A Very OK Podcast
Episode 58: “Sheb Wooley and Roger Miller”
May 19, 2026
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it’s great to see you today.
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Thank you, Trait. It is a good day out—beautiful weather. Spring is coming along nicely, and everything is green.
Thompson: It is. We’ve been very busy here at the Historical Society. Of course, Route 66 is taking up all of our attention these days. A couple of weeks ago, we had the Mother Road Summit here at the History Center, where we had over 150 people from seven of the eight Route 66 states. We hosted them for learning sessions. We had a great keynote speaker, which was Sean McMaster, who is the administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. Our partners in this, Tim Gatz at ODOT, Amy Blackburn at the Department of Tourism, VisitOKC, helped us put on this great event. We got to show off the History Center to all of our guests who had never been here before. But Route 66 is really high in our minds right now.
Blackburn: Well, you know, I’ve been working on a museum on Route 66, the Heartland of America Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma. They received a nice gift and a big collection of lithic material going back to Clovis points 12,000 years ago. So I’ve been working on that exhibit. We just got a Route 66 grant to do a new sign out front with the Route 66 theme and an exhibit indoors with the reproduction of a Magnolia Filling Station built in 1939 on Main Street in Weatherford. So I’m having fun with Route 66 and keeping my hand a little bit in history in between golf and pickleball, of course. And grandkids.
Thompson: Of course, played a little pickleball last night, and it was great weather. So, you know, one thing we’re working on here, we’ve got a brand new exhibit about Route 66 that is going to open on May 23 here at the Oklahoma History Center. And Nicole Harvey and her team have been doing a fantastic job getting ready for that exhibit. We have a great sponsor in the Inasmuch Foundation for that, and I’m really looking forward to it. So I hope everybody who is listening to us will make it make a point to come and visit us for that.
Blackburn: Well, and I just got a sneak peek as I came in the building today. That Corvette is to die for.
Thompson: It is.
Blackburn: That was my dream car, 1967, and of course my dad surprised me and got me a Volkswagen Bug. But I wanted the Corvette, so it’s a long, unfulfilled dream. But to even be close to it, it’s beautiful. Well, I wish we could let you drive it, but the folks at the National Corvette Museum might object.
(laughter)
Thompson: Well, speaking of museums, I want to bring our guest in to this episode. We are talking about Route 66 all year on this podcast. And today we’re going to travel to Erick, Oklahoma, out in the western part of the state— a little town on Route 66. We’re going to be talking about Sheb Wooley and Roger Miller, two of Erick's favorite sons. And I couldn’t think of a better guest to be with us than a man that I’ve known for quite some time. In fact, we’re from the same hometown in Brady, Texas.
Tracy Pitcox is with us, and Tracy began his career in radio in 1986 at the age of 15 at KNEL in Brady, Texas. He started a traditional country music request program called Hillbilly Hits in 1989. That radio show would enable Pitcox to connect with country music fans all over the world and become the nucleus of a 30-year radio career, and also a record label, a country music museum, and promotion of hundreds of country music shows and dances. His book, Legendary Conversations with a Texas Disc Jockey, has attained two pressings since it was published in 2008, and it contains interviews with over 90 country music entertainers, from Garth Brooks to Kitty Wells. He also founded The Heart of Texas Country Music Museum in Brady, Texas. The museum honors 125 musical artists with memorabilia. He’s got Jim Reeves’ tour bus. He’s got items from Tammy Wynette, Ferlin Husky, lots of Nudie-designed rhinestone suits from Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Hank Thompson, Ray Price, and many others. He is the president of Heart of Texas Records, which is an independent traditional country music record label that has released over 50 projects, including artists such as Norma Jean, Johnny Bush, Hank Thompson, Ferlin Husky, and more. He’s received numerous awards throughout his career and was inducted into the Texas Country Music—sorry— Texas Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame in 2017. Tracy, where do you find the time?
Tracy Pitcox: Well, I tell you, that’s very kind for you to read all that stuff. No one really cares, Trait. (laughing) But, you know, it was very nice of you to read all that off, and I want to say what a pleasure it is to spend time with you and Bob today on the podcast.
Thompson: Well, Tracy, I have to admit, of course, I mentioned that I grew up in Brady, Texas. You grew up in Brady, Texas, and you still live there today with your lovely wife, Charla. And your voice is the voice of my childhood in my growing-up years on KNEL in Brady, and all these years later, to have formed a friendship with you, and we’ve actually had an opportunity to work on several projects together, it’s been very gratifying for me.
Pitcox: Well, I appreciate you saying that, and it’s kind of, kind of interesting. You know, in August, I’ll be celebrating my 40th year at KNEL radio, which is pretty, pretty cool, I think. And I started, like you mentioned, when I was 15, and the other day we were doing a show, and this beautiful young lady came down the aisle, and she said, could I get my picture made with you? And I said, sure, I’d love that. You know, she’s a very attractive young lady. And she said, I’m going to send this to my husband. She said, when he was a little bitty boy, he used to call and request on your radio program. So it’s kind of like I’m getting older, and I can realize that now. So, you know, it’s like I’m going through the second and third generation of listeners now, and that’s pretty neat, Trait.
Thompson: Well, what you’ve been able to do, and I have to say, Tracy, a lot of people come to me with ideas of, hey, I want to start a museum. And I know, Bob, that’s been the case for you too. And a lot of times I try to talk them out of it because museums are a lot more work than people think they are, and a lot of times they place a higher value on their collection of old stuff than the general public does. But you’ve done something really, really incredible there in Brady, which is a population of a little over 5,000 people, last I checked. And you’ve created this incredible Heart of Texas Country Music Museum. You have some amazing artifacts. And not only did you create it to start with, but you have expanded it, and you’re working on a major expansion, and I think that’s just incredible. So, tell us a little bit about that venture.
Pitcox: You know, the museum actually kind of started, and I always tell everyone from the time I was doing an interview with a lady by the name of Rose Maddox, which was a great artist back in the ’40s and the ’50s, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, the most colorful hillbilly band in the land is how they went, their moniker, the most colorful hillbilly band in the land. But anyway, I was interviewing Rose Maddox one time, and I just read where Marty Stuart had been out to her house in Oregon and had purchased all of her old stage costumes. And in the interview, she says, and I asked her about that interview, she says, that’s true. He did. He came out here, and he bought everything I had, except for one old dress that I found in the back of my closet this morning. And I don’t know what it was, but something in my mind said I need to ask her about that dress. And so after the interview was over, I asked her, I said, Rose, do you want to sell that dress? And she said, she said, yes. She said, I’ve got a bill at the pharmacy for $100. And she said, I can’t get any more medication from the pharmacy until I pay that bill off. If you’ll send me a check for $100, I’ll send you that dress. And then a couple of weeks later, I got this package from Rose Maddox. I opened it up, and it was a Nathan Turk–created gold dress just encrusted with rhinestones, colorful rhinestones. And when I opened that package, it was just like, it was just like something was telling me, I’ve got to try to preserve this kind of stuff.
