JIMMY DEAN

Are these signs that might define a prolific career? Someone who's a musician, a singer, a jokester, a spoken word artist with a knack for bringing listeners to tears, a television show host and Muppet's best buddy...and a self-professed good ol' country boy...in addition to a connosieur of meat that's well-cooked and seasoned to most people's taste, making him a highly-successful businessman as a result. I'm sure there are even more phrases that describe Jimmy Ray Dean, the country music star of the 1950s through '70s who shared his name with a talented, ill-fated actor of the same generation, the difference being the latter actually had a slightly different first name (that would be James, of course).

His life began in 1928 in Olton, Texas, a wide spot on State Highway 70, before his family moved 30 miles eastward across the panhandle to the Seth Ward district of Plainview. His parents split up when Jimmy was very young; living in poverty with his mother and brother was a situation that motivated his ambition as an adult. While attending Baptist church every week, he sang in the choir and later began learning to play guitar, accordion and harmonica, mostly without any instruction. At Plainview High School he was center for the football team but dropped out at age 16 to join the Merchant Marines. At 18 he joined the Army Air Force and as a radio operator became known among fellow servicemen as an unusual type of comedian: he sent funny messages using morse code.

Towards the end of his service, Jimmy was stationed at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., during which time he performed country music locally with three other servicemen as The Tennessee Haymakers. After his discharge he started a new band, The Texas Wildcats, which included Fiddlin' Buck Ryan, guitarist Herb Jones, steel guitarist Marvin Carroll and singer-guitarist Mary Klick. With Jimmy on vocals and accordion, the band performed in nightclubs, dance halls and small auditoriums in the D.C and Arlington, Virginia area. In 1952 they were spotted by Connie B. Gay, a country music impresario based in D.C. with widespread influence in helping "hillbilly" acts enter the mainstream. Soon Dean had a contract with the Los Angeles-based 4 Star Records; his very first release, "Bumming Around," credited on the label to Jimmie Dean, became a top ten country hit in the spring of 1953 (it was written by country singer Pete Graves, who'd recorded the song on 4 Star several months earlier with his Bunkhouse Buddies). Despite this success, Dean was dropped from the label after two more singles.

Jimmy made his first appearance on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in May 1953. He and his Texas Wildcats became regulars on Connie B. Gay's Town and Country Time radio show on WARL-AM in Arlington, transitioning to television by '55 (WTOP channel 9) in a version that was syndicated to dozens of markets while continuing to originate from Arlington. After joining Mercury Records, six singles were released in a little over a year, some billed to the Texas Wildcatsss, before he parted ways with the label in late 1956. The TV career, meanwhile, went full steam ahead with dance group The Echo Inn Cloggers and guitarists Buck Owens and Billy Grammer putting in time with the Wildcats.

1957 was a breakout year for the still-youthful Jimmy (not yet 30!); signing with Columbia Records, he was teamed with Ray Ellis and his orchestra. This led to his first pop hit, "Deep Blue Sea," followed later in the year by a song inspired by a children's book character created by comic artist Jim Unwin, "Little Sandy Sleighfoot" (Santa's saddest helper due to his 3-foot-three-inch feet), which reached the top 40 the final week in December. Despite a lack of hits the following year, CBS-TV picked up his series, moved him (but not his crew) to New York City and retitled it The Jimmy Dean Show with a weekday afternoon schedule (times varied in each city) starting on September 15, 1958. New cast members included vocal and dance group The Double Daters. Pop singer Jennie Smith (who'd just signed with Columbia) was a frequent guest and current hitmakers like Patsy Cline and George Hamilton IV appeared on the show. Despite this national exposure, Jimmy's singles weren't selling; there was only one chart listing in the spring of 1959, "Sing Along" (with an arrangement and backing singers strangely similar to Columbia boss Mitch Miller's Sing Along recordings). Dean's CBS series ended at about the same time.

Two more hitless years went by and his time with the industry's top record company was in jeopardy. He wrote and recorded a mostly-spoken song, first titled "Big John" then changed to "Big Bad John," by which it became widely known. The story of a miner who '...stood six-foot-six and weighed 245' but died rescuing his fellow workers from a disaster, it encountered resistance from disc jockeys over the line 'at the bottom this mine lies one hell of a man...', so it was replaced on second pressings by 'big, big man...' (even though an earlier reference to '...this man-made hell' was oddly left intact). To complicate matters, The Shirelles had an unrelated "Big John" song that debuted on the charts the same week as Dean's working man's narrative. But it didn't matter; his record was the most-talked-about hit of the fall of 1961, spending five weeks at number one (in addition to ten weeks atop Billboard's recently-established Easy Listening survey) and selling over a million copies. A few months later it received five Grammy nominations (including Record of the Year) and won in the category Best Country and Western Recording.

He "mined" the spoken word motif for his next two singles, "Dear Ivan" (speculating on how a Russian working man might feel about the Cold War) and "To a Sleeping Beauty" (a love letter to his young daughter). The latter's flip side, "The Cajun Queen," served as a sequel to "Big Bad John," a fantasy number about reviving the man who lay dead in the mine. All three reached the top 30 of the pop and R&B charts and the Easy Listening top ten. Next came yet another "John" song, "P.T. 109," telling the story of Lieutenant John F. Kennedy's experience commanding a World War II Torpedo Boat; the single was a top ten hit in the spring of '62 and landed a Grammy nom for Best C&W Recording. The story became a popular film starring Cliff Robertson as JFK, released under the same title as the song a year later, in June 1963.

