From the Green Room: Feets Subs for Rob

While the Imus in the Morning Program is on hiatus, legendary blues singer Maurice Mordecai Dupris, better known as Blind Mississippi White Boy Pig Feets Dupris, or “Feets,” will fill in for Rob. In the wake of the passing of Jimmy Dean, the venerable country and movie star and sausage impresario, we offer the following excerpt from Feets’s unauthorized autobiography, “Smells Like The Blues.”

Jimmy Dean. For real.I first met Mr. Jimmy Deans at a roadhouse outside of Memphis called the Swine Time.  It was one of those joints where there was chicken wire covering the bandstand so as to protect the musicians from the flying beer bottles and rib bones that would often be thrown by unruly, unhappy, and very, very drunk patrons.  I was sitting in with a bunch of guys I had fell in with after I got out of the joint on trumped up charges for statutory rape.  See, on my European tour I got a mite tipsy on some Beaujolais, broke into the Louvre and tried to have my way with the Venus DeMilo. I eventually got the charges reduced to armed robbery, and did a nickel in a French prison, where I met a young man by the name of Papillon, who helped me escape in a cart by removing some old brie from the mess hall. I sat hidden underneath twelve overripe runny wheels in the hot sun for about seventeen hours. I still can’t eat cheese to this day. 

Anyway, there I was one night, playing harp with Gallic Glib Tongue Gilbert and the Cunning Linguists who had a hit with “Nobody Eats Parsley” when in walked none other than “Big Bad John” hisself: a big man, with a million-dollar-watt smile and a handshake that could crush walnuts.  I had just seen him play one of the bad guys in the James Bond movie where Sean McConnerys wore that awful hairpiece.  We finished a set, toweled off from the beer shower we endured, and this sweet little waitress by the name of Livinia told us John wanted us to sit with him at his table.  He complimented us, I told him I was a fan of his work, and he told me he was getting tired of the business and wanted to find another way to make a living. 

Now, The Swine Time was known for their snout sausage sandwiches, cos’ you could eat ‘em with just two fingers.  I was hungry and was woofing that bad boy down when I bit down on some nastiness, and pulled some bristle hairs out my mouth.  Nothing worse than poorly shaved snout.  I complained that there just wasn’t no place you could get a decent pork product any more; that what America needed was a quality sausage product that they could trust.  They deserved to have links, patties and tubes of the best smoked pig meats money could buy, at a price they could afford, and Jimmy’s eyes lit up!  He told me that was it! He thanked me for the inspiration, and told me that whatever he wound up making on the venture, he would make sure I was taken care of.

This is kind of grossIt became a multi-million dollar industry. And I never saw a penny.

But he did send me a basket of products every Christmas time.  After having to get my arteries rotor-rootered for the third time, I finally had to send him a note asking him to stop sending them.

The hell with the damn sausage, I thought. Send me some damn money.