The Tragic Murder of David “Stringbean” Akeman

akemandavidbio

Today is the birthday of David “Stringbean” Akeman (1916-1973).

Stringbean was one of the key performers on the syndicated country variety show Hee Haw from 1969 until his death in 1973. A top notch banjo player and comedian, he’d gotten his professional start playing barn dances and the like in the 1930s, until he worked his way up to Bill Monroe’s band (1943-1945) and the Grand Ole Oprey (of which he was a fixture until his death).

His nickname of course came from the fact that he was so tall, thin and lanky. His most memorable recurring bit on Hee Haw  was as a scarecrow with a cawing crow on his shoulder.

stringbeanakeman

Another recurring bit was a humorous “letter from home” which he would keep “close to his heart” (which would turn out to be his back pocket).

In 1973 the world was shocked to hear that Stringbean and his wife had been violently murdered by a couple of lowlife thugs who’d gone in to rob him at his rural Tennessee farm house. There were a lot of celebrity murders during those years, usually committed by bottom feeders who’d made the mistaken assumption that performers they saw on TV would be keeping big piles of cash and jewelry and other vaulables in their houses. But honestly if you’d the second story man who’se just dying to get his mitts on the big Stringbean fortune, that’s got to be its own punishment,

images

To find out about  the history of variety performanceconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous

2 comments

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.