The Baboon Congress

Happy Birthday, Roger Miller

88 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from tim

roger millers birthday is today. he’s not around to enjoy it anymore but he left something behind for us to enjoy in his absence.

roger miller was a blip on the screen in the 60’s when his hits , dang me, do wacka doo, king of the road and you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd were topping the charts. i enjoyed them and thought they were good songs. i gave them more credit than the equivalent guitarzan by ray stevens which sort of appealed to the same demographic.

king of the road upon inspection is a tune that offers a view of another mans shoes that is not really given enough credit for how different it was from everything else out there and if you actually went into the thoughts behind dang me and do wacka doo they show that there was a serious thought behind the semi babble top 40 pop effort of the times.

my first marriage gave me many unique memories two wonderful kids and one mother in law that insisted on knowing exactly what gift to buy for christmas and birthdays before she went out to shopping . i told her album collections were the way to go. dylan, the stones the beatles, roger miller and she chose roger miller. i already had too many dylan albums and most of the beatles so if it comes down to the stones or roger miller , roger miller won.

each album was 8 dollars and 50 was the budget so 6 was the number of roger miller albums I received . I had no idea you could get so much music form 6 albums. in addition to king of the road, do whacka do and dang me there were tunes like husbands and wives and other heartfelt balads he was incredible at writing that never made the radio and….there was an album called big river which was roger millers broadway musical i had no knowledge of at all at that point. it turned out to be a turning point for me and roger.

he spent three years writing big river. unlike all his other efforts he put time and energy into the production and it showed. he even played pap on broadway when john goodman had to leave the broadway production to take the role of dan conner on the tv series roseanne. if you haven’t heard the album recording of the musical do it. it is the best musical ever.

that fistful of roger miller albums caused a backwards biography of roger miller that informed me that while he was a kindred spirit he had a troubled history with many problems starting when his dad died during the depression in the dustbowl era of oklahoma and he and his two brothers were each shipped off to live with a different uncle.

shep wolley was another relative who taught roger to play violin and introduced him to the nashville end of showbusiness where roger got his start writing tunes for ray price and someone else on the grand ol opry and then befriended chet atkins and johnny cash and became part of the nashville scene. along the way he burned through life with ex-wives drug problems bouts with depression and kind of a death wish outlook on his career.

he was given one of those tv show in the 60’s. remember them all, the nat king cole show, ed sullivan, dean martin, red skelton, jimmy dean, judy garland, johnny cash, well they cut rogers out after the first 13 weeks, showing up for work was not a good job description for roger who did best shooting from the hip and writing songs when inspired.

while i am fortunate enough to be able to claim no depression, drugs and relationships had taken their toll and offered their challenges.

sometimes you are attracted to a guy and then find out the creative juices that he oozed were not a celebration of life but a pressure relief valve. if its in there its just gotta come out. when it does how you deal with it determines where it goes from there.

there are lots of roger miller clips out there on you tube. its like looking into steve goodman or john prine or a bag of lays potato chips once you get started its hard to stop. you guys are all fine but i may need to do some serious accessing.

name a creative artist who you would consider a kindred spirit.

88 thoughts on “Happy Birthday, Roger Miller”

  1. Nice post, Tim. I would consider Dorothy Sayers a kindred spirit-mystery writer, theologian, and Dante |scholar, a serious person who had a sense of humor. I know this is probably just one more indication that I need to get out more, but there it is. Wake up and smell the coffee, Baboons!

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    1. enjoy the rest of the vacation. my kids went back to school one jounior high one elementary school and one college and none of them is happy about it. they all need the rest of the week. hope you make the most of yours. the problem with getting out more in north dakota is where do you go?

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      1. One positive aspect of living in the middle of nowhere is that to get out, you really have to go somewhere else, you just can’t stay around and take in the sights down the road. I think London will be a great answer to mid-February doldrums.

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        4. It is a total fluke. My boss was going to London in February with a companion who had to back out of the trip. Not wanting to travel alone, she asked if I and my daughter wanted to accompany her. We plan to tour the film studios where the Harry Potter films were made, and see a production of Wicked. The price was very reasonable, and occurs over the February Presidents’ Day long weekend. It is an early graduation present for daughter.

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        5. Very cool. I bet your daughter is ecstatic. Now that you explained it, I recall you telling us this sometime ago. My memory being what it is, I need these reminders. Sigh!

