Meat-industry maven and show-biz superstar Jimmy Dean spent 30 years selling sausage, but a lifetime being a ham

[NOTE: This article was originally published in Meat Marketing & Technology magazine in 2002]

RICHMOND, Va. – To walk through the Virginia homestead of Jimmy Dean and his wife Donna Meade Dean, a country vocalist and songwriter herself whom Dean met on the set of a country music TV show in 1989, is to stroll past the memories of a man who made it big in the business.

Which business? Take your pick: Meat processing, country music, network television and big-screen movies.

He made his mark in all of them.

The mementos marking the milestones of Dean’s lengthy entertainment career line the walls of his modest but sumptuously furnished compound, situated plantation-like on 180 acres known as Chaffin’s Bluff, along the banks of the historic James River.

The area is rich in history – the site of the first English colony, first tobacco farm and a number of key Civil War battlefields. Dean’s life is equally rich in memories: They fill cabinets, shelves and bookcases and most available wall space. Photos of everyone from Elvis to Sinatra to George Bush, framed albums covers, five gold records and a well-worn Grammy for his 1961 mega-hit “Big Bad John.”

(The statuette itself is a compact Ford Falcon-size little gramophone on a wood base – nothing like the super-sized gold hunks handed out these days. Asked about a very visible dent in the horn, Dean casually noted, “Yeah, it survived a lot of years of kids playing with it.”)

In fact, his home could qualify as a shrine to a fascinating and successful career – only Dean is decidedly alive and well and fueled with the same charm, charisma and class in his eighth decade that propelled him to the top of country-western charts 40 years ago and to the No. 1 spot in branded sausage sales.

His days as a hotshot entertainer are long past, but decked out in his trademark Stetson, ostrich skin boots and gold-and-diamond belt buckle the size of a dinner plate, the 6-foot, 3-inch Dean still commands a lot of looks – some them the quizzical “Who’s he?” kind – and carries a casual but commanding presence among friends and business associates.

“Sometimes I look back over my life, and I can’t hardly believe I did all those things,” Dean says without a trace of self-consciousness.

But his accomplishments speak for themselves, in the studio and in the boardroom.

The business beat

Launching, nurturing and eventually selling to Sara Lee Corp. the sausage business that bears his name qualifies as a remarkable business accomplishment by any standard.

Dean’s not the first celebrity to have his face on a food product. In fact, other country legends, such as Ray Price and Charlie Pride, also tried marketing a branded sausage line to their Southern audiences back in ’60s and ’70s.

“Why did they fail, when I was able to succeed? Quality,” Dean says. “From the very beginning I insisted on top-quality sausage, and I never changed my mind on that.”

In 1968, as his show business career started to wind down, Dean opened his first fresh pork sausage plant in Plainview, Texas, and soon expanded into Louisiana and Oklahoma.

By 1972, he’d stopped recording regularly, but Jimmy Dean Sausage had opened a new plant in Osceola, Iowa, and Dean took a more active role in marketing and operations. By 1984, when he sold his company to Sara Lee, Jimmy Dean was the No. 1-selling breakfast sausage.

When the Osceola plant completed a major expansion in 1988, Dean cut the ribbon along with then-Gov. Terry Bransted of Iowa. But for two hours before the ceremony, he held court in a truckstop cafe on the edge of town.

After greeting pretty near every single customer in the place, he settled into a cane-backed wooden chair and talked candidly about some of the struggles his company endured as the business grew.

“There was a time when I stepped away [from the business], maybe too far away,” he admitted. “We stopped focusing on some of the things I felt were important.”

Like the advertising message.

“They wanted all these fancy scripts and special effects,” he recalls of a commercial shoot some 10 years ago. “I told them New York producers, just start the cameras, let ’em roll, and I’ll give you a commercial.”

Without notes and without hesitation, Dean simply smiled into the bright red eye of the camera – as he’d done a thousand times before – and talked about how much he cared about quality, how great the sausage tasted and how he’d guarantee every customer would enjoy the product, or get their money back.

Nothing fancy, but it’s doubtful if more than a handful of corporate chieftains have ever sounded as sincere and convincing as Jimmy Dean still does even today in his latest series of ads for the firm’s hot new “Fresh Taste. Fast” line of pre-cooked links and patties.

“I just smile and talk to the folks,” he says. “I just act like myself.”

It’s an act that’s had a run of more than a half century.

The cluster of houses Dean calls home includes Casa del Rio, a 3,500 square-foot party room with a staging area for the musical performances Jimmy and Donna and can still be coaxed to perform. Among other artifacts, a huge polar bearskin rug dominates the room.

