Two members of the music community passed away in recent days. The one who got national coverage, including even an obituary and photo in the San Francisco Chronicle, was Little Jimmy Dickens, who died January 2 at the age of 94.
But before getting around to Little Jimmy, I want to add my voice to the many who have expressed their sadness at the passing of our own Jim Carr, who died December 30. I wasn’t best pals with Jim, but we knew each other for at least 40 years, and played now and then at parties and jams. I always admired him because he had taken the time and made the effort to play Earl’s tunes pretty much note-for-note, and when he took a break on a bluegrass song you knew the style was going to be solid and traditional. He knew a lot about fine instruments and only played the best. He had an old Martin D-45 for years. People kept offering him larger and larger sums of cash for it and he finally gave in and sold it to a collector in Japan, bought a new Martin for himself and kept the rest.
He was a gentle soul, and he seemed to know everybody in bluegrass, not only in California but he had lived in the East some years ago and had befriended a goodly number of the best pickers back there. A conversation with Jim would usually yield a little nugget of gossip from back in Nashville that made one feel like we were one of the “in” crowd ourselves.
He and his wife, Linda, seemed to be devoted to each other. It is very sad that he was taken away at the relatively young age of 69.
By contrast, Little Jimmy Dickens was a flamboyant character, larger than life in spite of only being about 4-feet, 11 inches tall. He was born in 1920 in a little town called Bolt in the coal fields of West Virginia. “All my people are coal miners, but I never wanted to go into the mines,” he said. “From childhood on, I wanted to be an entertainer. And I set out to do that when I was still in high school.”
Dickens’ obituary in the Nashville Tennessean mentions that he played high school basketball in spite of his small size and 85-lb. weight. He also was senior class president in 1940. In spite of his small size he had a big voice, and in the days of small, inadequate sound systems, the crowd could always hear Dickens, even in the back of the room.
Dickens was brought to the attention of the Grand Ole Opry by Roy Acuff, who met him while on tour. Dickens was unusual in that he became an Opry member in 1948 before he had even made a record. The next year, though, he recorded “Take an Old Cold Tater (and Wait),” which made it to Number 7 on the Billboard magazine country chart. The song provided him with a life-long nickname, “Tater,” courtesy of Hank Williams Sr. Most of his hits were comedy and novelty songs such as “Sleeping at the Foot of the Bed,” “I’m Little But I’m Loud,” and his biggest hit, “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.”
In later years he was a folksy, avuncular, charming old fellow, but there was another side to Dickens that I found some months ago when I read Charlie Louvin’s excellent autobiography, “Satan is Real.” I highly recommend this book for its straight-talking, take-no-prisoners recollections of a tumultuous life in country music. It’s largely the story of the difficulties Charlie’s brother, Ira, had in life, starting with his brutal father, poverty-stricken childhood, and adult struggles with alcohol.
One caveat: Charlie uses a lot of salty language in telling his stories. If that disturbs you, give the book a pass. Here’s the interesting story of a fight between Charlie and Ira (and a bit about Dickens), not long before they broke up their partnership. The brothers had been arguing and had agreed to “take it outside.”
Here’s the story as Charley writes it:
“As soon as I stepped out the door, he swung at me. I dodged, got him by the hair on his head and bounced his face off the ground. Then I jumped on him and started hitting him.
“We were really getting into it when Jimmy C. Newman and Jimmy Dickens came out the door. Back in Newman’s younger days, he was an extremely muscular man, and he just reached out and lifted me off Ira by the head. I mean, I was on top of Ira, putting his face through the ground, and he just reached down, got me by the crown of the head and lifted me straight up.
“Ira started getting up, and Newman looked at him. ‘If either of you wants to whip somebody,’ he said, ‘you just try and whip me. I’d love to see either of you try it.’
“Neither of us wanted to fight Newman. We both knew that neither of us would have lasted a minute if we tried. But we all stood there cussing each other. We were really raising a ruckus, but we didn’t figure anyone could hear us out there in back of the armory. Then all of a sudden we were lit up by headlights.
“We all stopped talking and looked up and saw it was just some guy trying to get out of the parking lot, and went back to cussing. Well, the next thing we knew, the guy threw his car into park and stepped out. He was at least six foot six inches tall, bigger even than Jimmy Newman, and he walked right over to us and said, ‘Gentlemen, I got my wife out here in the car and I don’t appreciate language like that.’
“Little Jimmy Dickens turned and stepped right up on him. I believe his nose came up to about that fellow’s navel, but he didn’t care. He stood right up to him and put his finger and thumb almost together and said, ‘Mister, you’re just about this far from having me all over your ass.’
“Well that old boy just looked down at Dickens for a minute, then he pushed him out of the way and walked back to his car and he and his wife spun their wheels getting out of there. That was it. We all started laughing and couldn’t stop.
“That stuck with Dickens for all those years, too,” Charlie writes. “You can go up to him any time and put your finger and thumb together and he knows exactly what you’re talking about….
“Dickens was mean, though. If he fought you, he could slip up between your legs and de-ball you before you knew what happened. He was a dangerous fighting man because he was so low-down. He whipped Webb Pierce once, I’ll never forget that. Webb weighed over two hundred pounds and Dickens beat him up bad.”
Rest in Peace, Jimmy. I trust you’re not sleeping at the foot of the bed.