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      2. My 2nd and fourth grade grandkids are ready to go back today.
        I much admire the three friends Tolkien, Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. Lewis is the one most like me, except of course I am not that spiritual, smart ,or creative. But we share a mindset. Mr Tuxedo (the second grader) fell in love with Tolkien over vacation.

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      3. thats true. when we moved into this house i had one request which was no tv in the kitchen and we went with that for a week then a tv came in and never left. yesterday the tv broke and while there are other tvs in the house i need to be in the kitchen for whatever reason and i sepnt a good part of the day having conversations with people instead of watching foot ball old movies dance mom ( ooohh my daughters introduced me to possibly the worst show ever put on television yesterday before the tv broke.) this morning as i headed back upstairs after looking after the dogs it occurred to me that if i hung around in the kitchen could partake in conversation instead of just being in the room with the tv and the ladies of the hosue. it worked. w ehad a funfilled am conversation to start out the new year. maybe north dakota has the longest life expectancy in the country and the high standard of living it does because there is nothing else to do but live good. doroty sayers looks interesting. published in 1916 then started up the mystery writing. ill look into it.

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        7. Ooh, I was just at H-P Books and couldn’t remember which ones… picked up Busman’s Honeymoon, but I see that was well into the series – I suppose I should start with something earlier?

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        8. No, Busman’s Honeymoon is one of the last ones. Try an earlier one. Clouds of witness is one of the best one’s to start with.

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  2. There are plenty of artists I aspire to be more like, but a true kindred spirit? Gosh I don’t know. Maybe Astrid Lindgren. She was a mom, she had a day job, she wrote wonderfully fanciful stories that clearly showed that she was deeply in-touch with her inner-8-year-old. Oh, and she was a bit of a lefty-liberal besides. Yep, Astrid Lindgren.

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      1. Pippi and The Tomten. When I was a kid I used to look for tomte and nisse footprints in the snow. Was a bit sad that we lived in the city where we might be less like to have either since we had no barn animals to look after.

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        3. A story book about the Tomten was a favorite of my kids. Tomten was featured in some stories I made up to tell my kids at bed time.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    This is a HARD question tim. Are you making me think critically at 7am? The following weblink is to my favorite Polymer Clay artist, Jeffrey Lloyd Dever, who is also a designer in a different graphic world, too. I have studied with him. When I use his techniques I love the results–plucks my artist heartstrings. I hope the link takes you to a picture of a polymer teapot.

    http://creativeteapots.blogspot.com/2008/10/jeff-lloyd-dever-polymer-clay-teapots.html

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      2. PJ,

        If you make it to book group I Will take you down to my studio and show you. I have several pieces upstairs, too. I draw for books that I make for my mother (pastels), sculpt people on special occasions, do mosaics, but I never have enough time for it. Sigh…..

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  4. Good morning. Great job telling us about Roger Miller. I also like his music. I don’t think I can come up with akindred spirit artist that I know with the detail that you know Rodger. There is one who I don’t much about that comes to mind as someone I especially like – Mose Allison.

    Here is the lyrics to one of his songs.

    One of these days I’ve got to get things right
    I’m gonna do my business in the daylight
    One of these days you know I’ve got to get things right
    I’m gonna do my business out in the broad daylight
    One of these days I’ve got to get things straight
    I’m gonna stio actin’ like a reprobate
    One of these days you know I’ve got to get things straight
    I’m gonna stop staying out late
    And actin’ like a reprobate
    One of these days I’ve got to get in step
    It won’t be long ‘fore I’ll be needin help
    One of these days you know I’ve got to get in step
    The way I’m going I’ll soon be needin’ help
    One of these days I’ve got to go back home
    Sit out on my front porch and compose a poem
    One of these days you know I’ve got to go back home
    I’m gonna sit out on my front porch, rock away compose a poem
    [ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsty.com/mose-allison-one-of-these-days-lyrics.html ]

    One Of These Days lyrics © AUDRE MAE MUSIC

    I need to learn to put up videos so I can put up music instead of just putting up lyrics. Mose is a jazz and blues singer/song writer who also accompanies himself on piano. He must be over 80 years old now and is still recording and touring. I did read a little about. At one time he was very popular in England and was said to be the most popular jazz performer in that country at that time. He recently won an award in this country as a top master of jazz.

