 'Sonny Boy' Joyner Highway."

Joyner, a farmer, fertilizer salesman and peanut farmer, was raised in politics. He was the youngest of 15 children, which is how he got his name. His father was sheriff. Four generations of Joyners served in the legislature.

There is a story from the 1960 campaign, when Sanford and his key fundraiser, Lauch Faircloth, were campaigning in the northeastern part of the state. There were few hotels, so they stayed in Joyner's two-story manor house, built in 1801, in Garysburg. Because they didn't have beds for everyone, Sanford and Faircloth shared. (The two later had a falling out, and Faircloth unseated Sanford in the 1992 U.S. Senate race.)

"People down in that part of the state don't think a thing about doubling up in a double bed," Sanford told John Drescher, the New and Observer managing editor, in his book about the 1960 governor's race, "Triumph of Good Will."

"As I recall," Sanford said of Faircloth, "he didn't snore."

Only Sonny Boy could have gotten two future U.S. senators to share a bed.