Jimmy Dean: Death of a Legend

Jimmy Ray Dean - country music singer, actor, sausage king - passed away on June 13, 2010, only a few short months after being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, as well as returning to the Virginia home that burned in the spring of 2009. It was in this home that he died, at the age of 81.

When I was in high school, my mother bought a set of audio tapes with old country and western music on them. It was some sort of collection from the '50s and '60s called "Country Memories," or something to that basic effect. On the B side of one of the tapes was the Jimmy Dean song "Big Bad John".

We lived in a very rural area at that time, so we spent a lot of time in the car driving "into town. Those tapes got a lot of play in the old cassette deck. No matter how many times I listened to that song, though, it never failed to give me goose bumps. Dean's unique voice and gift for storytelling remained powerful through what must have been hundreds of plays of "Big Bad John" over those few years, and nearly 30 years after it was first released.

It was always hard for me to reconcile that deeply tragic song with the affable, unassuming man on the sausage commercials. I had grown up with his smiling face on my television, and had developed a rather biased image of him in my mind. So, somehow, discovering in my teens that his was the haunting narrative voice of "Big Bad John" was something of a puzzle for my brain to try to work around. Since "16 Tons" was on one of the tapes too, it didn't help matters, since I had a hard time remembering that it was Jimmy Dean and not Tennessee Ernie Ford, given that both songs involved mining and deep-voiced singing.

It was nearly the only song that one or more of us didn't sing along with, since its spoken word nature made that virtually impossible. My younger sister has never been a fan of tragic songs either, forcing us many times to change the station when songs like "Leader of the Pack" of "Last Kiss" were playing. But, for whatever reason, we rarely skipped "Big Bad John", despite its dark ending. And now, with Dean's death, it has become even sadder still.

Sources:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jimmy-dean-20100615,0,948588.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/arts/15dean.html?hpw

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/article/DEAN151_20100614-234002/351224/