REVIEW: The Best of Jimmy Dean

If you lead off with a real Americana icon of a song — Big Bad John — the rest of the album has a lot to live up to.

This is Jimmy Dean, "The Best of Jimmy Dean" and you must adjust your ears. Real country ahead. Old country. The truest and the best.

Even if Dean got his start in DC.

Before jeans were designer fake slick set it. Before sham country accents tarnished the real ones.

This disc is another in the worthy "Legacy" series from Sony and Columbia Records. But this is also a new collection of Sixties-era songs, timed to coincide with a Dean publicity phalanx to also promote "Thirty Years of Sausage, Fifty Years of Ham: Jimmy Dean's Own Story" his new autobiography, written with his wife.

Jimmy Dean is a simple pleasure, a man who wants to bring home uncomplicated truths.

Saying that, and bearing in mind the times (Dec. 1961), "Dear Ivan" is a surprise. A spoken performance of a sympathetic, "break-the-bread" letter written to a Soviet soldier:

I got a feeling that if you and I could just sit down and talk, not as representatives of anybody's government but just two plain, ordinary, human beings, i feel that we might think a great deal alike. I'm an entertainer now Ivan. I used to be a farmer just like you. I got a wife and three kids, and this may sound a little unpatriotic, but to me these are more important than the heads of anybody's government.

Even more surprising, it cracked the Top 30 in 1962.

There are two other spoken songs on this "Best of ... " collection, which seems odd. Still, "To A Sleeping Beauty" is a father reminiscing over a daughter growing up:

"Yesterday you could mend a dog's broken leg with a hug. Tomorrow you'll be able to break a young man's heart with a kiss. ... Tomorrow you'll lay aside your jump rope and tie up the telephone lines.

The other is "a Day That changed The World" about June 6, 1944. D-Day:

"We'll we're on our way. Boys quickly becoming men. Total strangers now as close as brothers. Hoping and praying that all will come back, And yet knowing in our hearts that some must stay."

Then there's the oh-so common country music theme, we hear so much about — John F. Kennedy.

A patriotic song called PT 109, tells of JFK's heroics aboard his PT boat and in the ocean after it was hit.

"In 1943 they put to sea, 13 men and Kennedy. ... Smoke and fire upon the sea, everywhere they looked was the enemy. The heathen gods of old Japan - yeah they thought they had the best of a mighty good man."

And, of course, it's another John with a tale to be told.

Article Author: Temple Stark

A graphic designing wordsmith, with a decade-plus career in community journalism behind me. Take a mean photo, have a new camera, and have been riding the wave of Twitter for more than a year.

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