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      1. Thanks for putting up the video, tim. I haven’t listen much to Ben Sidran. I should check him out. I didn’t know what to think of Mose Allison when i first heard him. I liked him, but I wasn’t sure where his music fit. He is fairly unique and that is what is good about him. He sounds sort of like some other piano playing jazz singers who kind of moan as they play. I like the the way he includes some more or less traditional blues singing in his act and his very interesting unusual lyrics, good melodies, jazz piano playing, and mellow singing style.

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  5. Thanks for the informative post, tim. I had no idea the same guy wrote King of the Road and Big River. I really love Big River on so many levels.

    I’m afraid the artist I feel most akin to off the top of my head is Christine Lavin-except she is not a mom. Imagine my surprise when I found out a co-worker in DC had been her freshman year roommate (and yup, I guess that was just about what you would imagine it to be, if you know Christine’s songs).

    I also suspect Kate Jacobs (author of the Friday Night Knitting Club books) and I could probably have a good old chat.

    Wish I could come up with more sophisticated artists, but that is not the morning I am having.

    And a belated Happy New Year to Baboons seen and unseen-so far, 2013 is looking like a real improvement on 2012. Fingers are crossed.

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    3. sophisitcated aint what this is about. folks is folks and the ones you get the feeling from have nothing to do with high falootin tones.

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  6. OT-A day late and a dollar short as usual, Husband would like all the Baboons to know that his goal for himself for the coming year is to sleep more at home and less at work.

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  7. Thanks, tim, for an informative post. I first encountered Roger Miller in Greenland where the base radio station played him a fair amount, but I had no idea he had written those songs, and not a clue that he had anything to do with Big River.

    As to kindred spirits, several come to mind. Joni Mitchell is an artist whose work I love. It shouldn’t be necessary to state that I obviously lack her HUGE talents, and that our differences far outnumber any commonalities, but I share her independent streak, that indomitable spirit that refuses to knuckle under. I have a sense, don’t really know what it’s based on, that she may not be a person that’s easy to get along with, but I find her fascinating.

    Another artist that I admire, and that I might actually have more in common with, is Cosy Sheridan. She’s a no-nonsense feminist with a wacky sense of humor, and I love her commitment to teaching and speaking out.

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    1. I think you’re right about Joni being less than warm and fuzzy, but you are obviously right about her talent. Look at her accomplishments in music and then consider that all she has cared about for decades is her visual art.

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        1. I guess my interpretation of “kindred spirit” isn’t necessarily someone I’d like or want to spend a lot of time with. I’m stuck with me all the time whether I like it or not, it get’s more complicated with a kindred spirit.

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  8. Morning all. I love these kinds of topics, to see what all of you have up your sleeves. I’m not feeling too inspired this morning – had to go back to work after 11 glorious days off. If I think of anybody, I’ll shout out later!

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  9. Golly, this question is much harder than it seemed at first, tim. I’d like to claim Peter Mayer as a kindred spirit, but he is way more spiritual and sweet-natured than I could ever be. If I could take photos the way I would like to, my work would resemble that of Hal Eastman. Alas, my photography just resembles the work of Steve Grooms, dammit. In the field of writing, I’d like to claim Aldo Leopold as a kindred spirit, but my actual work is a whole lot more like the stuff Bill Bryson does. Now, that is damn good writing, but not as lofty as I would like to do. If I were musically talented–which I ain’t–I’d try to make music like Peter Oustroushko makes. But we are deep in the realm of fantasy here.

    Actually, there is an artist I’ve recently discovered who seems a kindred spirit in many ways. I won’t list them, for to claim to be like her is laughable self-flattery for me, but we see the world very much the same way. She’s almost as obscure in her way as I am, although (unlike me) she is highly musical and good looking. Here is an example of the eye for human nature and smart writing that mark the work of Gretchen Peters:

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  10. Honestly, I’ve never been much of a fan of country music but I have a special place in my heart for Roger Miller. Not only because he made it to the top of the charts by being unique. Not only because he did goofy, silly, wonderful songs. Not only because he did the soundtrack and was Alan-A-Dale in Disney’s Robin Hood movie (one of my faves as a kid). But even before that (on my timeline), as a big music listener, I used to play anything I could find on the radio or in my parents’ record collection. And for some unknown reason, we had the soundtrack to the movie Waterhole #3, also done by Roger Miller. To this day, I’ve never seen the movie but I used to listen to that record for hours upon hours. Here’s a little sniblet:

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    2. Miller managed to blend hokey, goofy, and cool all in one package. How do you do that? But he did. We regularly watch Robin Hood with grandkids. Marvelous voice work all through it, especially Miller.

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      1. I didn’t know that Roger Miller did voice work and some of the other things mentioned today. I do think that his novelty songs are very good and way better than most other songs of this kind.

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  11. Good tough question, tim! I think Ursula LeGuin would be my pick. She’s a novelist, a short story writer, an essayist and a poet, deeply interested in Taoism (she did a nice poetic translation of the Tao Te Ching). I’m a poet who can also write prose, and deeply interested in Earth Religions. Our political views are similar: I’ve called myself a socialist anarchist and an eco-feminist at various times, and Ursula wrote “The Dispossessed,” which explores anarchism among its many other themes, the ur-text of feminist science fiction, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” and the lesser-known novel “Always Coming Home,” which is set in a post-industrial primitivist future. I’ve never been a mother or wife, nor did I have brilliant academics for parents like she did, but we both like cats a lot, so there’s that. I said in my twenties that I wanted to be Ursula when I grew up; so far I’m working on the white hair more than I am the writing, but I’ll have to change that this year.

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    1. i hope not with clairol. its nice to find the group you belong to and be able to plug in. i’m glad you are around to add you two cents crow girl. get writing

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      1. Nope, it’s all natural, starting with my first gray hair at 21 and currently salt-and-pepper, with luck heading toward silver-white like my friend Eleanor Arnason. It’s the one gift I’d actually like to thank my biological family for. I live in hope that I’ve also inherited my great-grandfather’s eyes–according to Dad, he stopped having to wear glasses in his later years because his original myopia and age-related hyperopia canceled each other out!

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    2. Crow Girl, I bought myself a present this December: Finding My Elegy, new and selected poems by Ursula LeGuin. She is wonderful.

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    3. My favorite book of hers is “The Lathe of Heaven”. I think we also have “Earthsea Trilogy” but I don’t think I’ve read it yet.

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  12. Morning-
    Great Post tim. I’ve got a ‘Best of’ CD… and after reading it had ‘Do Wacka Do’ in my head for awhile this morning.

    I will admit a desire to have Tharon Musser as a kindrid spirit. She was a broadway lighting designer and was crotchety and caustic and talented and I think I’d like her. But it’s only in my dreams that I could be as good as her.
    I have a framed picture of her in my office. I look to her for inspiration frequently. It’s a face full of white hair and wrinkles and ‘character’ and no time for BS or fools, which I admire.
    She was the first designer to bring a computerized lighting board onto a broadway show for ‘A Chorus Line’.

    Tharon said, “The important thing to remember is that there are no rules in lighting with color. The design has to look right to you—it has to reflect your taste… My advice about color is this: Don’t sweat it! It’s the easiest, cheapest thing to change. If the color doesn’t look right on stage, just change it.”
    Yep; so simple, but people get hung up on doing it right the first time and not wanting to change color.
    It’s kind of a thrill to me when I don’t have a clear color choice in my head and I finally decide, ‘well, I’ll just try this one and we’ll see’. And it’s like ‘ooooo! He’s going to *play*!’ You won’t know until you try, right?

    Another story about her:
    “In 1975, (a person) demonstrated the first Strand Multi-Q to Tharon for the touring shows of A Chorus Line. The prototype console had two single-handle cross-faders. Tharon asked how she could do a split cross-fade with a single handle, which, (the guy) somewhat foolishly tried to convince her wasn’t necessary. Chuck Levy and Wally Russell pulled me aside and suggested that it wasn’t the best idea to tell Tharon how to light a show. Two weeks later, a split cross-fader was added to the console.”

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    1. we need to come see what the heck you do sometime ben. id like to come to a dress rehearsal or preview when they are letting you get the tweaking done that you need to do. you got room in the projection room?

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      1. I work in a big light booth; there’s plenty of room for visitors. Well, two or three easily can watch the show from there. When we have staff days there might be 6 people in the booth. Sometimes I have to shush them and then they scowl at me and leave.

