The man everyone called Stringbean was not who the costume suggested.
David Akeman stood six foot five, wore a shirt sewn long to a pair of pants belted at the knees, painted his eyebrows into a permanent look of bewilderment, and frailed a banjo in a style that predated bluegrass itself. On Hee Haw, he was the scarecrow in the cornfield. At the Opry, he was the hillbilly who read nonsensical letters from home, tucking them close to his “heart, heart, heart, heart.” The character was so complete, so fully inhabited, that it was easy to mistake the man for the act.
The man was something else. David Akeman had been performing professionally since the mid-1930s, when a bandleader named Asa Martin forgot his name during an introduction and called him “String Beans” on account of his frame. He was Bill Monroe’s first banjo player in the Blue Grass Boys, years before Earl Scruggs arrived and reinvented the instrument. Uncle Dave Macon — the original showman of the Opry — took him under his wing and eventually willed him one of his own banjos. By the early 1970s, Stringbean had been on the Opry stage for three decades, was a founding cast member of one of the most-watched shows in television history, and had quietly accumulated over half a million dollars in bank accounts. In 1973 money, that was a fortune. In any era’s money, it was the portfolio of a man who understood exactly what he was worth.
But the character was so convincing that people believed it. They believed the scarecrow in the short pants didn’t trust banks. They believed a man who’d been cashing checks from CBS and the Grand Ole Opry for decades kept his money stuffed in the walls of his cabin. The rumor circulated freely in Nashville’s margins: Stringbean’s got cash in that house out in Ridgetop.
On the evening of Saturday, November 10, 1973, Stringbean and his wife Estelle drove from their cabin on Baker Station Road in Ridgetop to the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. It was an Opry night. He did his set — frailed the Vega, did the hand wave, flipped the hat. The crowd loved it, same as always. He and Estelle left the Ryman and drove the twenty-odd miles home through the dark.
While they were gone, two men had broken into their cabin.
John A. Brown and Marvin Douglas Brown were twenty-three-year-old cousins. They had heard the rumors about Stringbean’s hidden cash, and they had decided to take it. They ransacked the cabin. They found nothing — because there was nothing to find. The fortune in the walls was a myth. What the cousins did next is what separates a burglary from a horror story: they didn’t leave. They turned on Stringbean’s radio, listened to his Opry performance, and waited for him to come home.
When the Akemans pulled into the driveway, Stringbean saw that the cabin had been broken into. He grabbed a .22 rifle. It didn’t matter. The Browns shot him just inside the door. Estelle ran. She made it about twenty yards into the yard before one of the cousins shot her in the back of the head.
The killers fled with a chainsaw, a couple of firearms, and roughly $250 from Stringbean’s front pocket and Estelle’s purse. They missed over $3,500 sewn into a hidden pocket in his overalls. They missed $2,000 more hidden in Estelle’s clothing. They missed the half million in the bank. They killed two people for $250 and a chainsaw.
The next morning was a Sunday. Grandpa Jones — Louis Marshall Jones, another Opry legend, Stringbean’s neighbor and close friend — drove over to pick him up for a hunting trip they’d planned. He found Estelle’s body in the weeds near the driveway first. Then he found Stringbean face-down inside the cabin. On the porch, untouched, sat the banjo.
The murders detonated through Nashville’s country music community like a bomb. This wasn’t a plane crash or a highway wreck — the kinds of tragedies the Opry had absorbed before, losing Patsy Cline and Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas in a single night ten years earlier. This was someone breaking into a man’s home and executing him and his wife. Roy Acuff broke the Opry’s longstanding rule against politics on stage to call for reinstatement of the death penalty. A who’s who of Nashville drove out to Ridgetop before investigators could secure the scene.
The Browns were caught quickly. Stolen firearms traced back to Stringbean. At trial, a gun Grandpa Jones had personally given to Stringbean as a gift was entered into evidence — recovered from the cousins’ possession. They turned on each other, each blaming the other for pulling the trigger. Under Tennessee’s felony murder rule, it didn’t matter. Both were convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Marvin Douglas Brown died in prison in 2003. John A. Brown was paroled in 2014, over the strenuous objections of the country music community, after serving forty-one years.
What died with Stringbean was bigger than one man.
Before November 10, 1973, Nashville’s country music world operated like a small town. The stars lived in regular houses on regular roads. They knew their neighbors. They left their doors unlocked. The Opry brought every major act under one roof on Saturday night, and during the week they recorded together, played cards together, hunted together. It was a community held together by proximity and trust in a way that no other genre of American music could replicate.
After the murders, that world contracted. Stars moved to gated properties. Fences went up. Security systems got installed. Grandpa Jones himself changed his state of residence. The openness that had defined Nashville’s music community — the quality that made it feel like a family reunion instead of an industry — began to harden into something that looked more like Los Angeles. The isolation that came after wasn’t just about fear. It was about the recognition that fame made you visible, and visibility made you a target, and no amount of community spirit could protect you from two idiots with a gun and a rumor.
Stringbean himself slipped through the cracks of memory in a way that would have been unthinkable while he was alive. He was the first banjo player for Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys — a fact routinely omitted from early bluegrass histories. He was a preservationist of clawhammer-style playing at a time when three-finger picking had taken over, keeping alive a sound that ran in a direct line from the Appalachian hollows to the Ryman stage. He wasn’t a museum piece doing it, either. He had lived the tradition. Unlike Pete Seeger, who preserved old-time music from the outside, Stringbean was the genuine article — a Kentucky farm boy who traded two bantam chickens for his first banjo at twelve years old and never stopped playing.
But Hee Haw made him a comedian first and a musician second in the public mind, and the manner of his death made people flinch from the memory. The Opry moved to its new house on Opryland Drive four months later, in March 1974. A whole era closed.
In 1996, twenty-three years after the murders, the new owners of the cabin on Baker Station Road pulled a loose brick from the fireplace and found a stash of cash hidden behind the chimney. Roughly $20,000, wedged in there by a man whose financial sophistication his killers couldn’t have imagined. Most of the bills had been shredded by mice. The rest had rotted.
It was the fortune the Browns had come for. It had been there the whole time — not the millions of the legend, but real money, hidden by a man who kept most of his wealth in banks like anyone with sense, and tucked a little extra behind a brick the way his generation did. The mice got it before the killers could. There is something in that detail — the smallness and the waste of it — that captures the whole tragedy better than any courtroom testimony.
Two people died because a rumor was more interesting than the truth. The truth was that David Akeman was a sophisticated, disciplined man who played a character so well that the character became the target. The hillbilly with cash in the walls. The rube who didn’t trust banks. The costume was so good it got him killed.
His banjo sat on the porch all night, waiting for someone to pick it up. Nobody ever really did.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons