By Dan Murphy

Executive Director, Meat Industry Hall of Fame

A legend has left us.

Jimmy Dean, the quintessential American storyteller, actor, songwriter, TV personality—and of course, meat industry entrepreneur—died peacefully at his Richmond, Va.-area home last Sunday.

He left us way too soon. Before he’d had a chance to attend his own induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October, an honor long overdue for one of the original voices of the genre, a Grammy Award winner and the man who introduced America to such country music stars as Patsy Cline, Roy Clark and Roger Williams during his years as host of television variety shows on both ABC and CBS.

Before he’d had a chance, as a Charter Member of the Meat Industry Hall of Fame, to fill out his first ballot to vote for this year’s class of Nominees to the Hall.

Before he’d had another opportunity to charm a reporter with tales of his years in show business, his ground-breaking stint as the first country singer to play Las Vegas and the parties he attended—and hosted—for a long list of celebrities who all seemed to come away from their encounters with the genial entertainer saying the same things I once said after a lengthy interview with him at a roadside diner near his sausage plant in Osceola, Iowa, years ago: “He’s one of the nicest, funniest and most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

What other conclusion can you draw about a man who, as a bona fide and very recognizable celebrity, spent his first 15 minutes after entering a crowded diner shaking hands, saying hello and offering kind words and a humorous crack or two to virtually every single person in there? Jimmy Dean worked a room the way Sinatra took over a song. With a signature style that nobody bothered to copy—because it wouldn’t have flown.

But Dean never had to force himself to “be nice” to people; he was a naturally warm, friendly person with a disarming smile and a handshake that would impress a blacksmith, who could command a crowd just by standing there, all six-foot three inches of his trademark boots, Stetson hat and belt buckle big enough and gaudy enough for a rodeo star.

As a journalist, you didn’t “interview” Jimmy Dean. You could toss aside all your carefully prepared questions, ’cause son, ya’ll just sit down and we’ll have a conversation, one that spun tales of larger-than-life exploits fit for a Hollywood script—which, by the way, someone ought to put together some day. You had to be good listener, because it took time to scroll through Dean’s lengthy career as a performer, songwriter, band leader, television host and actor—before you even got to the part where he dials down his show business career in the late 1960s and launches a meat company nobody expected to be anything other than the usual celebrity-endorsed vanity brand that’d be here today, vanished tomorrow.

Instead, he worked hard at building the Jimmy Dean Meat Company into a highly successful, quality-driven operation that eventually became the No. 1 selling brand of fresh sausage in the country. No matter how hard you worked to convey the significance of that accomplishment, however, Dean merely shrugged it off by saying, “I always insisted on quality, because I believed that’s what people appreciated.”

After he sold his company to Sara Lee, which initially took a step back with some ill-advised marketing tactics, Dean took a final turn in front of the cameras for a memorable ad campaign in the 1990s, joining that exclusive club of company owners and CEOs who can actually communicate sincerity as they’re pitching the product. Sincerity was never a stretch for Jimmy, because everything he did, he poured his heart into it, and the genial entertainer that millions of fans watched each week on TV, or listened to across a thousand AM radio dials, was as hard a worker, as demanding a leader and as tough a boss as you’re ever gonna find.

Show up a few minutes late for an appointment with Mr. Dean, and you’ll spend the next hour trying to regain his trust. In fact, he once kicked Hee Haw star Roy Clark (himself a Country Music Hall of Famer) out of his band for arriving late to gigs.

Likewise, Dean never had much love lost for the corporate suits who wear their MBAs like badges on their lapels, preferring instead to simply “talk to the people about the things they care about,” as he once famously told a producer attempting to get him to “stick to the script.”

Jimmy Dean wrote his own script for a life that spanned America’s coming of age as a television generation; who played venues around the world on the strength of his mega-hit “Big Bad John,” which he dreamed up on a plane ride to a Nashville recording session; who wrote and recorded a string of hit songs and introduced a nation to the names and faces and voices of some of our most beloved entertainers; who subbed as a guest host for the likes of Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin; and who, as kid with little formal education growing up dirt poor in West Texas, achieved a level of business success that can only be described as astonishing.

While his name lives on as a brand that’s as familiar to American families as any that populate the nation’s supermarket meat cases, it’s with a heartfelt sense of loss that there will never be a chance to sit down with him one more time and ask, “Hey, tell us about that polar bear you hunted in Russia,” or, “So what was Sinatra really like?” or, “Sing a couple verses of one of your favorites, okay?”

His widow Donna Meade Dean, herself a veteran singer and performer, has said that Jimmy Dean was like no other man she’d ever met. From his unique “talking style” on his records to his made-for-TV mannerisms to his shrewd business sensibilities to his rare talent for putting into words and songs the heartfelt emotions of love and loss and family and friends that all of us share, he was truly unique.

An original. One of a kind.

His passage to the life beyond this world is no doubt a happy one for him. But it’s a sad day for the rest of us to realize that even 81 years on center stage just wasn’t long enough. ×

» Jimmy Dean’s career retrospective appears on the Country Music Hall of Fame website at www.countrymusichalloffame.org/full-list-of-inductees/view/jimmy-dean