And so, every time I would book an artist down here in Texas, I would ask them for something, and you’d be surprised at how many just were kind enough to give us things. So this was way before, and this was the early ’90s, way before we even decided to do a museum. And then, so, we started collecting all this stuff, and then I thought, we need to do something with it. And so, our organization started fundraising in 1997. And of course, you’ll think it’s funny because I know, Bob, you and Trait both have had to raise a lot of money for museums, but we raised $50,000 and had complete volunteer labor, and even the lot given to us, but we raised $50,000 to build our first little building. And since that time, we’ve expanded three other times, including the most recent 6,300-square-foot addition that we just opened back in March. But it’s kind of been a religious experience for us to try to save as much of this stuff as we can.
Thompson: Tracy, what are some artifacts that you have relating to Oklahoma artists? Well, as you know, Oklahoma and Texas are probably a rival as to how many country music artists came from those two states. And, a friendly rival, of course. We’ve got some great Oklahoma people represented. You mentioned Norma Jean. Norma Jean lives here in Brady with us now at the age of 88. Well, she’s donated so much of her memorabilia to us, from guitars and stage outfits, her Grammy nomination plaques, and even her Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame award. We have all that stuff here at the at the museum, and Wanda Jackson has done the same. We have a guitar from Wanda, and stage outfits from Wanda Jackson as well, even to newer artists as well, the, you know, the Toby Keiths and the Garth Brooks and that sort of thing. Of course, Reba McEntire and and so many other great Oklahoma artists are represented in the museum as well.
Thompson: Well, that’s great, Tracy, and we appreciate all the work that you’re doing to preserve those artifacts and to make sure that they can be enjoyed and learned from for future generations.
Pitcox: Oh, yeah. We really enjoyed, here a few years ago, going on what we call the Oklahoma music trail, and I gathered information about places where people were born in Oklahoma. Everyone from, of course, the Garth, and the Rebas, and Patti Page, and everyone else. And so we actually made a trip and spent a week just going from little town to little town, visiting those places in Oklahoma where some of my musical heroes were born and where they lived. You know, Hank Thompson wasn’t born in Oklahoma, but he spent a lot of time there in Oklahoma.
Thompson: Right. And so, we were able to go and spend time at places where he lived there in Oklahoma, and of course, we have the bulk of his memorabilia at our museum as well.
Thompson: And we just transferred a car to you that was owned by Bob Wills, that we did not have room for at our OKPOP Museum, that’ll be opening in a couple of years. And I was so glad that we were able to connect with you to give that car a good home.
Pitcox: But you have the bus. I mean, that bus is incredible. I mean, what a showpiece right there. It’s just going to be a, that’s going to be the centerpiece of that great museum. I cannot wait until it’s open. You were kind enough to take us through it a few weeks ago. But man, what a great addition that’s going to be for the fine state of Oklahoma.
Thompson: Yeah, we’re very excited about it. Well, let’s get into our topic for today. I want to turn our attention to, because we could talk for probably the next three hours about the two gentlemen that we’re talking about, Sheb Wooley and Roger Miller. I mean, the fact that you have two artists that come from this tiny little town in western Oklahoma that make the impact that they make is quite incredible. And, Bob, I’d love for you to set the scene for us, like you always do such a good job of doing.
But Sheb Wooley is born in 1921 in Erick. Roger Miller was born in 1936, not in Oklahoma, but in Fort Worth, and we’ll get into the story of how he makes his way to Erick in a little bit. But times were good in the 1920s. Times were hard in the 1930s. Erick kind of goes through a series of shifts over the years, as it is very prosperous in its early days. I think it was incorporated in 1901. And then, you know, it goes through, of course, agricultural boom and bust, and the oil boom and bust comes to Erick. So it’s a town that’s been through it’s hard times. But Route 66 goes through Erick starting in 1926, and that is a major lifeline for economic development. So, set the scene for us.
Blackburn: What’s life like in Erick? Yeah, well, typical of western Oklahoma, we’ve had challenges and opportunities, and to understand the culture, the people, the way they react, the way they create, you have to understand these challenges. It almost creates a dramatic stage of history that they’re walking on. And, of course, the area was opened by land run in 1892, but no one settled, took homesteads that far west, in the Cheyenne-Arapaho lands, because no one thought they could farm out there. It’s so dry, so cyclical. It’s prairie. And it was rich prairie, home for the buffalo herds for thousands of years, and no one settled at first.
Well, eventually, mechanization started catching up. Prices of commodities started going up. The rains came back to the Southern Plains in 1896 and ’97. And so, farmers could move farther west onto these grasslands, and they’d break the sod and then raise their crops. Well, the first big challenge was dealing with that cyclical climate, and we know about the Dust Bowl. We know about the droughts of the 1880s, and the droughts of the 1930s, and the droughts of the 1950s. Then you throw on top of that the rising and falling price of agricultural products, and farmers had no control over either. Either the rains came, or they didn’t, and either the price was up, or it wasn’t. But they kept trying. And typically those lands in western Oklahoma attracted a pretty hearty group of people, usually had been starved out of farms elsewhere in Kansas and Missouri, Texas perhaps. And to them, free land was one last chance. Land was the idea of wealth— the idea of the future and hope. So getting the land was all-important.
So they would sink down their roots, and year after year, they’d put in crops, typically on 160 acres. They would have to have corn to feed the animals, the motive power for making farming work. They would have to have a garden to feed the family. They would have to have a couple of cash crops. Typically from 1901 to the 1920s, that was cotton, and cotton would grow well there. Now, it was borderland. You’re not going to see much cotton north of Roger Mills County, north of I-40 today, or Route 66 in the day. Usually, cotton is more of a southern crop, but it was marginal. So they’d have a few good crops, you know, every three or four years, there’d be a good crop. And if the price is up around $0.25 a pound, they could make a lot of money— enough to pay their taxes, pay off a little bit of a mortgage on the home to buy the tractors and equipment, and to buy clothes and shoes for the kids or send them to school. But probably two out of three years, the crop wouldn’t make much, that wouldn’t make much money.
Well, the little town of Erick had numerous cotton gins. It would have the grain elevators as wheat became more popular as a cash crop, because you could put your cattle on wheat and the high protein, and fatten them up, send them to market. And so the farm and ranch was up and down, and both Sheb’s and Roger’s families were farmers and ranchers. That’s where they started. They might be merchants, but typically, you might have a job off the farm. And so the family was largely an agricultural community and farm families. Then the big change, though, was oil and gas.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: The oil boom in western Oklahoma, where you have the Anadarko Basin, and you can drive today from Erick and Sayre and Elk City on Highway 152 up through Borger and all those oil towns, north of Amarillo, and that is a seam of oil play that really hit big in the 1920s and ’30s. And so, that would have boosted town population, giving people new hope. Well, maybe we can survive. Creating jobs, bringing people in. But again, oil and gas was up and down. One time in the ’30s, got down to a nickel a barrel, and with big production in East Texas, Oklahoma City Field, those fields weren’t producing much, and so hard times, challenges.
