SMH Home Home   >   Obituaries   >   Article    Jed was new to
Hollywood, but Buddy wasn't  July 12 2003  Buddy Ebsen, Actor
1908-2003  Buddy Ebsen, a gangly and personable Ziegfeld song-
and-dance man in the late 1920s who gained lasting fame on
television as Davy Crockett's sidekick, a hillbilly in Beverly
Hills and an ageing private eye, has died aged 95.  For nine
seasons, starting in 1962, the lanky Ebsen was the canny Jed
Clampett, head of the backwoods family in The Beverly
Hillbillies, one of the most popular television series of the
1960s.  This sugary fantasy depicted a clash between the values
of the Ozark Hills in Missouri and those of sophisticated
Hollywood following the discovery of oil on the Clampett farm.
With his honey-and-chewing-tobacco drawl, Ebsen's Jed Clampett
would insist on retaining his old battered hat, and enthuse
about an ideal diet of "coons' innards" and "buzzard pie". The
plots had little variety. Jed's beautiful daughter Elly May
never found a husband and his dumb nephew Jeth