Good Country Boy

From CBS's Washington studios last week came a new network noise: "Whenever the day is endin', wherever we are seen, it's the whole gang sayin', good evenin' from Jimmy Dean." At 28, rawboned, wavy-haired Jimmy Dean* was making his nighttime TV bow as the dandy of country music, and showing a late-hour (10:30 p.m., E.D.T.) audience just why millions have been getting up at 7 a.m. five days a week to catch his slick Texas slang and catgut twang. Since April Dean has charmed early risers away from Dave Garroway's Today with his easy ways, his oleaginous grin, and a no-ulcer format thickly populated with bosomy fiddlers. Although his corn is off an aged cob ("Haven't had so much fun since the old cow had twins"), Dean is, in the words of an associate, "photogenic, amiable, happy-go-lucky and a nipple feeder--that is, he knows little outside his music." Says his manager, Connie B. Gay, who is the chief impresario of country-music shows: "Garroway plays to the box office, Jimmy to the grandstand."

Free as a Breeze. City Slicker Gay, whose 200-man rural stable brings him more than $1,000,000 a year, found Jimmy five years ago doing a rube comedy act with a fright wig, blacked-out teeth and rouged-in freckles at a rowdy Washington honkytonk, hired him at $64 a week to sing and play his piano, accordion and guitar for U.S. troops in the Caribbean. On his return Jimmy joined several of Gay's corn-fed broadcasting groups and made a howling hillbilly recording called Bumming Around ("I'm free as a breeze, I'll do as I please, just bummin' around") that sold almost a million copies.

When Gay heard that CBS was thinking of a morning hillbilly show, he cut a pilot film of Dean that sold CBS bigwigs. Within two weeks Jimmy Dean had become the first performer in three years to clout NBC in the morning rating war. His fans wrote up to 25,000 letters a week. (Sample: "It's about time the damyankees gave a good country boy a chance.")

Bull by the Tail. This year Jimmy will make $100,000--a measure of the boom that country music is enjoying throughout much of the U.S. "Country music's like an eating cancer," says Gay. "Once you start with it, you've got a bull by the tail. That music takes over."

Born on a farm outside Plainview, Texas, Country Boy Dean worked at cleaning neighbors' henhouses and picking cotton. Sundays he would sit at an old upright and play religious and "inspirational" songs. After a stint as an oiler in the merchant marine, he joined the Air Force, played in base bars for $5 a night. Today Jimmy lives in transportive Arlington, Va. with his wife Sue and their two children Gary (5) and Connie (3). He gets up at 3:30 every morning, downs a breakfast of three energy pills and a Waring-blended pint of cream, two eggs, vanilla and sugar, drives his 1957 white Oldsmobile convertible to the Washington studio, where he runs through the songs for his show. To Dean, country music is a happy thing, and keeps him practicing the advice he gave when he signed off last week: "Grin once in a while; it's good for you."

* No kin to the late Cinemactor James Dean.

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