Jimmy Dean – "Big Bad John" (1961)

At the bottom of this mine 

Lies a hell of a man

Big John

Brunswick is an old railroad town that’s located on the Potomac River in Frederick County, Maryland, near the intersection of the Appalachian Trail and the C&O Canal in Frederick County, Maryland.  It’s about an hour northwest of my home.

Brunswick Heritage Museum

I discovered the Brunswick Heritage Museum with my kids many years ago.  The most interesting part of the museum is a HO-scale model railroad layout that depicts the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Metropolitan Subdivision, which ran from Brunswick through Montgomery County, Maryland (where I live) and on to Union Station in Washington, DC, a distance of roughly 42 miles.

The B&O's Metropolitan line

The museum’s model railroad is huge – 1700 square feet – and amazingly detailed.

Here's a photo of the part of the layout that depicts the Montgomery County fairgrounds:

Montgomery County fairgrounds depiction

The part of the setup that recreates the B&O’s Brunswick switching yard and roundhouse is particularly noteworthy:

Model of Brunswick switching yard

Here’s a video that shows the model train layout in detail:

The other Brunswick attraction that you need to know about is Smoketown Brewing Station, a microbrewery that opened for business less than a year ago.

Smoketown Brewing Station

Smoketown Brewing is located in the old Brunswick fire station.  Back in the day, the community hall located on the upper floor of the building hosted a number of prominent country and western musicians – including today’s featured artist, Jimmy Dean – and was also utilized as a movie theatre.

Jimmy Dean and Patsy Cline once appeared
on the same bill at the Brunswick fire station

The day I visited Smoketown, I ordered a flight with samples of four of the dozen-odd beers they were pouring and had a chat with the brewery’s owner, David Blackmon.  

A flight of four Smoketown beers

Since I was only a short drive away from Frederick, Maryland, I also stopped at Attaboy Beer, a brand-new brewery that’s adjacent to Carroll Creek Park.

Attaboy beers

Attaboy’s most unusual offering was its “Lunch Break” patersbier, a mild and relatively low-alcohol beer modeled after those brewed by Belgian monks for their own consumption.

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Jimmy Dean was a very successful country and western recording artist in the 1950s and 1960s.  His 1961 hit, “Big Bad John” which Dean and Roy Acuff co-wrote – held down the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” for five weeks and won the Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording.

Dean was also a popular radio and TV personality.  Patsy Cline and Roy Clark were two of the country stars who got their start on Dean’s “Town and Country Time” radio show, which aired on a Washington, DC station in the mid-1950s.  (Dean and Cline once performed on the same bill in the Brunswick building that now houses the Smoketown Brewing Station.)  After a year, the show moved to a local television station, and was eventually picked up by CBS and broadcast nationally.

In 1963, Dean was tabbed to host a primetime variety show on the ABC television network.  The Jimmy Dean Show’s guests included the crème de la crème of the country music world (George Jones, Buck Owens, Roger Miller, and many others) but what I remember about it were the skits that featured Dean and Rowlf the Dog, the first of the Muppets to become a star.  

Jimmy Dean with Rowlf

In 1969, Dean and his brother founded the Jimmy Dean Sausage Company.  The business was so successful – thanks in part to Dean’s folksy TV commercials – that the Sara Lee Corporation paid $80 million for it in 1984.  

Dean died in 2010, when he was 81.  His final resting place is a nine-foot-tall piano-shaped mausoleum on the grounds of his Virginia estate, which overlooks the James River.  

His epitaph comes from the lyrics to “Big Bad John”: “Here lies a hell of a man.”

Here’s “Big Bad John”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Billy Murray – "Low Bridge, Everybody Down" (1912)

Low bridge, everybody down

Low bridge, we're coming to a town

I’m almost 65, and I’ve decided that I’m going to retire from the practice of law sometime this year.  

Is it any surprise that I’m finding it harder and harder to haul my ass into the office five days a week?

I played hooky regularly last fall, taking a day off each week to go for a hike or a bike ride and then hitting a brewery or two . . . or three.  But winter eventually arrived, and skipping work to take a hike or go biking isn’t all that attractive a proposition when it’s freezing cold outside.

So when the weatherman said it was going to be unseasonably warm one Wednesday a couple of weeks ago, I made plans to spend the day in the great outdoors.

A CSX train goes through Brunswick

After accompanying my mother to her thrice-weekly 11:00 am exercise class, I hit the road for Brunswick, an old railroad town that’s near the intersection of the Appalachian Trail and the C&O Canal in Frederick County, Maryland.

On the way there, I stopped at a new outlet mall that’s just off the highway.  I spent so much time trying on shoes at the Nike outlet that I didn’t have time to visit any of the other stores at the mall.

I walked out with four pairs of kicks – a personal best for me.  (I realize that buying four pairs of shoes at one time is all in a day’s work for you ladies out there, but I usually limit myself to a pair or two.)

One of my purchases was a replacement for the shoes I use to referee basketball games on weekends:

One was almost identical to a pair I already have.  (I figure if a particular pair of shoes fits just right, why not get a second pair?)

One pair was an incredible bargain – these bad boys only set me back $24.95:

The fourth pair was simply irresistible:

Half an hour after leaving the Nike store, I was in Brunswick, which sits on the Potomac River about an hour northwest of my home.  

Brunswick used to be called Berlin because many German immigrants settled there.  But then some spoilsport pointed out that there was another town named Berlin on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.  (Apparently the Post Office wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to distinguish one Berlin, Maryland from the other when it came to delivering the mail.)

A MARC commuter train pulls into Brunswick

Around 1890, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad chose Brunswick to be the site of a six-mile long freight yard along the Potomac.  It was also the home to a B&O locomotive repair works and roundhouse.  For the next five or six decades, Brunswick was essentially a B&O company town.

Today, Brunswick is a little down at the heels, but it has its charms.  In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll visit two of the town’s most popular attractions.

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Do elementary-school kids still sing “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” in music class?  

The Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, ran between Albany and Buffalo, New York.  It was 363 miles long, and had 36 locks to handle the east-to-west elevation difference of 565 feet.

Erie Canal mules

The C&O Canal along the Potomac River is half as long as the Erie Canal, but has twice as many locks to overcome its 605-foot elevation change.  It took almost three times as long to complete the C&O as it took to build the Erie Canal (22 years compared to eight years).  

There are a lot of recordings of “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” – which is sometimes titled “Fifteen Years on the Erie Canal,” or simply “The Erie Canal Song.”  

Today we’re featuring a 1912 recording of the song by Billy “The Denver Nightingale” Murray, one of the most prolific recording artists of the early 1900s: