Roger Miller
Golden Hits
Album · Country · 1965
The easiest way to understand Roger Miller might be through the fact that right before he became one of the ’60s biggest pop sensations, he thought his best chance to make it might be as an actor. He’d done some late-night TV appearances, and his charisma and determined eccentricity had charmed audiences; Miller still needed cash to get to Hollywood, though, so he recorded some sides for a start-up label called Smash Records in January 1964. Among them was “Dang Me,” a 1 minute and 47 second-long talk-sung song about being on a bender—the song, which he apocryphally wrote in a few minutes, sent Miller’s career into the stratosphere.
This 11-song compilation of the young artist’s “greatest hits” was released the following year. In the intervening 18 months, five of those songs had reached the Top 10 of Billboard’s pop charts; four more hit the Top 40. They were fleshed out with two album cuts pulled from the three hit albums he released in that same span. In short, there were few surer bets from 1964 to 1965 than Miller (short of, say, The Beatles)—the Nashville songwriter had, improbably, become America’s favorite performer of novelty songs, songs that were as unorthodox and fiercely original as they were catchy. Beneath Miller’s odd-sounding vocal improvisations and lyrics about buffalo herds and drinking was both virtuosity and pathos: He could manipulate the guitar as deftly as he could his own voice, and released a song about committing suicide (“One Dyin’ and a Buryin’”) as he was in the midst of the greatest success of his career.
That success had come courtesy of “King of the Road,” a classic that meets in the middle of a beatnik’s jazz and a Nashvillian’s highway tune. Easy to sing and easier to get stuck in your head, the song’s massive success cast a long shadow from which Miller struggled to emerge. But the song, and the other vestiges of his wild mid-’60s ride that are collected here, remain evidence of just how idiosyncratic and influential he was, eschewing genre in favor of an all-purpose charm and wit.
Golden Hits
Roger Miller
The easiest way to understand Roger Miller might be through the fact that right before he became one of the ’60s biggest pop sensations, he thought his best chance to make it might be as an actor. He’d done some late-night TV appearances, and his charisma and determined eccentricity had charmed audiences; Miller still needed cash to get to Hollywood, though, so he recorded some sides for a start-up label called Smash Records in January 1964. Among them was “Dang Me,” a 1 minute and 47 second-long talk-sung song about being on a bender—the song, which he apocryphally wrote in a few minutes, sent Miller’s career into the stratosphere.
This 11-song compilation of the young artist’s “greatest hits” was released the following year. In the intervening 18 months, five of those songs had reached the Top 10 of Billboard’s pop charts; four more hit the Top 40. They were fleshed out with two album cuts pulled from the three hit albums he released in that same span. In short, there were few surer bets from 1964 to 1965 than Miller (short of, say, The Beatles)—the Nashville songwriter had, improbably, become America’s favorite performer of novelty songs, songs that were as unorthodox and fiercely original as they were catchy. Beneath Miller’s odd-sounding vocal improvisations and lyrics about buffalo herds and drinking was both virtuosity and pathos: He could manipulate the guitar as deftly as he could his own voice, and released a song about committing suicide (“One Dyin’ and a Buryin’”) as he was in the midst of the greatest success of his career.
That success had come courtesy of “King of the Road,” a classic that meets in the middle of a beatnik’s jazz and a Nashvillian’s highway tune. Easy to sing and easier to get stuck in your head, the song’s massive success cast a long shadow from which Miller struggled to emerge. But the song, and the other vestiges of his wild mid-’60s ride that are collected here, remain evidence of just how idiosyncratic and influential he was, eschewing genre in favor of an all-purpose charm and wit.