But the opportunities were there for people like Sheb and Roger, because this is also at a time of technological change. Not just mechanization on the farm, but first you have radio. The first radio stations in Oklahoma are the early 1920s. And so by the time they are becoming adults, and Sheb was born the same year, as my dad, 1921, he grew up listening to Bob Wills and Johnny Lee Wills. So there’s a little connection with my own family there. But Sheb would have grown up, Roger would have grown up, listening to radio. That’s where you hear the latest sounds out of Nashville and New Orleans, and Chicago. And this blend of blues and gospel and country, you know, the old-fashioned country, and then this rising new genre of bluegrass. And so you can hear these things, you could hear bands with Woody Guthrie in it. They’re playing this old cowboy music. And so they were right at the right time to get this blend of musical trends, that are all coming together for new things. And then you throw in the technological changes of the movies.
By 1928, you have the talkies. And of course, the most popular movies through the 1940s and ’50s are the westerns. And that created an entire new opportunity for studying cowboy music, Western music, the singing cowboys like Gene Autry. And we claim him in both Texas and Oklahoma. But music and movies, cowboys, all kind of blend together. Roy Rogers, more recently, the singing cowboy. And then you throw in the impact of television. First television stations in Oklahoma really go on the air in 1949, 1950. And that creates another outlet for creative talent, along with the recording industry that really takes off after World War II. A lot of that is going to be early rock and roll, but you also have country and western stations, and it’s no accident coming out of Nashville, coming out of Oklahoma City, covering western music. And that provides another opportunity. That’s why Bob Wills moved from hard-pressed Oklahoma, or Texas, to Oklahoma, first Oklahoma City, then to Tulsa, where he finds opportunity making money on dances, but promoting the dances on radio. And so, you get radio, you get television, the movies, and the recording industry. So, musical acts, and especially writers like Roger especially, he made more money writing than he ever did recording. Now, if he recorded his own music, of course, he was making money as a writer, but that gave them a new opportunity to make a living, to do what they wanted to do, what was their passion. And that was writing, singing, performing— the witty nature of those two writers along between their songs.
You have to think, well, there’s something weird in the water out there in western Oklahoma, because they both would write witty songs that were popular with the public, that would be on AM radio, that would appeal to a vast audience. Later, FM and now, of course, with Spotify and Sirius Radio, you get your little genres and your little slice of music. But in those days on AM, I was raised in the AM days until I got, let’s see, I would have been in my 30s, in the 1970s, before I got a car that had anything but AM radio. On AM, you hear a little bit of everything in that crossover.
So the Garth Brooks, the Rebas, were being raised at the same time. Hearing that blend of music, and it all comes together to create that western Oklahoma spirit, tenacity, creativity, looking to get off the farm to do something else, instead of baling hay and picking cotton. And they find opportunity in these converging media where their artistic background and inclination could take them. And both of them would span all the way from recording artist, to performing artist, to television acts, where they would do more than just music. They would entertain, kind of in the vein of Will Rogers. And so really, this stage of history is really a very creative time period for people. And these two individuals from western Oklahoma along Route 66 made their mark.
Thompson: Yeah, absolutely. Tracy, Sheb Wooley’s story, which his given name was Shelby, but no one called him that. Everyone called him Sheb. He reminds me a little bit of your story because when he was 15 years old, he forms a band called the Plainview Melody Boys, and he traipses right over to Elk City and says, hey, I have this band. I want to start playing on the radio. And they said, well, okay, and that’s how he gets his start.
Pitcox: And he was, he was in Western swing. That was his first love was western swing. And it’s kind of ironic that that might have been his first love, but he probably had less success as a western swing artist than anything in his career, even doing the country stuff. It was good, but, of course, whenever you hit with a song like “The Purple People Eater,” that’s going to be a...at that time, it was kind of a rock and roll song, back in 1958. And so although his first love was western swing, and makes sense being from Oklahoma, but his actual success came after he had the “The Purple People Eater” song.
Thompson: Yeah, he used to— so, he worked for the Miller family on their cotton farm, and he and Roger used to spend time just daydreaming about being famous. You know, that’s all they could think about was going off and being famous and being on the radio, being on television. And, in fact, I was watching a documentary about Roger Miller, and it said that Sheb Wooley would, in their barn at the Miller farm, he took a pencil or something, and he practiced his autograph on one of the boards there. And later on, when Roger moved to Los Angeles, he had that piece of board cut off and took it with him to Los Angeles, because Sheb was such a hero to him, and Sheb actually taught Roger how to play the guitar and actually got him a three-quarter-size fiddle to teach him how to play the fiddle as well. And so these two guys are really tied together in terms of their influences, and Roger considers Sheb a major influence on his life and career.
Pitcox: And I believe that Sheb actually married Roger’s cousin, for the first time, if I remember correctly.
Thompson: He did. Yeah, he married, so you know, it’s hard to talk about these guys and and take them apart. But Roger Miller, he was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and his father died when he was one year old. And at that time, his uncle Elmer came to Fort Worth and basically snatched him away, basically told, Laudene, who was his mother. His mother was only 22, 23 years old at the time. He, Elmer said, you know, we’re taking this boy back to Oklahoma. We’re going to raise him. You don’t have the ability to do it, and so basically kind of stole him away. Laudene was young. She didn’t know what her rights were, and she just said, kind of threw up her hands and said, okay. And so that’s how Roger Miller gets to Erick, Oklahoma. And Roger grew up being raised actually by his aunt and his uncle. And so, yeah, it was Sheb who ends up marrying Roger’s cousin, who he was raised with.
Pitcox: I thought it was always interesting that, that you have Sheb Wooley, who had probably the biggest hit of his career in ’58 with the “Purple People Eater.” At that same time, that was the same year that he also got into the ability to be Pete Nolan on Rawhide, which was also a very big thing for him in his career. So he was enjoying success recording, as well as enjoying success in the television series as well at the same exact time, and then also sort of writing and directing some of those episodes as well.
Thompson: Yeah, he was multi-talented. And in fact, looking at his career, I kind of almost consider him almost more of an actor than a singer-songwriter because he seems to have resonated more in the movies and in television. In 1950, he goes to Hollywood. His music career isn’t doing all that much, and he wanted to become a singing cowboy. And what he didn’t realize is that era was at its very end of its life, and so he couldn’t get a job as a singing cowboy. So in ’58, he gets he gets these jobs on these various different shows. In fact, his first movie was the 1950 film Rocky Mountain starring Errol Flynn. And he’s one of the heavies in the 1952 movie with Gary Cooper, High Noon, which is a classic western. If you haven’t seen it, everybody should go see that movie. And he gets on the 1958 show Rawhide. Rawhide runs from ’58 to ’65, I believe. And, Bob, who else is in that show?
Blackburn: Yeah, Clint Eastwood, young actor, his first big part, and of course, that would launch his career, and revived by the spaghetti Westerns, but he started on Rawhide. and I wanted to say, Sheb was a natural as a character actor. He had a face that looked like it had been worn out on the trail.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: And he just looked like this Western cowboy and had the drawl and walked and talk just like a cowboy from western Oklahoma that he was.
Thompson: Bob, could Clint Eastwood almost have been your stepdad?
(laughter)
Blackburn: Oh, we were talking earlier. My mom had a television show from 1958 to 1975, and Clint came out to promote the show on her show, and they had a date. So, my mom was single at the time, and so I almost had a stepdad that would have taken me to Hollywood, if that had worked out. But apparently it didn’t because he went on and we stayed in Oklahoma.
Thompson: Yeah, we’ve talked about this before, Tracy, but, Bob’s mom was quite a celebrity here in Oklahoma City. And it was, I think almost every celebrity that came through tried to snatch her up in some way. John Wayne tried to make her his secretary.
Blackburn: Yeah, wanted her to start a show on his Paramount station in LA in 1963. And she’s raising two little kids, and I got lots of family around to help with me, with them, and I’m just going to stay. She also just, this is off, but it has a musical connection. One time, I was working on an exhibit at the OKPOP Museum on Mason Williams, who was raised here in Oklahoma City. It had Texas connections as well, what you said Tracy, there’s lots of overlap, but I was doing that, and his best friend was Tommy Smothers. So I was on the phone one day. I called my mom. I said, mom, I’ve got a picture of you and Tommy and Dickie Smothers. When was it? She says, well, you don’t remember because Tommy came to the house to take me out on a date, and you let him in the apartment and talked to him for 30 minutes while I was getting ready. I said, I have no memory of meeting him, but again, it could have been a stepdad, but wasn’t.
Thompson: I love that.
Pitcox: I do too, I do too.
Thompson: Well, interestingly enough, Clint Eastwood was actually allergic to horses. Can you believe that? And Sheb Wooley taught him how to ride and to tolerate horses for his career. And in fact, Clint Eastwood would remark later that he, in that show Rawhide, they’re cattle drivers, you know, they’re driving cattle from Texas to Sedalia, Missouri. And of course, they have different adventures in between. I pulled up season one, episode one of Rawhide, just so I could get a feel for it the other day. And in that episode, there’s a group of marshals that are bringing prisoners across the territory in a prison wagon, and the marshals end up in a shootout, or a struggle with the inmates. One of them dies. So the trail herders, Clint Eastwood, and the main boss, and you’ll forgive me if I’m forgetting his name at this point, they have to take the prisoners on into the fort, and all in all, the adventures that ensue in that particular time. But yeah, Sheb was actually instrumental in helping Clint Eastwood become Clint Eastwood, which is pretty fascinating to me.
Pitcox: I don't know if you had an opportunity to ever see his show live, but he had a a fascinating show, but it was three parts to his program if he did his full show, because he would come out and do the Sheb Wooley stuff, and he would do the stuff that he had had his own with, with the Sheb Wooley and do the “That's My Pa,” and that sort of thing, “My Only Treasure,” and some of that stuff. And then he would do the, you know, the Ben Colder, the drunk act that he had such a success with, and he had those parodies of every big country hit that there was. He had “Almost Persuaded No. 2” and later on and “Harper Valley P.T.A.” you know, all that other stuff that he recorded. He’d do the Colder stuff, but he would also do the Rawhide stuff. He did a stint on his live show as, you know, as Pete Nolan, and did Rawhide, and had the whip and everything else, and was very good with working the whip in the stage show.
Thompson: Oh, wow.
Pitcox: And so every time we had a chance to see him, he was doing a breakfast show there in Nashville with Jim Ed Brown for a number of years, and every time I had a chance to see him, he would come out and do like all three characters, and it worked good because it’s like he could do his little stuff 20 minutes and go back, and sing some more songs. He’d come back and do another, you know, a few minutes of whoever. But he was also very good with the whip, which I thought was a very interesting thing.
Blackburn: You know, little aside here, every time someone mentions Rawhide the music, I think of the Blues Brothers and that classic scene where they’re in that bar where everyone is throwing beer bottles at them and chairs and chicken wire and they’re playing Rawhide. That was a great version.
(laughter)
Thompson: I love that. I want to go back to “Purple People Eater,” just for a second, because the story behind this song is pretty wild, and it all started with a joke that was told by Don Robertson, who was a songwriter, and he told it to Sheb Wooley. And supposedly, the joke actually came from Robertson’s son, who had heard it at elementary school. But the joke was, what has one eye, one horn, flies, and eats people? And the answer is a one-eyed, one-horned, flying people-eater. And Sheb heard that joke and went back and within an hour had written the “Purple People Eater” song, and it was one of those songs that, he was at the end of a recording session. It wasn’t originally supposed to be part of the recording session, but he records it anyway, just on a lark. And it gets back to MGM. MGM was like, we’re not putting this thing out, but the young people in the audience start listening to it, and there would be 40 or 50 people gathered around listening to this song. And MGM started thinking, maybe we got something here, and they ended up releasing it. And, you know, folks, if you haven’t heard the song, go on YouTube, you can find it. It’s a wild song. It’s almost, you know, it might help if you have some substances that aid you in listening to it, but it’s a wild song. They made the voice of the “Purple People Eater” kind of like they make Alvin and the Chipmunks, by speeding up the recording to make it a very high-pitched voice, but it’s, people go wild for it, and it becomes an amazing hit across the country, as you mentioned in 1958.
Judy Garland actually records it on her 1958 Capitol Records album, Garland at the Grove, and it sold over 100 million copies to this date. It is a wildly successful novelty song, and in the 1970s, if you remember, the Minnesota Vikings defense were the “Purple People Eaters,” and that came from that song as well. So, what a crazy story, Tracy.
Pitcox: For sure. And it just goes to show you what one little, one little thing, like you said, the joke or something that someone casually says, actually sparks a song, and that song actually sparks, truly a career and such a such a movement in the music business.
Blackburn: You know, Trait, you probably found this too with other artists, is that some artists will say, oh, it takes me weeks to write a song, and they’ll just edit and change, but at times they’ll wake up, and they will have dreamed a song. I’ve heard Paul McCartney tell that story. Steve Ripley here in Oklahoma told that story, and Roger Miller was known for sitting there and writing out a song in a cafe on a napkin. And sometimes the inspiration would hit; sometimes they would struggle. And the great ones knew how to do both.