Did you bag that bear in Alaska? Dean is asked.

“Actually, at the time we were in Russia, and if they’d known about it then, I might not be here today,” he says with a disarming smile.

The hard road to success

In reality, tracking down that bear was easy compared with the lengthy path Dean traveled to arrive at the stardom he eventually achieved.

Born on a farm in Plainview, Texas, in 1928, Dean grew up dirt poor, pulling cotton sacks at six years old. As a kid, he spent a “whole lot of time digging ditches, cleaning chicken coops and stealing watermelons,” as he recalls. At 18, he joined the Air Force and while stationed at Bolling Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., launched his career as an entertainer singing songs spiced with some tall Texas tales.

Dean started out at local after-hours clubs, making $25 a week plus tips. After his discharge in 1948, he formed the Texas Wildcats, which became a local favorite on WARL radio in Arlington, Va., and by 1952, was touring military bases in the Caribbean.

Not a bad gig for the young country boy, especially when Dean’s first single, “Bummin’ Around” (“I’m free as the breeze and I’ll do as I please, Got nothin’ to lose, not even the blues, just bumming around”), sold more than 700,000 copies and rose to No. 5 in the country charts.

His career was far from bumming, though.

In between logging 10 hours a week on WARL, Dean found time to appear on the “Town and Country Time” show on ABC-TV affiliate WMA, which was broadcast every Saturday night from the Capital Arena in Washington, D.C. It was the beginning of what would be nearly two decades among country music’s elite.

In 1957, Dean moved to Connecticut with his family, rented a house in Greenwich (for $350 a month!), and launched “Country Style,” a live, national television show from New York City that CBS snapped up on the strength of a half-hour kinescope of Dean’s D.C. show.

It created strenuous demands on the performers, as each show was an actual live performance. In fact, Dean hosted two telecasts of “The Morning Show,” one for the Eastern Time Zone and one for the Central Time Zone. Rehearsals started at 5 a.m., which meant rolling out of the sack at 3:30 every morning.

“It was a killer schedule,” Dean admits. “I’d drive to the studio in my purple ’57 Olds, and the only people I’d see were drunks heading home from the night before.”

The show featured a lot of singers, Broadway actors and big stars, such as Della Reese and Sammy Davis, Jr. “I didn’t feel it was ‘country’ enough, but we got great reviews,” Dean recalls. “One critic said I looked so laid back and comfortable I made Perry Como look like a bundle of nerves.”

Dean had reason to be nervous, though, because despite strong ratings, the show was cancelled in 1961. It took two years to resume his television career, this time on ABC with a program called “The Jimmy Dean Show,” which aired Thursday nights from 1963 to 1966.

On his ABC show, Dean served, as he puts it, “as producer, arranger, choreographer and performer,” and was dubbed by critics “The Dean of Country.”

To this day, he defends the vaudeville-like format, and points out that he introduced big stars early in their careers.

“I brought Roy Clark (of “Hee Haw: fame) on as a regular guest, and I showcased a whole lot of young performers,” he says. “Some of ’em went on to become real stars, like Roger Miller and Patsy Cline.”

Not to mention Rawlf, one of Jim Henson’s earliest Muppets, who had a comedy segment with Jimmy each week.

Ironically, both Cline (1973) and Miller (1995) are in the Country Music Hall of Fame; Dean is not.

You might expect a bit of rancor, but Dean says he doesn’t worry about not being in the Hall. He relates a touching story about his relationship with Miller, the self-titled “King of the Road.”

“Roger had his problems throughout his life, but he was one heck of a talented singer,” Dean recalls. “Years later, he sent me a door handle mounted on a plaque titled, ‘The Golden Doorknob.’ I didn’t know what to make of it until I read the inscription: Thanks for opening so many doors for me.”

Making of a country legend

Doors were opening for Dean as well, as his recording career began to take off. In 1957, he signed with Columbia Records, and a few years later, he struck gold.

It might not have been Abe Lincoln on the train to Gettysburg, but in 1961, on his way to a recording session in Nashville, Dean scrawled on a piece of scrap paper the lyrics that become a smash hit and his signature song.

Earlier that summer, Dean had played in summer stock, where he met a 6-foot, 6-inch actor he nicknamed “Big John.”

“On the plane to Nashville, I was trying to compose a song for a recording session,” Dean explains. “I always thought “Big John” had a powerful ring, so in less than an hour and a half, I put John in a mine, and then I killed him.”

