TV fans love him for Mayberry and Matlock, but at the start of his career he had a top-10 record, two hit Broadway shows, one popular movie and another — A Face in the Crowd — that turned his smiling-yokel persona into a multimedia monster

Hulton Archive / Getty Images Promotional headshot portrait of actor Andy Griffith from 1958, for director Norman Taurog's film, 'Onionhead'.

“I’d struck out on Broadway, and I’d struck out in the movies, so I kinda had to go to television,” Andy Griffith stated in 2008. That comment, like so many things Griffith said as Sheriff Andy Taylor and Ben Matlock, was a sly joke, an aw-shucks feint of self-depreciation to disarm the sharpies who underestimated him. But his admirers from a half-century’s runs and reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock should know that there was life before Mayberry. By the time he launched his own TV show on Oct. 1, 1960, when he was 34, Griffith had already conquered the other extant media: records, Broadway shows and movies. He didn’t strike out; he was a triple-crown winner.

Beginning as a standup comic, Griffith perfected the “Andy” persona — the good ol’ boy observing modern life with enthusiastic bafflement — in monologues like “What Is Was, Was Football,” which went to No. 9 on the pop-music charts in 1953. He extended that character by starring in the TV, Broadway and movie versions of the military comedy No Time for Sergeants, a solid hit in each medium. And having constructed this friendly Tarheel image, he then boldly deconstructed it, tore it to shreds, as folk singer and TV talk-titan Lonesome Rhodes in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. For a decade, Griffith scaled the mountain of achievement, then coasted — most agreeably and reassuringly — as the folksy-foxy sheriff or lawyer on TV.

(READ: James Poniewozik’s tribute to Andy Grffith’s TV career)

Raised a Baptist, and entering the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the intention of becoming a Moravian minister, Andy Sam Griffith soon spun the spellbinding oratorical skills of a backwoods preacher into comedy monologues. That brought him to New York, where the rural naïveté of the Andy character played like sweet, foreign bluegrass music to the sophisticates in Manhattan night clubs.

Unlike traditional standup, with its barrage of one-liners, the monologue has a through-line narrative; it’s a short story or essay delivered aloud. Ruth Draper fashioned it into high art on Broadway, but the monologue was also a staple of vaudeville; in the 1920s it had helped build Will Rogers‘ legendary reputation. As Rogers was to Oklahoma, and later Herb Shriner to Indiana, so Griffith was to rural North Carolina: the country boy speaking truth to the city slickers.

Occasionally, a monologue could become a vinyl and radio smash. Johnny Standley, a Wisconsin musician in Horace Heidt’s band, had translated the fire-and-brimstone preacher mode to the tale of Little Bo Peep for his 1952 comedy record, “It’s in the Book.” The two-sided single hit No. 1 and sold two million copies. But Standley’s monologue climaxed in a sing-along tune (“Grandma’s Lye Soap”), whereas “Football” was just Andy talking, for five minutes and 40 seconds — possibly a record length in that era of three-minute singles.

(SEE: Sing Along With Andy)

Listening to “What Is Was, Was Football” on YouTube, the Andy fan hears the rolling cadences and sly innocence of the Taylor and Matlock voices. Nearly 60 years ago, it was all there. And Griffith created the piece — the only time in his career he took writer’s credit.

He tells the audience that, “last October, I believe it was,” he and his fellow Christians had come to some college town for a tent service, and he wandered into what his listeners instantly realize is a football stadium. To Andy, it’s just a giant “cow pasture” with stripes on it and “great big outhouses” (tunnels) on either side. The referee is “a convict”; when players get in a huddle, “They voted.” (For full comic effect, play the YouTube recording, or channel the Andy voice in your head.)

He gradually infers that “Both bunches-full of them men wanted this funny-lookin’ little pumpkin to play with. They did. And I know, friends, that they couldn’t eat it because they kicked it the whole evenin’ and it never busted. … One bunch got it, and it made the other bunch as mad as they could be. And, friends, I seen the awfulest fight that I have ever seen in my life. I did. They would run at one another and kick one another and th’ow one another down and stomp on one another and griiind their feet in one another, and I don’t know what all, and just as fast as one of ’em’d get hurt, they’d tow him off and run anoth’un on.” In the rhythms of Griffith’s laconic frenzy, you can hear a forerunner of the tone Arlo Guthrie used in his own famous comic monologue, the 1967 “Alice’s Restaurant.”

(READ: Corliss on Arthur Penn’s film of Alice’s Restaurant)

Superbly building the excitement, Andy then calms down to offer his final précis: “I think it’s some kindly of a contest where they see which bunch-full of them men can take that punkin and run from one end of that cow pasture to th’other, without either gettin’ knocked down, or steppin’ in somethin’.”