Hey! Ol’ fireman Roger has got him a hit record!” Bob Gooch greeted our crew of shoe department salespeople one morning in 1964. Bob brandished the current issue of Billboard, the show-business journal, and added: “And not just on the hillbilly radio stations, either! Ol’ thing is climbin’ the pop-music charts, too!”
The scene was Amarillo’s downtown Fedway store, where Gooch was a hellbent-for-commissions footwear clerk by day. Most nights, he spent as a municipal firefighter. Gooch had known Fort Worth-born Roger Miller as a fellow smoke-eater during the 1950s in the Amarillo Fire Department. Except that Miller had fought few fires, in or outside the line of duty.
“Hardly a surprise to see ol’ fireman Roger makin’ a go of his music,” Gooch raved. “He mostly used to just sit around the fire station, pickin’ his guitar and makin’ up those goofy songs of his.” Miller would speak fondly of his hitch with the Amarillo Fire Department, allowing as how his very presence had been a deterrent.
“Just you check the official record,” Miller told me a few years later in an interview for the Amarillo Daily News & Globe-Times. “Amarillo had very few big-deal fires while I was on the crew, as if fire was a-scared of me and just naturally kept its distance. Had just two of ’em, as I recollect. One was in some ol’ boy’s chicken coop — and the other was … well, I reckon I slept through that alarm.”
Miller’s breakthrough hits of 1964 were “Dang Me” and “Chug-a-Lug,” original novelties that peaked at No. 1 and No. 3, respectively, on the country-western charts and scored within the upper 10 titles on Billboard’s Hot-100 chart. Further hits followed, including “England Swings,” “Doo Wacka Doo,” “Kansas City Star,” and his overriding chart-topper, the hobo anthem “King of the Road.” The concentration of stardom was short-lived but hardly premature, for Miller peaked early as a hitmaker, once given strategic promotion. He continued to record for the long term, scoring a final Top 20 C&W hit during 1981-1982 with “Old Friends,” a trio session with Ray Price and Willie Nelson.
Miller continued to record and tour until shortly before his death in 1992, with such highlights along the way as a composer-performer hitch on the Disney animated version of “Robin Hood” (1973). He cracked Broadway in 1985 with the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical “Big River,” an adaptation of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Raised on an uncle’s farm near Erick, Oklahoma, where his mother had sent him from Fort Worth, Miller had learned to play guitar from a cousin-in-law, country singer-turned-actor Sheb Wooley. During Army service in Korea, Miller made connections that would land him in Nashville. He infiltrated the music business with a job at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, where he became known as “the Singing Bellhop.” Affiliations developed with guitarist-producer Chet Atkins and vocalist George Jones, but Miller spent much of the 1950s-into-1960s as a busy songwriter.
“Every sentence Roger uttered was a potential song,” producer-publisher Buddy Killen once said. Miller’s singing chops went by-and-large ignored, except for short-lived early contracts with Decca Records and RCA Victor’s Nashville outpost, where he fit no familiar stylistic mold.
Strapped for cash and longing to be heard, Miller sold out for chump-change in advance to Mercury Records’ ambitious Smash label. (Smash had handled the national release for the hit “Hey, Baby!” by Fort Worth-based artists Bruce Channel and Delbert McClinton.) Miller offered to record 16 songs for $100 apiece. The gamble yielded the transformational hits “Dang Me” and “Chug-a-Lug,” along with additional material enough for an album and leftovers. “King of the Road” followed in short order — his most enduring song — and so did “Kansas City Star,” an imaginary autobiography about a local-television personality who prefers the security of small-time show business over the risk of tanking in a larger marketplace.
Never short for original material, Miller dreaded the time when he sensed his songwriting muse would abandon him. “The human mind is a wonderful thing,” he wrote during this fertile period, adding: “It starts working before you’re even born and doesn’t stop again until you sit down to write a song.”
Miller earned a television show of his own in September of 1966. NBC-TV’s “The Roger Miller Show” lasted for 13 weeks, inspiring the country-music comedy duo of Homer & Jethro (Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns) to record an affectionate parody, “The Ballad of Roger Miller,” with the recurring lyric, “pickin’ and a-grinnin’, sittin’ on a stool / Here’s to Roger Miller, the crazy and the cool.”
Miller cooled it with the songwriting in 1978, arguing that his reputation as a funnyman had obscured his more earnest efforts. He resumed upon receiving an offer to compose a Broadway score for Huckleberry Finn, which premiered as “Big River” in 1985 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. For the role of Huck Finn’s good-for-nothing father, the producers chose John Goodman, who was succeeded by Miller himself. Seven Tony awards resulted, including a Best Original Score citation for Miller.
Miller resumed touring, as a soloist, in 1990. He cut that schedule short in 1991, having received a diagnosis of cancer. His final television appearance occurred on a Nashville Network tribute to countrified comedian Minnie Pearl, née Sarah Ophelia Cannon. That program appeared on October 26, 1992, a day after Miller’s death.
Though conveniently labeled as a C&W artist, Miller’s style and influences defy classification. As fellow fireman Bob Gooch had said way back in 1964 upon learning of his friend’s pop-chart status, Miller was scoring “not just on the hillbilly radio stations!” In other words, the artist defied expectations so thoroughly that popular expectations would come around to expecting the unexpected. Most of Miller’s songs are humorous by nature, with nonsense phrases and jazz-like scat singing — but the transcendent “King of the Road” is a good-natured meditation on the loneliness of an untethered existence. And 1966’s “Husbands and Wives” is a downright mournful composition.
Perhaps the most succinct summation of Roger Miller can be found in Lyle E. Style’s biographical study, Ain’t Got No Cigarettes (Great Plains Publ.; 2005). Style perceives Miller as “uncategorizable,” except perhaps as a genius.
Click here to listen to the our pick of Miller favorites on Spotify.
