Serenading Little Jimmy

#98 / Flood Time Capsule: 1977

Forty-five years ago this week, The Flood played at Huntington’s old Memorial Field House, one of several local bands opening for West Virginia country music legend Little Jimmy Dickens, who was in town to headline a benefit concert sponsored by Cabell County Sheriff Ted T. Barr.

These days we can’t recall whether it was Joe Dobbs or David Peyton who landed us the gig, but Dave was the first to make hay with it.

Reporting in his regular Sunday column in The Herald-Dispatch a week later, Dave wrote about the band’s socializing and jamming backstage with the Bolt, WV, country star before the show. The column’s headline called Dickens the “little, loud mountaineer.”

Peyton described how Jimmy joined in on the chorus as The Flood played and sang “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight.” Later, he listened intently to the words of “Barbara Allen” before telling fiddlin’ Joe, “Play ‘Sally Goodin’ and then I’ll leave you alone.”

Flood co-founder Roger Samples could not drive in from Mason County, WV, to join his cohorts for this Friday night gig, so Joe’s brother, Dennis Dobbs, stood in for him, offering up beautiful guitar solos when it was The Flood’s turn to take the stage before a full house.

About a year earlier, Dennis had moved up from Texas so that he and Joe could open their new Fret ’n Fiddle music store on Huntington’s West 14th Street.

Incidentally, a few days before the concert, newspaper photographer Lee Bernard came by the Dobbs’ store to get pictures of Dave and Charlie, Joe and Dennis practicing for the July 22, 1977, show. Shot in front of Fret ’n Fiddle, these were the first professional photos ever taken of this bunch.

Jimmy’s Journey

Thirty years after that summer night in Huntington, Jimmy Dickens was back in his home state to be inducted into the first class of the then-new West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2007, along with Billy Edd Wheeler, Hazel Dickens, Molly O’Day, Chu Berry, Bill Withers and others.

By then, Jimmy already had been an inductee of Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame for 25 years, and for 60 years he had been a member of the Grand Ole Opry.

Dickens began his music career in the late 1930s, performing on radio station WJLS in Beckley, WV, some 20 miles east of his Raleigh County home of Bolt. He soon quit his studies at West Virginia University to pursue music full time, traveling the country to perform on local radio stations under the name "Jimmy the Kid.”

In 1948, after catching a Dickens performance on a Saginaw, Michigan, station, Roy Acuff introduced him to officials at Columbia Records and at the Grand Ole Opry, where Jimmy would be a regular for the rest of his life. Around this time he began using the nickname “Little Jimmy,” capitalizing on his 4 foot 11 frame.

Famed for his novelty songs (“Sleeping at the Foot of the Bed,” "Take an Old Cold Tater And Wait,” “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose”), he was also known for his sparkly rhinestone outfits. (In fact, today Jimmy Dickens is credited by music historians with introducing the widely imitated rhinestone attire into country music’s live performances.)

In the 1990s, as he was entering his seventh decade, Dickens found a friend and supporter in fellow West Virginian Brad Paisley and appeared with him in concerts and in a number of Paisley’s music videos.

Jimmy died in January 2015, days after his last appearance on the Opry as its oldest living member. He had just marked his 94th birthday.