Pitcox: I remember Tammy Wynette saying one time that it took her 15 minutes to write “Stand By Your Man,” and then a lifetime trying to explain it, so you know it’s a good point. (laughing)
Blackburn: That’s a good line.
Pitcox: Sometimes the greatest songs come to you just in a matter of minutes, but then understanding them sometimes takes a career.
Thompson: Yeah. For sure. People are still trying to explain “Okie from Muskogee,” that Merle Haggard wrote. There’s whole groups of people that are trying to figure out what he’s talking about.
Pitcox: Well, he probably didn’t know either!
(laughter)
Blackburn: You know, even inspired by a sign on the side of the road, “trailers for sale or rent.” And I grew up with that song. That must have come out about ’67 or ’68 because I remember listening to that on AM radio, and I would hear that driving to work when I was a carpenter.
Thompson: Well, I want to get into Roger Miller here in just a minute, but two more things I want to mention about Sheb Wooley, and then we’ll take a quick break and come back for Roger Miller. The first one is he was in the original cast of Hee Haw in 1969 and also wrote the Hee Haw theme song, which is one of, in my opinion, one of the legendary theme songs. And then, Tracy, have you heard of the Wilhelm scream?
Pitcox: Yes, actually, I have.
Thompson: Can you tell us about it?
Pitcox: Well, why don’t you explain to me? If you would.
Thompson: Yeah, this is this is kind of one of those crazy movie trivia things. But in the 1951 film Distant Drums, which Sheb Wooley was in, there is a scene where a man is trudging through a swamp and he gets drug under the swamp by an alligator that attacks him. Now, a lot of times in scenes like that, they come back and redubbed some of the sound effects, and so they hired Sheb Wooley to come in and dub this man screaming as he is pulled under.
Pitcox: He’s the voice actor, for this.
Thompson: Yeah. And the scream was, I guess it became iconic, and it becomes used in hundreds of films and television shows. And it’s now, if you go on IMDb and you look in the trivia section of lots of movies, they’ll say at 3:42, in the movie, there’s a Wilhelm scream, and the scream was actually named after a Private Wilhelm where the scream was used in the 1953 film The Charge at Feather River. Warner Bros. uses it in all these movies, and then people kind of forget about it, and it doesn’t get used until a sound engineer, Ben Burtt, came across it while recording some of the sounds for Star Wars, and it’s used in all the Star Wars movies. It’s used in all the Indiana Jones movies. And to date, it’s been used in over 400 films, the scream that Sheb Wooley recorded, and it’s kind of just crazy movie trivia.
Blackburn: I wonder if he got royalties on that. I hope he did. He probably didn’t.
Pitcox: I think he did because he told Ralph Emery one time in an interview that it was the shortest thing that he ever recorded, and it made more money than nearly anything else he had in his career. (laughter) So, that’s really neat.
Thompson: Isn’t that wild? But for you movie trivia fans out there, Sheb Wooley from Oklahoma, recorded the Wilhelm scream. Unfortunately, Sheb died of leukemia in 2003, and so we lost him.
Pitcox: Trait, I was going to tell you also, my last time that I saw Sheb, my wife and I were in Nashville, and it was in June of 2003. He had been ill for for two or three years with leukemia. And we were actually having lunch at Shoney’s, and I looked across the restaurant, and it was like 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and there’s hardly anybody there. And Sheb was in there with his wife, Linda, who was also his manager. She was the manager first, and then she became his last wife. But anyway, and so after he, I waited till he got through eating, and I went over there and spent some time with him. But he was so weak at that time. That was the last time I saw Sheb, and that was in June of 2003. Then he passed away just a few months later. But what a prince of a guy.
Thompson: Yeah. Wow. Now in Erick, there’s a mural to Sheb Wooley there. Just like there’s a mural to Roger Miller. So I want to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will get into Roger Miller.
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Thompson: And, we’re back. So, Roger Miller, I just finished reading a book about him in preparation for this podcast. And, Tracy, I really don’t know... He was a funny person, no doubt about it. He was a witty person, no doubt about it. But there was a depth to him that I think a lot of people might not have appreciated when he was alive. Can you talk a little bit about your impression of Roger Miller?
Pitcox: Well, first of all, I think he was a musical genius. I mean, I think there’s no doubt about it. Not only was he, he was a funny guy, and he said so many funny things, but he was also very deep when it came to to his thinking and his philosophy and things such as that.
I’ll never forget Darrell McCullough telling me one time that they were out on the road, and they’d driven all night from one gig trying to make it to the next gig, and he said that the sun was just coming up, and it was just absolutely beautiful, you know, as the sun rises and the landscape is just gorgeous. It just was absolutely one of the prettiest mornings he had ever seen. And he said they were just riding along there, and Roger turned over to him and said, wouldn’t it be amazing what God could have done if he had money? You know, (laughing), and he said, just as serious as he could be, what God could have done if he had money, because it was such a beautiful scene there. But I mean, it was just things like that that he just thought of all the time, you know, just completely out of his mind. It might have been funny, but he was deep in thought at that particular time of how beautiful it was, you know? So it’s like, he was just, and those Roger-isms are talked about today in Nashville all the time. There’s little things such as that.
Thompson: Well, and I’ve watched several interviews. There’s lots of stuff you can find on YouTube, and he was somebody who didn’t have to wait to think of a joke or a quip. It came to him in the moment. He was lightning fast about, you know, his humor and the way he saw the world. And I have a few of them here if you guys want to hear a few of Roger’s witticisms, because I think it illustrates exactly who he was.
One of Marty Stuart’s favorite Roger Miller moments was when he came up behind Ronnie Milsap, who was blind, and put his hands over his ears and said, guess who? He said about his mother’s cooking: Every year, the Natives from South America would come up and dip their arrows in her gravy. He said old songwriters never die, they just decompose. This was a funny one that I saw in an interview. You know, somebody was asking him, I think this is with Dean Martin actually, Dean asked him, well what do you been up to, Roger? And you said, hey, I just got back from playing in Panama Beach, and then he says, I beat him 18 to 4. And there’s another one here. He says, old songwriters never die. They just decompose.
Dean Miller, his son, who went on to have a musical career of his own, remembers that every time Glen Campbell would get ready to go on a talk show like The Tonight Show, he would call up Roger Miller and talk for 20 or 30 minutes and make notes about all his quips. And then he said, sure as you can believe it, when you saw him on that show, he was using all of Roger’s lines on that show, and Roger knew it, and he didn’t care. But I thought, you know, that’s just the way his humor was. He saw the world in a completely different way. He was a creative person. He was, you know, we need people’s minds who work like that. Because I can tell you for a fact, my mind does not.
