The Big Easy List: Big Bad John

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Continuing on the theme of songs that reference New Orleans, today we continue a theme started yesterday. Both of these songs are country. Both were on Columbia Records. Both won Grammy awards. And both were edited for radio play! Here’s today’s song. Big Bad John - Jimmy Dean This is another one of those songs that’s very well known outside of country circles, too. If you know anything about Jimmy Dean, you know he ran a sausage company and he had this song. (A little trivia: he also premiered the Muppets on his TV show! Rowlf the dog was a regular on his show in the early 60s, long before Kermit hopped on over to Sesame Street.) And, as I alluded to yesterday, this song had to be cleaned up for radio. Yes, when we have songs these days that have the “F word” in the title, the notion of someone not playing a song because it contained the line, “At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man” is laughable. That may as well have been six centuries ago as six decades. I’ve linked the original with the “one hell of a man” line. It was replaced with “At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man,” which is probably the only version of this song you’ve ever heard. Oh, a little post-script about banning: Homer and Jethro were frequent guests on Dean’s TV show. One night he asked them why they didn’t parody one of his songs, to which Jethro replied, “We tried once and they banned it.” The song in question was a spoof of this song, which began, “He arrived every morning at the beauty shop in a pink sports car with a chartreuse top, kinda narrow at the shoulders and wide at the feet, and everybody knew there was something mighty sweet about John.” That was recorded at their show that became the album Homer and Jethro At the Convention. It only made it to a few mono copies of the album before it was pulled…so quickly that they didn’t even wait for the liner notes to be rewritten to remove references to it! (BTW, if you’re interested, the Homer & Jethro parody is on YouTube.) “Big Bad John” was big bad trouble for the censors, but what a classic tune! Big Bad John Written by Jimmy Dean Recorded by Jimmy Dean From Big Bad John and Other Fabulous Songs and Tales, 1961 NEW ORLEANS LYRICS: Somebody said he came from New Orleans