Junior Samples

Junior Samples, born Alvin Samples Jr. (April 10, 1926 – November 13, 1983) in Cumming, Georgia was an American comedian best known for his 14-year run as a cast member of the TV show Hee Haw.

Samples was a stock car racing driver who went on the radio at the age of 40 and told a story about catching the largest fish ever seen in his hometown. The story was a humorous tall tale, and the recording of this radio story became a best-selling novelty record.

He was asked to become part of the 1969 cast of Hee Haw, and created a bumbling personality, often slurring his way through delivery, messing up jokes and forgetting lines. One of his most famous blunders was from "The Cornfield" sketch...

• Junior: "What did the judge lock up old Stan Hawkins fer?"
• Roy Clark: "Bigamy. He had three wives!"
• Junior: "That's not bigamy, that's trig...trem...tri..." The word he continually slipped on was "trigonometry".

In 1974, Samples announced that he was "seriously considering" running for lieutenant governor of Georgia on a Republican ticket with then-mayor Ronnie Thompson, who was seeking the party's gubernatorial nomination. The media at first presented Samples' announcement as a political story. However, Samples was pulling a practical joke for publicity purposes. Thompson remained in the race and was defeated in the general election by the Democrat George D. Busbee.^[1]

In this way, Samples did much to contribute to the post-Laugh In surrealist comedy of the show, with its strange combination of absurdist kitsch and down-home non sequiturs. He was known for being one of the foursome (the others were Gordie Tapp; Grandpa Jones and Lulu Roman) that made up the eponymous family of the skit called "The Culhanes of Cornfield County". However, his most famous bit was as a used car salesman, inviting callers to call an older 5-digit phone number, BR-549 (in the show's later years, the number was changed to BR-1Z1Z). When Hee Haw episodes were later sold to the public through a TV ad, the initial 800 number was 1-800-BR54949, a takeoff of Samples' comedy bit. In 1993 BR5-49 was also taken as a name by an American country music band. The number also appears as a cell phone number on signs at Wishard Memorial Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana cautioning against the use of cell phones. In the animated film Heavy Metal 2000, a destination for the mining spaceship is Asteroid BR-549.

Samples, whose weight sometimes neared four hundred pounds, was on Hee Haw for 14 years, until he died of a heart attack at the age of 57 in 1983. He was nominated for two Comedian of the Year Awards from the Country Music Awards in 1969 and 1970, and released a number of other comedy albums.

References

External links

• Short bio
• Find-A-Grave