Country Humor

Different days, different ways
by Mitch Jayne

One of the reasons I have always thought farm people have an advantage over city folks—aside from living outside the pressure cooker—is the way they look at land as both a challenge and an opportunity. Farm folks see land like their ancestors did; it’s a permanent base on which to stand, while they change their minds and plans every year, depending on new ideas. I can’t help but apply this way of looking at things to everybody’s old friend Andy Griffith, who I got to work with years ago. Andy is no farmer, of course, but like the ones I know, he is never satisfied to settle for last year’s crop as the best he can do. The land he plants may be the same, but his way of making a crop changes along with the world, and he stays as optimistic as a person who has just bought brand new machinery. I got a letter from Andy a while back telling me he liked my last book. Andy still keeps track of what his old friends are doing. Back when I was on The Andy Griffith Show, Andy’s crop was Mayberry, a little town that was wherever you wanted it to be in America, and so full of human traits that we all were at home in it.

For its first year, in 1960 I watched that town happen from my old farmhouse in Missouri, and in its third year, I was part of it, as a member of an Ozark band trying our luck in California. We were picked by Andy to be “The Darling Boys.”

I have never gotten over my amazement at becoming part of someone else’s idea, and since then, I never ceased to be surprised at Andy’s new ones—new crops in proven ground.

Andy was smart about that, not wanting to wear out one concept. “How long before people will get tired of me bein’ the one to solve all the town’s problems with a light bulb over my head, like a cartoon character gettin’ an idea?” was the way he told us he felt about the show’s premise.

The answer to that, it turns out, is over 48 years because folks still watch, but Andy just didn’t want to ride a good horse to death. He never will, because as Dean Webb, my Darlin’ brother, once said, “You know, Andy’s got a lot of Missouri in him.” He meant the way Andy said things, I think, but every spring like this one, I wonder if, like a Missouri farmer, Andy’s got some new notions about some of his well-tended old ground.

We watched him play the elderly owner of a pie shop in the recent movie “Waitress” and saw what I expect everybody else did too—an old fellow who doesn’t mind being old as long as people trust him with a new way to handle it. And, of course, we will. After all, there’s a lot of Missouri in that old guy.

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