Jimmy Dean was kind of an odd country music star: he was most famous for NOT singing. He was famous for his "recitation" songs, which were not really songs, but a spoken narrative with musical accompaniment. "Big Bad John" was his biggest hit, I think.
Jimmy Dean was from Plainview, Texas, which is up in the panhandle, and most likely "Plainview" is a literal name. Anyway, he also did some acting, most notably in the TV series Daniel Boone and the movie Diamonds are Forever.
During the 1960s, had his own TV variety show. It was on this show that he gave Jim Henson's muppets their first national exposure.
He was a frequent guest-host on the Tonight show. It was on one of his hosting gigs there that he first gave future country star Roy Clark his first national exposure.
Although famous for not singing, he had a very expressive voice and could pack a lot of emotion into a three-minute spoken-word story.
"Big Bad John" had two sequels, one by Dean himself, called "The Cajun Queen," in which John's love from New Orleans shows up and rescues John from the mine. They go on to have 110 grandchildren. The other sequel, "My Big John," was recorded by Dottie West. In this song, the Cajun Queen comes to the mine looking for John and learns about his death (oops...SPOILER ALERT!).