Worth, Texas, on January 2, 1936, his father Jean Miller died when he was only a year old, and his mother Laudene Miller had to farm her three boys out to Jean's family. Though Miller could lay claim to being a Texan, having been born in Ft. This collection attempts to rectify this situation, gathering together all of his early recordings from his very first session in 1957 up to the time that he signed with RCA-Victor in 1960. Until now, not much attention has been paid to Roger Miller's early recordings.
Like others who achieved such monumental success, the story of how Miller got to the top was an interesting one. It took less than ten years for Miller to come from nowhere to the top of the hill. By the mid-1960s, Miller was hot as a pistol, with his own NBC television special, his own television show, a mantle’s worth of Grammy awards, and a string of huge hits including Chug-A-Lug, Dang Me, Engine Engine #9, and of course his career-defining hit King Of The Road. Miller could have made it on any one of his talents-songwriter, comedian, singer, entertainer, actor-but his hyper-active creativity couldn't be tempered until he had excelled in all of his pursuits. Although he led the sort of extreme wildman existence that no Grandmother could ever comprehend, he somehow was able to charm the pants off of the entire nation with his immense wit and original song style. "That's Roger Miller,"my Granny explained with a chuckle, "he's CRAZY!”Īnd so it was that Roger Miller became the most unlikely of country music superstars. The song was You Don't Want My Love (In The Summertime) and whenever the singer would start scatting the solo, sounding completely incoherent, going into a falsetto punctuated by sounds resembling Donald Duck, I just didn't know what to think. I would sit and listen intently for hours, but one song by one artist in particular truly perplexed my fragile young psyche. She had one of those big ol' console stereos, ordered from Sears, and one of her favorite record albums was a compilation album of older country hits. As a youngster, this author was introduced to country music through his grandmother, who was a real honest-to-goodness, grey haired, Granny widow living up in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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