Plainview: Jimmy Dean Museum

“Big Bad John” went to number one in 1961 and stayed for five weeks. It sold over eight million copies. It won the Grammy for Best Country and Western Recording. Not bad for a kid who grew up without electricity in a dirt-floor house in Plainview, Texas. The Jimmy Dean Museum Plainview Texas, on the campus of Wayland Baptist University, opened in 2016 — a full tribute to a man who built three careers in a row and made a success of each one.

Dean grew up in genuine poverty in Plainview. He taught himself guitar and learned to work a crowd early. By the late 1940s, he was playing military bases and honky-tonks across West Texas. Then Washington, D.C., where a television contract and a radio show launched him nationally. Then Nashville, which gave him “Big Bad John” and two decades of hit records. Then television again — “The Jimmy Dean Show” on ABC, which ran from 1963 to 1966 and introduced Rowlf the Dog, Jim Henson’s first major national puppet character, before the Muppets were the Muppets.

Three Careers, One Museum

The museum covers all of it. The country music career: the hits, the awards, the stage costumes. The television career: the ABC show, the Henson connection, the mainstream celebrity. And the business career: the Jimmy Dean Sausage empire, built from the ground up and sold to Sara Lee Corporation in 1984. Highlights include a seven-foot bronze statue, a video theater screening “Breakfast and a Song: The Jimmy Dean Story,” and enough sausage company history to qualify as a separate exhibit.

Plainview didn’t make it easy for Jimmy Dean. He returned the favor anyway. For another Panhandle music story with a completely different sound, see the Turkey: Bob Wills Museum — an hour and a half north on US 70, in the town where Western Swing was born.