This day in 1961″ “Big Bad John” took Jimmy Dean to #1 on the Billboard country chart.
“Big Bad John” is a country song originally performed by Jimmy Dean, who wrote and composed it in collaboration with Roy Acuff. It was released in September 1961 and by the beginning of November it had gone to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It won Dean the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording, and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.
The song and its sequels tell a story typical of American folklore, reminiscent of Paul Bunyan or John Henry. Big Bad John was also the title of a 1990 television movie starring Dean.
The song tells the story of a mysterious and quiet miner who earned the nickname Big John because of his height, weight, and muscular physique. (“He stood six foot six and weighed 245”.) He supposedly came from New Orleans, where, with “a crashin’ blow from a huge right hand”, he allegedly killed a man over a Cajun Queen.
One day, a support timber cracked at the mine where John worked. The situation looked hopeless until John “grabbed a saggin’ timber, gave out with a groan / and like a giant oak tree just stood there alone”, then “gave a mighty shove”, opening a passage and allowing the 20 other miners to escape the mine. Just as the other miners were about to re-enter the mine with the tools necessary to save him, the mine fully collapsed and John was believed to have died in the depths of the mine. The mine itself was never reopened, but a marble stand was placed in front of it, with the words “At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man – Big John.” (Some versions of the song change the last line to “lies a big, big man” to replace what was at the time considered to be borderline profane language.)
Its 1962 sequel, “The Cajun Queen”, describes the arrival of “Queenie”, Big John’s Cajun Queen, who rescues John from the mine and marries him. Eventually, they have “110 grandchildren”. The sequel’s events are more exaggerated than the first, extending the story into the realm of tall tales.
In June 1962, the story continued (and evidently concludes) with the arrival of “Little Bitty Big John”, the flip side to “Steel Men” on Columbia 4-42483, learning about his father’s act of heroism.
In October 1961, Dottie West recorded a sequel to the song called “My Big John”. This song was told from the point of view of the “Cajun Queen” that drove John away – her search for him, then discovering about his death.
Columbia Records was considering dropping Dean before the release of this million-selling single, as he had not had a hit in years. Dean wrote the beginnings of the song on a flight from New York to Nashville because he realized he needed a fourth song for his recording session. Roy Acuff later helped him polish it.
The inspiration for the character of Big John was an actor, John Minto, that Dean met in a summer stock play, Destry Rides Again, who was 6’5″. Dean would call him “Big John” and grew to like the rolling sound of the phrase.
Country pianist Floyd Cramer, who was hired to play piano on the song, came up with the idea to use a hammer and a piece of steel instead. This became a distinctive characteristic of the recording.
There are several known recordings of the song by Dean.
Source: Wikipedia
