dang me it's roger miller...

 On This Day, July 18, 1964:

Roger Miller scored his first career #1 hit with “Dang Me”.

Roger Miller was more than just a honky-tonk man and singer. He was also a songwriter, a guitarist and fiddler, a drummer, a T.V. star, a Broadway composer, and perhaps, above all else, one of the wittiest personalities in Country music.

Roger Dean Miller was born on January 2, 1936, in Fort Worth, Texas, and was the youngest of three boys. When he was only a year old, Roger’s father, Jean Miller, died of spinal meningitis when only 26. Laudene Holt Miller, Roger’s mother, was already struggling to care for three children by herself during the Great Depression. Unable to provide for her children, Jean’s three brothers came, and each took one of the boys to live with them.

Armelia and Elmer Miller took Roger with them to a farm on the outskirts of Erick, Oklahoma. He would later joke about how the town was “so dull you could watch the colors run” and was “so small that the town drunk had to take turns.”

Jokes aside, Roger had a difficult childhood. Most days were spent picking cotton. He was lonely and unhappy, never accepting or understanding the separation from his mother. While walking three miles to his one-room school, he started to compose songs.

Roger painted a somewhat more humorous picture of his school days. “The school I went to had 37 students,” he would say, “me and 36 Indians. During recess, we would play cowboy and Indians, and things got pretty wild from my standpoint.”

Roger was a dreamer, and his heart was never in picking cotton or working on a farm. “It’s a good thing that he made it in the music business, ’cause he would have starved to death as a farmer,” Sheb Wooley would say.

Roger’s first break came when he was hired to play fiddle in Minnie Pearl’s road band. His second break came when he met George Jones at the WSM radio station one night and played him some of his songs. Jones introduced Roger to Don Pierce and Pappy Daily of Mercury-Starday Records and asked them to listen to Roger’s material. Auditioned at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, Roger impressed the Mercury-Starday group enough to be granted a session in Houston.

George Jones and Roger rode to Texas together and wrote songs along the way. They co-authored “Tall, Tall Trees”, recorded by Jones in 1957, and “Happy Child”, which Jimmy Dean recorded in 1957. Roger also recorded some of his own songs, including the honkey-tonk weeper “My Pillow” and “Poor Little John”. In October of 1957, he and Jimmy Dean were paired together on the first single of Roger’s career.

Through the course of his career Miller would go on to win eleven GRAMMY Awards and in 1988 received the Academy of Country Music Pioneer Award.

In September of 1990, at the urging of his manager and long time friend, Stan Moress, Roger embarked on a tour unlike any he had ever done before. Just him and a guitar. The first show was ninety minutes of Roger being himself and left the audience laughing the entire time.

Roger found out that he had lung cancer in the fall of 1991 and performed one last time during CMA week in Nashville, TN. After a year of treatment and one short-lived remission, Roger passed away in Los Angeles on October 25, 1992, at 56 years old.

A week later, a memorial service was held for him at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN. Hundreds of relatives and friends, many of whom had known him while he was the ‘Singing Bellhop’, squeezed into the Ryman. They told their favorite Roger Miller stories and listened to his music, a fitting tribute to a man who was equal parts laughter and soul.

In 1995, Roger was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “This would have been his dream come true,” Mary said. “The ultimate recognition of his songwriting and musical artistry”.

When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Roger replied, “I just don’t want to be forgotten”.