Next up, "Steel Men" told another tragic tale, this time of workers building a bridge; its flip side, "Little Bitty Big John," speculated on the 'giant of a man' having fathered a son. It was the final chapter in what had turned into a "Big Bad John" quadrilogy (that is, if you count the one about Kennedy). Switching gears, "Little Black Book" covered on-the-rebound romance and reached the top 30 hit in October '62. "Gonna Raise a Rukus Tonight" came across as a non-political military protest song ('...the food is poor and the pay is too!') and was his last notable hit for the next few years. Much of the output from this period was self-penned by Dean, occasionally with collaborators.

When Jack Paar quit NBC's Tonight Show in March 1962, the network lined up Johnny Carson as his replacement, despite his being under contract with another network until the end of September. For the next six months, a grab-bag of guest hosts took up the slack (if only those shows still existed!) including Groucho Marx, Jerry Lewis, Hugh Downs, Steve Lawrence, Mort Sahl, Soupy Sales, Bob Cummings, rare-at-the-time female host Arlene Francis and soon-to-be talk show stars (and friendly Carson competitors) Merv Griffin and Joey Bishop. Dean took his turn sitting in (a full week at one point) and it led to big things with the same network Carson would soon be leaving.

Jimmy Dean, Rowlf

ABC-TV's version of The Jimmy Dean Show premiered in the fall of 1963 and enjoyed a three-season run. High-profile country and pop music stars appeared between Dean's "country corn" openings and comedy skits. The variety series provided a breakthrough for Jim Henson's Muppets with the sidekick status of Rowlf the dog, voiced by Henson himself and animated by Henson and Frank Oz. Rowlf (pronounced just like it's spelled: "ralph" but with on "ow" sound in the middle) had been featured the previous year in a series of commercials for Purina Dog Chow (sometimes joined by Baskerville the Hound) before moving up to network TV stardom. Jimmy Dean was very fond of Rowlf, who provided a lot of the show's comedy and also sang and played the ukulele (years later, on The Muppet Show, he was promoted to piano player).

Despite having passed his peak as a top-selling recording act, Dean nevertheless continued making records and scoring an occasional hit. In 1965, at the peak of his TV show's run, he returned to the number one position on the country charts with "The First Thing Ev'ry Morning (And the Last Thing Ev'ry Night)," a romantic tune he'd composed with New Yorker Ruth Roberts (a baseball fan, she'd already co-written "I Love Mickey" (as in Mantle and Teresa Brewer) and "Meet the Mets" for the N.Y. expansion team that debuted in '62. A move to RCA Victor resulted in several more country hits for Jimmy between 1966 and '71: "Stand Beside Me," "Sweet Misery," "I'm a Swinger," "A Thing Called Love, "A Hammer and Nails" and "Slowly," a duet with Dottie West.

Investing in a hog farm seemed an unlikely path to his greatest success, but it led to the founding of the Jimmy Dean Meat Company in 1969 with his brother, Don Dean, in their hometown, Plainview. They ground the meat and their mother, Ruth Taylor Dean, would then season it with her own recipe. As the company grew in the '70s, Jimmy began appearing on commercials for Jimmy Dean's Pure Pork Sausage and the product connected with a large number of breakfast food aficionados - in other words, most Americans. Though the sausage enterprise took more of his time, he continued recording, hitting the country charts with a few more RCA efforts and "Your Sweet Love (Keeps Me Homeward Bound)" in 1973, during a brief return to Columbia.

Occasional acting assignments came his way starting in the late '60s when he served as a semi-regular on Fess Parker's NBC drama Daniel Boone through 1970. The guest hosting stints resumed in the late '60s as he sat in on several late night installments of Bishop's and Griffin's talkfests, continuing occasionally on the latter show until the mid-'70s. There were several TV movies throughout the '70s and one high-profile theatrical film, the sixth installment of the James Bond franchise starring Sean Connery; in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever he played Willard Whyte, a billionaire tycoon who is kidnapped and rescued by agent 007. One other notable film came in 1990 when he starred in Big Bad John, which unfortunately has little in common with the story-inside-the-song.

In 1976 he emerged again with a top 40 pop hit on the Casino label, "I.O.U.," a six-minute spoken word tribute to his still-living mother that reached the country top ten and was certified gold. A remake of "To a Sleeping Beauty" made a brief appearance on the country chart as well. His private life hit a snag in 1990 when he and Mary Sue Wittauer, his wife of nearly 40 years, divorced. The following year he married singer-songwriter Donna Meade and she helped him write his autobiography, Thirty Years of Sausage, Fifty Years of Ham, published in 2004. Five years later their house was seriously damaged in a fire. It was reconstucted at great expense shortly before Jimmy Dean passed away in 2010 at age 81. At his gravesite in Varina, Virginia, near his home, a piano-shaped monument contains an epitaph etched into it, the original uncensored line from his famous hit "Big Bad John": "Here lies one hell of a man."

- Michael Jack Kirby

NOTABLE SINGLES:




MORE ARTISTS

Little Sandy Sleighfoot Big Bad John P.T. 109 Little Black Book Gonna Raise a Rukus Tonight

    Way Back Attack trademark and content Michael Jack Kirby. All rights reserved.