Blackburn: Tracy, you used a phrase that I think is so appropriate—a musical genius. And of course, that word is used way too often. A lot of them are good craftsmen, but they’re not genius and not natural. But Roger was, and all of the musicians that we’ve interviewed for the OKPOP for the last 20 years, when you start talking to them about other musicians they admire, Roger Miller was almost always at the top of the list. Other musicians realized what a talent he was, both musically and with his lyrics. And of course, that’s the way musicians should be judged, you know, both the lyrics and and the tune, and Roger could do both. And it was recognized very widely that he was a musical genius, and they all kind of stood back in awe of his talent.
Pitcox: You know, Bob, you talked about him being raised in a tough time, and he was raised in a tough time. And, you know, he actually got in trouble, if I remember correctly, because he stole a guitar because he wanted to perform and sing so much that he actually stole a guitar. And the deal was that, I think he took the guitar back, but they didn’t press charges if he would join, enlist in the army. And so that’s kind of how he got involved in the military is because of his wanting to perform and play so bad at such a very early age. I think maybe he was, I think he’s only 16 or 17 years old whenever that happened.
Thompson: Yeah, he was 17. He steals a guitar in Amarillo, and the judge says we’ll toss out the charges if you join the military. That’s during the Korean War. The Korean War was starting to wind down at that time. So when asked, this is another one of his witticisms. He’d say, people would ask him, why did you go to high school? And he said, Korean conflict, clash of ’52. So, he had a way of looking at that as well. But yeah, I think, and going in the military was actually the first time he got on the radio. He performed on Stars and Stripes radio while he was in the military there.
Talking about some of his influences, you know, Bob, you had mentioned Bob Wills. He was a major influence on Roger Miller. In fact, he used to go, Bob, of course, used to play all over north Texas and western Oklahoma. And so he would go to these shows, and he would just pepper the band members with all these different kinds of questions. And he said one of his biggest thrills came when Bob Wills pointed his bow during a show at Roger Miller, acknowledging his presence. And Roger was so thrilled that Bob acknowledged him that he started crying. And so, Bob was a major influence on him.
Another major influence was an Oklahoman— and we did a podcast about him earlier this year—was Will Rogers. Roger wanted to be kind of the next Will Rogers, and he said this about him. “I’d like to be like Will Rogers, who was a country boy but could reach everybody because he was honest. If you have something to say, if you can polish yourself to where you can communicate with everybody, it’s a great feeling. But if you try things that aren’t true or honest, you don’t get away with it.” And so, he saw himself as trying to follow in the footsteps of Will Rogers.
He had a complicated relationship with Erick, Oklahoma, because he desperately didn’t feel like that he fit in with Erick. You know, his adopted parents didn’t understand him. He got a lot of whippings. He was mischievous. He really didn’t feel like he fit in there. He wanted to leave the cotton farm and go be famous. And over the course of his career, he was asked about Erick several times, and these are a few of the things he said about Erick over the years. He said, “where I grew up was back woodsy, but there was no woodsy,” talking about lack of trees in Oklahoma.
(laughing) He said, “The town where I grew up in was so small that we held a parade, and there was nobody to watch.” He also said, Dwight Yoakam asked where Erick was at and said, “What’s it close to?” And Roger said, “It’s close to extinction. The population is 1,500, and includes rakes and tractors.” He went back home one time, and this was after “Dang Me” and “King of the Road” had won all those Grammys. And he said he saw this old fellow who used to drive a school bus, and he walked up and said, “Hey, do you remember me?” And the guy said, “Yeah, I remember you. What have you been doing since you got out of the army?” But it was, it was a complicated relationship with Erick. I think in his later years, he did make his peace with it more, and he started coming back and actually performing in Erick for charity functions. And Bill Anderson talks about going and performing there as well. But going back, and speaking of Bill Anderson, and Tracy, you know Bill pretty well, I think. You hang out in the Grand Ole Opry quite a bit, don’t you?
Pitcox: Yes, yes, and Bill’s a great guy, and Bill also was one of Roger’s best and closest friends. I mean, Bill, if you talk about Roger-isms, Bill knows every one, and he still talks about every one, too. But not only that, they were great writing friends. I mean, when two worlds collide, I mean, those guys were not only a great songwriters apart, but they were also great songwriters together as well. And they were also very close friends. And I know that it took a lot out of Bill whenever Roger passed away at such an early age.
Thompson: Yeah, they met each other. Bill was a college deejay near Atlanta. Roger was stationed in Atlanta. They struck up a friendship, and they promised each other that whoever makes it to Nashville first, they would help the other one get there and get their foot in the door. And Roger actually made it to Nashville first, but they used to hang out backstage. They’d go to the Tower Theatre near Atlanta, and they would hang out backstage, and they would talk to all the acts, and this is a cool little Oklahoma connection. One Sunday afternoon, Wanda Jackson played at the Tower Theatre, and Roger goes back there, and he knocks on the door, and he starts asking Wanda Jackson questions about her career and everything. And then he asked Wanda if he could borrow her guitar so he could play some songs for Bill Anderson that he had written him. And so Roger borrows the guitar and talks about how they made the vow to each other that they would help whoever got there first. And so Wanda Jackson was a part of one of Roger’s earlier influences as well.
Pitcox: I thought it was interesting too, that when Roger first got his like, I guess real professional gig, it was actually playing fiddle, and you brought up the Bob Wills connection and what a fan he was of Bob Wills. But, you know, he played fiddle for Minnie Pearl, of all people. And that was kind of his first major professional gig that he got was working for Minnie Pearl, playing fiddle on her road show.
Thompson: Yeah, that was really interesting. Now, Roger was a great musician in addition to a great songwriter. But Ray Price remembers Roger as not being the best fiddle player. And in the late 1950s, he plays with Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys, and he auditions on fiddle and guitar. And Ray Price says, well, why don’t we just put you on guitar? (laughing) And so he plays guitar in Ray Price’s band, Faron Young, in 1961. Faron Young needs a drummer, and Faron Young asks Roger, do you know how to play drums? And he says, I will by Monday. And he learns the drums that fast, and he goes on the road with Faron Young for a year playing drums.
Blackburn: You know, there’s something genetic probably about this, because you mentioned Dean earlier, Stacy. And we had asked Dean to perform at one of our annual meetings we had in Elk City. We were trying to honor Roger Miller, so we asked Dean, and he came and he sang some of Roger’s songs, of course, as everyone expected. But he also sang his own songs, and they were brilliant. I remember how beautiful his own music was, and his performing ability was similar to Roger’s. And of course, he would use some of his dad’s quotes, and he told stories about family and touring, and a good entertainer. And I know he’s a featured singer- songwriter out of Nashville even today.
Pitcox: Another interesting aspect of Roger being with Faron, you mentioned being with Faron, Trait, the very first major tour that Charley Pride went out on the road, Roger was part of the band at that particular time. And of course, you know, Charley was the first major Black country music singer. And being out on the road with Faron, and Darrell McCall tells the story of it was and Charlie and Roger and and Darrell, and they were, you know, rooming together, just trying to trying to make it. And Charley’s first major career tour was with Faron Young, and Roger Miller was along to play drums for him.
