![]() He didn't pay for those nice clothes, though. I remember those nice trousers, over them long, slithered legs. He wore funny clothes onstage, but in the car he'd always be dressed nicely, with a sport coat and a pair of trousers. And we'd ride in the car together, traveling to appearances. "I remember sitting on the porch of their cabin, dangling my feet on the ground. "We'd sit and visit at that little cabin, like kin folks do," says Wiseman, 88. I think they suited each other the best of any two people I've ever seen."īluegrass Hall of Famer Mac Wiseman was also close to the Akemans. 17, 1973, WSM-AM radio special hosted by Al Voeks, Grandpa Jones said of the Akemans, "They were just about as happy a couple as I'd ever seen. Within a year, the Joneses returned to Middle Tennessee, and they bought a house down the road from the old farm. In the late 1950s, the Jones family moved to the Washington, D.C., area and the Akemans took possession of the white house, though they continued to live in the cabin. ![]() "He was so happy that he was making a living playing a banjo and that he got to live on a farm, doing what he wanted." "String flashed money, mostly to his friends," says old-time musician Lester Armistead, who was Stringbean Akeman's friend and neighbor. He made extra money hunting wild ginseng and selling it to the Chinese.Īnd, as many people knew, he kept wads of $100 bills in his overalls. He'd slaughter, smoke and eat pigs but wouldn't touch anything from a cow. He borrowed a Jackie Gleason expression - "How sweet it is!" - and used it as his signature line, explaining that if it was good enough for Gleason, it was good enough for him, and also that his fans didn't know who Gleason was. He used apple vinegar as shaving lotion and rubbing alcohol as deodorant. (Little Jimmy Dickens gave him his first such pair of pants.) He sang songs such as "I'm the Man That Rode the Mule Around the World" and "How Many Biscuits Can You Eat," while wearing baggy shirts tucked into tiny pants, belted just above the knees. Stringbean Akeman never learned to drive, and Estelle Akeman ferried him to tour dates, the "Opry" and syndicated television show "Hee Haw" in the couple's one extravagance: Each year, Stringbean Akeman bought a brand new Cadillac, always paying in cash. The tiny cabin was room enough for the Akemans, who were comfortable in each other's presence and who shared enthusiasms for hunting, fishing and country life. "We visited the place, and Estelle told my mother, 'We could leave a bucket of money on our front porch and be gone on tour all summer, come back, and it'd still be here.' She told my mother, 'We're so happy here, we want to live in this little cabin 'till the day we die.' " "They told us how safe and serene it was," said Gibson, who was 13 at the time. In a 1983 New York Times interview, he recalled his early career in small clubs where the show consisted of "me - master of ceremonies, comedian and magician - maybe a dog act, and a stripper." It was a piano player in one such club, he said, who suggested replacing Dallas Burrows with some funny name like “Roger Duck” - or Orson Bean.Earlier that year, Stringbean and Estelle Akeman had tried unsuccessfully to convince Gibson's family to move to the farmhouse next to the Akemans' little cabin in Goodlettsville, near Ridgetop, 20 miles north of Nashville. His father, George, was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and Bean recalled later that his “house was filled with causes.” But he left home at 16 after his mother died by suicide. He had picked the stage name Orson Bean “because it sounded funny.” Bean's face comes wrapped with a sly grin, somewhat like the expression of a child when sneaking his hand into the cookie jar," The New York Times noted in a review of his 1954 variety show, "The Blue Angel." It said he showed “a quality of being likable even when his jokes fall flat.”īorn in Burlington, Vermont, in 1928 as Dallas Frederick Burrows, he never lost the Yankee accent that proved a perfect complement to the dry, laconic storytelling that established him as popular humorist.
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