        Watching me would be pretty boring actually. [tapping my head] ‘It’s all up here….’ Ha!
        This is for you tim:
        http://youtu.be/j2hAmXVEtDg
        Mind you, I don’t have that many lights, but I do have a Hog board at the college. (cackles) And it’s pretty cool!

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  13. Hailey Mills – I remember fantasizing about having a meeting her when I was a teen. I lost track of her till The Flame Trees of Thika and then Saved by The Bell (remember Miss Bliss?). She came here in the nineties as Anna in a stage production of The King and I – I missed it, but again thought if I could just see her in person we could be friends… I think I wanted to be as clear and straight-forward as she was in her characters.

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    1. one of my moms first belly laughs was when she asked me at age 7 or 8 who my favorite male and female actors were. john wayne and haley mills of course. you are kind of a haley mills now that you mention it barbara

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    2. A friend of mine knew a guy who admired her. The two of them attended a big dinner party, with lots of people seated around a long table. As they were leaving, this one guy tells the other, “Do you know WHO was here tonight? I just heard this: HAYLEY MILLS was here, if you can believe that! God, I’ve worshiped her for decades! And she was at OUR table tonight!”

      The other guy said, “Do you remember the woman sitting on your left? You lit a cigarette for her, but you spent the evening talking to the woman on your right. The one on the left was Hayley Mills.”

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  14. Nice one, tim – my dad loved Roger Miller, and we listed to his albums during the last days Dad was on the planet.

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  15. I love Richard Russo books, all but that last dreadful one. I appreciate his wry bittersweet take on life. He writes about the sort of folks who populated by childhood. So I guess Russo comes the closest. I have worked extensively in the Hudson River Valley where he sets many of his books. It is a tired old area, which he captures so well, and I like it there.

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    1. i got to meet him a couple years ago and i cant remember which of his books he said he enjoyed most. it was one he described as funny. i think he is dry dry dry but he does have an excellent sense of humor. nice man.

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      1. He does much of his writing sitting in small town non-chain dinners. His Pulitzer Prize book is about a dinner.

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  16. There are many female writers I admire, but I’ve always had a singular connection to Louisa May Alcott. When I was growing up I wished I could be Jo March.

    This has nothing to do with Louisa May Alcott…but it’s been running around in my head all day:

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    1. Linda,
      If you’re interested, there have been a number of biographical publications in the last couple of years about Louisa, about Louisa and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, about the family’s utopian venture at Fruitlands, and recently about Louisa and her mother in a volume called “Marmee and Louisa” by Eve La Plante. If you wish, I can provide more specifics about the volumes of which I am aware.

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        1. I bought the “Marmee and Louisa book for myself for Christmas. I also have the John Matteson book about Louisa and her father and the Harriet Riesen book about Louisa. How was the Susan Cheever book? I read her “American Bloomsbury” and it was pretty terrible.

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  17. OT, sort of, well, yes, but anyway, under the category of “Things You Cannot Make Up”: I saw an ad on History channel for a new show on one of their many channels about fitting women for Bras. “Double Divas.”

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  18. When you say kindred spirits, I take that to mean someone with which you would love to have a conversation and someone who would find you at least marginally interesting. For me, that would have to be the writer Paul Collins. I read a lot of nineteenth century material, some of it histories and some of it simply published in the nineteenth century. My overarching interest is to gain enough familiarity with personalities and events of that period that I can begin to see the interrelations, the fabric of connections. Paul Collins approaches his subjects in just that way. He’s drawn to eccentric and exceptional individuals, as I am. I especially liked his book, “Banvards Folly, Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World.” He references people and events in some of his books that are obscure enough that they likely mean little or nothing to many of his readers, but those references are precisely what elicit the kindredness. It’s as if it’s a secret code that I am privy to.
    I am also very drawn to the work of Maira Kalman, the illustrator and author. She is delightfully quirky and insightful. If you don’t know her work, you should look her up.

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  19. I have loved the creative work of two MN writers: Erin Hart and Stanley Gordon West. If you have not read their books do try them out! They are great Minnesota creative folks.

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    1. Yes, I really liked the Erin Hart books, too, the way they linked Ireland with Minneapolis in the story lines. Too bad she only writes one every 7 or 8 years!

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