Thompson: Yeah. That’s great. George Jones actually becomes one of the, or actually the first person to record one of Roger Miller’s songs, and he records “Don’t Do This to Me,” “Tall, Tall Trees,” “Hearts in My Dreams,” and “No Use to Cry.” That was in April of 1957. And, Roger Miller, of course, he’s working as a bellboy at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, writing songs, trying to get on. That’s when he goes and plays with Minnie Pearl. So, he’s doing everything he can to kind of scrape along in Nashville. He has songs that Ray Price records, “Invitation to the Blues,” which is Roger Miller’s song. “Half a Mind” for Ernest Tubb. These are classic country songs. These are some of the best country songs ever written. You know, “Tall, Tall Trees,” Alan Jackson comes back and has a hit with that in the 1990s.
And then he gets frustrated, and he decides in 1964 that he wants to move to Los Angeles. He’s frustrated with his music career in Nashville. It’s not going the way that he wants it to go. He’s going to go to Los Angeles and try his hand at the movies and at acting, kind of following in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Sheb Wooley.
And he goes to Jerry Kennedy, who’s a music producer, and he asked for an advance of $1,600. Jerry Kennedy says, I can’t give you $1,600. Roger was notoriously kind of frivolous with his money. One time he bought a riding lawnmower on an advance from a music producer of $300, bought the riding lawnmower, drove it down the street to his house, mowed one time with it, and never used it again. He just kind of saw those shiny things, and he wanted them immediately. But he says, I want $1,600. I want to move to Los Angeles. Says, well, go write me 16 songs, and you’ll get $1,600.
Well, out of those group of songs that he is forced to write to get his advance, “Chug-A-Lug” comes out. “Dang Me” comes out, and “Do-Wacka-Do” comes out. Three massive hits for him. “Chug-A-Lug” came along because one of his old drinking buddies in, or one of his old friends from high school in Erick, could drink a beer in three seconds or less, and he called it chug-a-lugging. So, he took that in a song. Charlie Rawlston, who was another one of his friends, he used to bring wine in a mason jar to school and share it with everybody. And that’s, you know, that’s one of the lines in “Dang Me.” And so, these are three songs that become major hits. He’s already living in Los Angeles by the time these songs become hits. Tracy, can you talk about these three songs? Because they are three, “Dang Me” is put in the, it comes across as a funny song, but the subject matter is serious. “Do-Wacka-Do,” I don’t even really know how to classify that song. It’s just wild, and then and then “Chug-A-Lug,” once again, kind of a serious song about someone who obviously has some issues with drinking, but once again put into a funny manner. Can you talk about these songs and their impact on country music?
Pitcox: I think the key part of that is that, especially at that particular time, Roger is running with people like you mentioned, the Bill Andersons, the Farons, the Webb Pierces, the people such as that. And he was kind of known as the jokester, the one that always came up with the funny things and that sort of thing. So it certainly makes sense that some of his biggest hits would be songs like “Chug-A-Lug” and “Do-Wacka-Do” and that sort of thing, even “King of the Road,” to, you know, to a point. Of course, “Dang Me” is a little different when you think about that. But it’s still, for someone that doesn’t really listen to the lyrics, they’re going to think it’s a funny little song, right? If you just go along, saying dang me, dang me.
But I think, I think at that time he was really concentrating on the humorous side of himself and everybody thinking how funny he was and that sort of thing. But then you go back and you look at all the other things he’ll come up with in the next few years. I mean, “Husbands and Wives,” come out a great song. It just talked about, you know, what so many couples go through and their life together and “Little Green Apples” and stuff like that. I mean, there was such a serious side to him too, but I think everyone really expected him to be, you know, the oh, here’s Roger Miller, and he’s going to sing a funny song.
Thompson: Yeah.
Pitcox: Because the first couple of big hits that he had were certainly in that vein of music. But I think the strength of Roger Miller wasn’t those comical songs. I think the ballads that he wrote, where he showed his real strength and what he really was inside.
Thompson: What’s really interesting is the songs that have been rerecorded over the years, like “Tall, Tall Trees” is kind of a little bit of a novelty song, but not much. But the songs that have been rerecorded and done well are his more serious songs. You know, Brooks & Dunn took “Husbands and Wives” to number 1 in 1998, and then Cody Johnson recorded an incredible version of that song in 2019 that is one of my favorite versions I’ve ever heard. But the lyric is, “It’s my belief, pride is the chief cause and the decline in the number of husbands and wives.”
Pitcox: What a line. What a line.
Thompson: Yeah. A great story about that song, too is all he had was the first verse. He needed a second verse. And so he was told, okay, we need you to go write something. And he was in the studio. And you know, when you’re in the studio, those musicians are getting paid whether they’re playing or not, and so he had to go write something really quick. And he comes back with the refrain, “A woman and a man, a man and a woman Some can, some can’t, and some can.” And then they add an instrumental to that. And he writes that, and that just sort of completes the song. And he does that spur of the moment. That’s the way his mind worked. It was incredible.
Pitcox: It’s deep. It’s very deep. And just even, even if you think about the song “Half a Mind,” you know, “I’ve got half a mind to leave you but only half the heart to actually go.”
Thompson: Yeah.
Pitcox: You know, he was a genius when it came to that kind of stuff. So even though the novelty songs were probably what made him the most money, I mean, he was a tremendous, tremendous, serious writer.
Thompson: 1965, “King of the Road” is released, and he got the idea for that song because he was driving to Chicago and saw a sign that said trailers for sale or rent. That’s it, that’s it. I would see a sign like that a million times and never think that could be something fun. And that was the spur. He writes that down.
Then he’s in Boise, Idaho, presumably had a show in a hotel room, and he sits down and writes it. Mary Miller, his widow, has it. It’s written on the back of an airplane ticket, and it’s all the lyrics in handwriting to “King of the Road.” That’s his monster smash. That is his major song that really comes to define his career. And it’s such, once again, it’s a song immediately when you hear it, and you don’t even have to hear the first word because it’s that It’s that bass—ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum— it’s that bass. And then sometimes you hear the snaps come in. (singing) “Trailers for sale or rent.” I don’t want to sing here because nobody’s going to like that. But anyway, and it just talks about this guy who’s sort of a wanderer, and he does what he can to get by. He’s, you know, finds old, cigars that he smokes that people have thrown away. He seems like a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, and it just resonates with everybody.
