One thing we are blessed to know is that we will never know an Elvis any older than 42 years of age! But today, had he lived, he would have been 75. Difficult to imagine.
One characteristic I've inherited from my mother is a lack of patience with egotistical people. I've seen it when I was in rock bands and see it in them today, and I definitely see it in a lot of wannabes I run across in karaoke circles. One HAS to have a degree of confidence in order to get up and sing in the first place, but an over-sized ego is one of the most unattractive traits in a human being.
Such was Jimmy Dean, the singer of the one-hit wonder song, "Big John."(Okay, "PT 109" got some air play, but how many people remember it?) He was about as good a singer as he was an actor and you can witness that on the old "Davey Crocket" Disney-produced tv series. Quite wisely, he got into the sausage business. The sausage ain't half bad!
To his credit, before there was the Muppets, Dean brought a young Jim Hinson to the network and used his "Hound Dog Buddy Rolf" on his tv show.
Mom never had much use for Jimmy Dean and once when I was in a Northern Virginia restaurant where Dean was "politiking" walking to each table shaking hands with people saying, "Hi, I'm Jimmy Dean!"
When he got to my Mom, she said, "Congratulations!" quite sarcastically. That was NOT Mom's normal way of treating people, but it was quite appropriate.
So, you ask, "How does this tie in with ELVIS?" Glad you asked. At about that same time, around 1956, Elvis appeared on WMAL-TV, channel 7 in DC on Dean's variety show and visited at his house on Roosevelt Street in Arlington, Virginia. So Elvis and Dean became acquaintances.
In George Klein's new book, he relays a story he told on cable tv yesterday about an occasion where Dean was hitting on a starlet Elvis was dating and Elvis pulled a gun and put it to Dean's head and said, "If you don't stop bothering her, I'll blow your head off."
Dean, tried to make a joke of it, but Elvis did not say it with a smile on his face. Jimmy Dean backed down and stopped pestering the young starlet, according to Klein, Elvis' lifelong friend since the days at Humes High School.
I've had occasions like that lately, but don't think to carry a pistol with me, but I can relate to the emotion of obnoxious people, believe me!
