Roger Miller was a likeable guy. The country pop artist and master of the novelty song leaned more towards the Johnny Cash of “One Piece at a Time” and “A Boy Named Sue” than the Cash of “Folsom City Blues” and “Man in Black.” A mid-sixties precursor to Jim Stafford, Miller preferred to make people laugh than shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
There are dozens of Miller compilations out there, but I prefer 1999’s cheesy Roger Miller, 20th Century Masters / The Millennium Collection: The Best of Roger Miller. It strips Miller’s work down to the essentials, making it the ideal LP for neophytes and folks (like yours truly) who don’t feel the need to dig through Miller’s entire catalogue in search of deep cuts.
Miller is best remembered for his 1965 hit “King of the Road,” a first person account of a happy-go-lucky guy who’s a “man of means by no means.” He’s not about to let his hand-to-mouth existence get him down—he’s the epitome of the carefree rambler, happy to push broom, smoke cast-off stogies, stay in four-bit rooms, and live on handouts as he moves from town to town. The song itself has a jazz vibe—that bass and those finger snaps are pure Hipsterville, daddy-o. Its subject matter brings Del Reeve’s “This Must Be the Bottom” to mind, and couldn’t be any further away from Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”
On “Dang Me” Miller’s a no-good fellow who spends the family grocery money drinking with his buddies—he knows damn well he’s a low-down wastrel, hence that “Dang me, dang me/They oughta take a rope and hang me/High from the highest tree.” He does some scat singing, and in general sounds more amused than consumed by remorse. The romp that is“Chug-A-Lug” runs down Miller’s drinking history, from the homemade grape wine in a mason jar he shared with a schoolmate to his first visit to a honky-tonk: “With the help of my finaglin’ uncle I get snuck in/For my first taste of sin/I said, ‘Lemme have a big old sip’/I done a double back flip.”
On the high-spirited “In the Summertime” Miller’s gal doesn’t want his love but that doesn’t stop him from doing some hilarious blubbering and speed-yodeling. “Kansas City Star” has him turning down a job in Omaha because he’s a big children’s TV show cowboy on a local station in Kansas City, and “the number one attraction in every supermarket parking lot.” “The Kansas City star, that’s what I are” he sings, while doing some more demented yodeling.
“You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” is another Miller classic–a nonsensical kids song about being happy “if you have a mind too.” “You can’t drive around with a tiger in your car” he sings, having obviously never having seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”You can’t take a shower in a parakeet’s cage” he goes on, before yodeling himself straight into the psych ward. On “Do-Wack-a-Do” he wants more of what a certain fella has, and as for the other fella he can have do-wack-a-do.
“England Swings” is Miller’s whistling paean to Swinging London and pure pop for your average middle American—amongst his litany of popular tourist destinations he tosses in some good old country surrealism: “Your mama’s old pajamas and your papa’s mustache/Falling out the window sill, frolic in the grass/Tryin’ to mock the way they talk fun but all in vain/Gaping at the dapper men with derby hats and canes.” Top that, Andre Breton. The funniest thing about “Atta Boy Girl” is its title—Miller’s congratulating his gal for breaking his heart, but there aren’t any crack-you-up lines in it.
On “Engine Engine #9,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “One Dyin’ and a Buryin’” Miller shows his serious side. The first-named is straight-up pop and has a sprightly feel, but it’s a tale of a guy whose gal had second thoughts and never got off the train at his stop. On the mid-tempo waltz “Husbands and Wives,” Miller plays marriage counselor; “It’s my belief,” he sings, “Pride is the chief cause/And the decline/In the number of husbands and wives.” On “One Dyin’ and a Buryin’” a heartbroken Miller says of suicide, “Well, I think I finally found me a sure-fire way to forget/It’s so simple, I’m surprised I hadn’t done thought of it before yet.” He says he wants to be free of heartbreak and regret, but it’s his funeral he seems fixated on; you get the idea he’s taking a self-pitying kick out of the idea of all those people crying over him at his grave.
Country music has always been the perfect medium for novelty songs—my personal favorites include Jimmie Rogers’ “She’s a Hum Dum Dinger from Dingerville” and my dad’s adopted anthem, Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” Miller was the antithesis of the cry in your beer school of country songs. He preferred comedy to tragedy, and dismal simply wasn’t in his vocabulary. If he had a predecessor it was Spike Jones, not George Jones. And that’s all she do-wack-a-do wrote.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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