EVERY morning at the mine, you'd see him arrive. He stood 6-foot-6 and weighed 245. He was broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips and everyone knew you didn't give no lip to ... who da guy? These ballads really
had some biteIf you said "Big John" you aren't only right but you're probably an old fart like me who remembers all those great songs that used to tell stories. It was a weird genre of music, quirky songs about courage, suicide, unusual insects and cannibalism.
About the only place you can hear them these days are on Tom Moffatt's oldie's radio show, which is where I heard "Big John" recently for the first time in about a hundred years.
"Big John" was sung by Jimmy Dean, a country singer better known for his sausages today. It basically tells the story of a big, mysterious galoot who worked in a coal mine.
The mine caves in and Big John holds up a beam so that everyone else can escape. Then he's buried. That's it. You couldn't do a song like "Big John" today unless he was a gangster. ("Every morning at the mall, you'd see him arrive, he had hoes on his arms and carried two .45s.")
The only part of the song that doesn't quite hold up today is where it says he killed a guy in New Orleans in a fight over "a Cajun queen." It makes it sound like Big John was, you know, a little light in the work boots.
There were songs about that particular subject. "Lola" was about a guy who falls in love with a transvestite. He finally begins to suspect that Lola is not what she appears. ("I'm not dumb, but I can't understand, why she walks like a woman and talks like a man, ohhh, my Lola.") What a rube.
One of the strangest songs of this type was "Timothy," about some guys trapped in a cave who end up eating their buddy Timothy. There was a lot of controversy about the song because they never came out and actually said they ate Timothy ("Timothy! Where on earth did you go? Timothy! God why don't I know?") Clue: Pile of bones.
There are very few songs about cannibalism today, which, I suppose, is a good thing.
Not all of the songs were about people, though. Some lunatic had the idea of writing an entire song about a boll weevil and that lunatic made a lot of money when it became a hit, even though it was more of a science lesson than a song. ("The boll weevil is a little black bug, comes from Mexico, they say. Came all the way to Texas, just lookin' for a place to stay.") There are more species of beetles than any other living animal, so it's fitting that there's at least one song about them.
The mother of all ballads, though, has to be the "Ode to Billy Joe."
It was another of those mystery songs. It's about a family of hicks whose daughter apparently had a fling with a hayseed named Billy Joe. The preacher stops by the house and tells the family that Billy Joe threw himself off the Tallahachee Bridge. This came shortly after the daughter and Billy Joe were spied throwing some kind of object off the bridge.
Speculation was rampant as to what it was they had thrown off the bridge that could have caused Billy Joe to feel lousy enough to take his own life. A baby? A dead hamster? A thermo-nuclear device? Timothy?
The news of Billy Joe's demise was met with extreme indifference by the girl's family. One actual line of the song was the father saying, "Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please." That's cold, man.
They actually made a movie about that song, which I don't think cleared up the issue of what was chucked off the bridge. Today, the entire family would be on Geraldo.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
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71224.113@compuserve.com.
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