And boy, is he awarded. So the Grammy Awards in 1965 for 1964, he wins five Grammy Awards that year. And in 1966 for 1965 with “King of the Road,” he wins six Grammy Awards. “King of the Road,” Bob, get this, “King of the Road” beats out “Yesterday” by The Beatles for being the best rock and roll single. Can you imagine that? I mean, he beat The Beatles. He won in categories for rock and roll. He swept the categories for country music. So this is a man in 1964 and 1965, he’s got 11 Grammy Awards between those two years. I don’t know if that’s ever been duplicated. Do you know, Tracy?
Pitcox: No, I don’t believe it has. Certainly not the country field. I mean, that may be in the rock or pop field, but not in the country field. And that also spawned, of course, the career of Jody Miller, who had the answer song “Queen of the House” to Roger’s “King of the Road.” And then, of course, Jody became the second female artist to win a Grammy Award because of “Queen of the House.”
Thompson: I was just explaining to my daughter the other day about answer songs because Ella Langley just put out, and one of Kitty Wells’s original answer songs, which was “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” which was an answer to one of Hank Thompson’s songs, and I was explaining to her this was a fairly common practice back in the day. How one person would have a song, and it would be successful, and another would record sort of the retort to that song.
Pitcox: Well, and interestingly enough, you say that, and of course, I asked Hank about that one time, if he was upset when Kitty cut it originally. He said not at all. He said because my hit had already gone, it had already kind of petered out a little bit. And he said, and then Kitty comes along and does “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” He said then the jockey, the jocks out there, the disc jockeys out there would go back and they would play my record again and play hers right behind it. So I had twice as much play as I would have had at a regular time, which makes perfect sense.
Thompson: Yeah, it revived it for him, which I’m sure he loved.
Pitcox: Which is what “King of the Road” and “Queen of the House” did as well.
Thompson: Yeah. Fantastic. Now, Roger’s career kind of starts to wane in the 1970s and into the 1980s, and he gets this opportunity. There is a theater producer named Rocco Landesman who comes to him, and he wants to do a musical about Huckleberry Finn. And he says he’s a big Roger Miller fan. And he says Roger Miller has to write the songs, approaches Roger. At that time, Roger had only seen one musical theater production in his whole life, so he didn’t have any idea what to do. He wouldn’t go watch any other shows because he didn’t want to be influenced by them. But basically, he’s living in Santa Fe with his wife, Mary. He’s writing songs, but it’s coming along really slow. At one time, Rocco and Mary try to lock Roger in a room to get him to sit down and write, because today we know what Roger—Roger had ADD. I mean, that’s the long and the short of it. Back in those days, they didn’t have a diagnosis. They didn’t know it. But he had a really hard time sitting and focusing. A lot of times, he would come up with the idea for something, but he couldn’t go all the way through and execute it.
But he finally writes all of these songs for this production called Big River. It opens on Broadway in 1985. It’s nominated for ten Tony Awards, and Roger ends up winning, for Best Score, a Tony Award for that. So that’s the second part of his life. And then, Bob, we just did a podcast on The Grapes of Wrath. He wanted to license the rights to The Grapes of Wrath, and write a musical for that show, but he never got to do it because he’s diagnosed with cancer, and he ends up passing away in 1992 of cancer. He had been complaining about issues. He couldn’t sing. His throat was giving him issues. What he actually had was a tumor that was pushing against his throat, and he died at 56 years of age. Definitely too soon for a man like that to pass away.
Pitcox: It’s interesting that you bring up the ADD with Roger Miller, because Mel Tillis, I was talking to Mel Tillis one time in Branson, and he was telling me, of course, he loved Roger Miller. They were both Songwriters Hall of Famers and that sort of thing. But Tillis told me that he would never want to ride in a car with Roger Miller because he was the worst driver in the world, because he would actually get bored with driving, and he would start, you know, taking things out of his pocket. And he was sort of adjusting the radio, and sort of adjusting this, and adjusting that, because he would get bored with the aspect of just driving down the road, and he was one of the worst drivers ever. And Tillis said anytime we went anywhere with him, I never would let him drive. I always insisted on driving because my life depended upon it, he said. (laughing) So I thought that was kind of an interesting thing that most people would not know.
Thompson: Tracy, as we’re wrapping up here, you know, what do you think Roger’s legacy is today? And do you think he’s appreciated by some of the newer country music acts coming up?
Pitcox: You know, I think a lot of it, when the Brooks & Dunn, whenever they had “Husbands and Wives,” I thought that was so neat. That brought him a lot more of attention that he deserved. But I don’t think anybody in his era is appreciated as much as they should be appreciated. I mean, you talk about someone that was just a tremendous entertainer. I mean, he brought, he opened up country music to different people. I mean, he did The Tonight Show, and he did things that a lot of country music singers and songwriters would not have the opportunity to do. And so he did broaden the country music spectrum whenever he was performing. But number one, he left way too soon at 56 years of age. Just think of what else he could have contributed to the industry if he had had a longer career and a longer life is as well.
I mean, I think Roger Miller songs will still be recorded hopefully after we’re all gone, and people will still enjoy his music. I think he’s probably, his greatest legacy is going to be that, because even though there will be people listening to his music, you know, we live in a world that it’s, probably there’s more new artists being created every day. But I think his songs will probably even outlive his own vocal performances, truthfully.
Thompson: Bob, I think it’s safe to say, you know, there’s a lot of musicians that come up today, and you say, well, that person reminds me a little bit of maybe, you know, Garth Brooks or Mark Chesnutt, or might remind me a little bit of, you know, Reba McEntire. I don’t know that anybody reminds me of Roger Miller. He was unique.
Blackburn: No, who else would have written “You Can't Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd.” You know, that’s an original. It’s like Will Rogers, you know, John Stewart, modern comics will look back on him as inspiration, but no one has ever duplicated it. And I think that’s the way Roger is. He inspired a lot of other young people who saw the talent and said, well, if he can do it, maybe I can do it too. But yeah, you don’t think of anyone before or after that really shared the genre the way he did.
Thompson: Well, Tracy, I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today to talk about two of these Oklahoma legends in music and entertainment. Where can people find out more information about The Heart of Texas Country Music Museum?
Pitcox: We’ve got a neat website. Of course, we’re on all the social media stuff, the Facebook and Instagram and that sort of thing as well. But you can easily just go to HeartOfTexasRecords.com. That’s HeartOfTexasRecords.com. We’re located in Brady, Texas, and The Heart of Texas Country Music Museum is a free museum. And we’d love for people to visit us here in Brady. We do a lot of shows not only here in Texas, but different places as well. And so check out all of our activities at HeartOfTexasRecords.com, or HeartOfTexasCountry.com. Both go into the same website. Bob and Trait, I want to thank you both for allowing me to be a part of this program today. It’s a pleasure to be with both of you. And I thank you for letting me be a part of it.
Blackburn: Well, thank you.
Thompson: Thank you, Tracy. We’ll see you around the bend. Bob, it’s been great. We’ll talk to you soon.
Blackburn: Thanks, Trait.
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