The song became a classic and virtually anyone old enough to have been tuning into AM radio back then recognizes the iconic first verse:

Every mornin' at the mine you could see him arrive

He stood 6 foot 6 and weighed 245

Kinda broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip

And everybody knew you didn't give no lip

To Big John

Given a musical cue, Dean drawls a couple verses of this signature song sitting next to Donna at his custom 100th Anniversary Yamaha grand piano (one of only 100 in the world). But he cuts it off halfway through.

“I must have performed that song 10,000 times,” he laughs.

Big Bad John eventually sold more than six million copies, becoming the No. 1 song in the world and making Dean a recording industry sensation.

“That song took me around the world, to the London Palladium, the Hollywood Bowl and onto The Ed Sullivan Show,” Dean says. “I got four Grammy nominations and won one for Best Song. I was on top of the world.”

He stayed on top the next year, as the hits kept coming.

In 1962, he recorded “Dear Ivan,” which reached No. 9 on the country charts, the two-sided hit “The Cajun Queen” and “To a Sleeping Beauty,” which made the Top 20. In April of that year, he released another song destined to become a classic, “PT 109,” about President John F. Kennedy’s dramatic rescue of his crew after his boat was sunk by the Japanese Navy in World War II. The single rode the charts right along with the rising popularity of the dynamic young president.

Dean’s popularity and national presence peaked in 1965, when he hosted the inaugural Country Music Awards show, a gig that opened yet another chapter in his entertainment career.

The following year, he made his dramatic TV debut in an episode of Fess Parker’s “Daniel Boone,” the hit NBC-TV series that had kids of that era wearing Boone’s trademark coonskin cap just about everywhere except maybe church. Dean landed the role of Boone’s friend, Josh Clements, and was a regular cast member from 1967 to 1970.

Dean laughs off his acting talent, saying, “I just played myself,” but he recalls warmly his friendship with Parker.

“Truly one of the nicest, genuinely caring men I ever met,” he says. “Most people only knew him as an actor, but he was a wonderful human being.”

In 1966 Dean jumped from Columbia to RCA, releasing “Stand Beside Me,” a Top 10 hit, and recording “A Thing Called Love,” “Born to Be By Your Side” and “A Hammer and Nails.” He just missed the Top 50 with his 1969 entry “A Rose is a Rose is a Rose,” but came back in 1971 with the Top 30 duet with Dottie West titled, “Slowly.”

But by 1973, he admits he was burned out from toll of more than 20 years of touring and performing, and his growing sausage business needed his attention.

With little fanfare, he slid out of show business, and ever since has made only token appearances on stage, in movies—his decidedly less-than-star turn in the forgettable 1977 Bond flick, “Diamonds Are Forever”—and an occasional television guest slot.

The test of time

So what is Dean’s legacy? Decades after he was a bona fide star, he acknowledges that few contemporaries are aware of his accomplishments. Some critics contend that his musical contributions were closer to the novelty tunes popular in the lull between the Elvis years and the “British Invasion.” To be sure, Dean has not been voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“It’s politics,” his publicist has suggested.

Others point to Dean’s contemporaries—Johnny Cash, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Marty Robbins—all of them country-music legends, all of them Hall of Famers. Next to the wealth of classics they wrote and recorded, Dean’s discography doesn’t match up in the minds of most critics.

But there’s no denying his talent and his crossover appeal. His early recordings, if listened to in the context of the times, ring with the syrupy but sincere sentiments of family and friendship.

His several decades of success as a singer, songwriter and actor on TV and the big screen all cement his stature as a top talent and a top-flight entertainer.

Whether singing in his sweet, mellow tenor, swapping stories about life as a celebrity or simply sharing his homespun take on life, Jimmy Dean is one of a kind, a man with the magic fans pay good money to sample, a winner in virtually everything he did.

He’s a man who rose to the top, yet never forgot his roots. A country boy who never left the country and never lost his boyish enthusiasm for every venture he touched.

In his 1976 gold-record hit, “I.O.U.,” a classic Dean “talkie,” he pays tribute to his mother in words that tug at the edges of a childhood that was a long way from Easy Street.

In a lifetime of cutting gold records, hosting hit shows and achieving unqualified business success, the sky often seemed to be the limit.

The sky this day is low and cloudy, typical of a Southern summer afternoon. With barely a wisp of wind through the treetops, the river alongside Dean’s compound leisurely floats past on its tidal run to the sea.

It’s a metaphor for the man who sits a stone’s throw away, looking out past a flowered landscape toward the dun-colored horizon: At ease with who he is and all he’s done.

In the final analysis, his career accomplishments will endure, because Jimmy Dean is an original. Whether in show business or the meat business, we’ll never see his likes again.