Stuttering star a country legend
SELF-DEPRECATING HUMOUR ENDEARED HIM TO FANS
Mel Tillis, a chart- topping Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter and singer who turned a chronic stutter to his advantage, winning a following as a genial folksy performer onstage and in a side career in movies and on TV, died Nov. 19 at a hospital in Ocala, Fla. He was 85.
Publicist Don Murry Grubbs said the cause was likely respiratory failure. Tillis had undergone colon cancer surgery in January 2016.
Tillis, who became one of country music’s most durable and versatile talents, once described himself as “the most unlikely to ever make it” in show business, mostly because of his speech impediment. He joked that his CB handle would be “Old F-F-Flutterlips.”
It was precisely that selfdeprecating humour that would eventually endear him to fans. But, scarred by the teasing he took in childhood for his stammer, he spent years trying to overcome his fears of being out front, introducing his songs or thanking crowds. As he was trying to break into the business in the mid-1950s, a record company executive suggested he might be better off pursuing songwriting instead of performing.
He flourished as a writer, with his compositions recorded by performers such as Webb Pierce, Ray Price, Wanda Jackson, Tom Jones and Brenda Lee.
One of his most enduring pieces, Detroit City, cowritten with Danny Dill, earned a Grammy Award for country singer Bobby Bare in 1963 and captured the alienation of rural Southerners in the big city:
“Home folks think I’m big in Detroit City
“From the letters that I write they think I’m fine
“But by day I make the cars “By night I make the bars “If only they could read between the lines.”
Tillis’ song Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town gained its greatest renown in 1969 when it was recorded by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.
By commercial standards, Ruby was risky material, recounting the bleak story of a paralyzed veteran from “that old crazy Asian war.” The soldier begs his wife not to leave him and even dreams of killing her: “And if I could move, I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.”
Tillis said the song was inspired by a Second World War veteran involved in a murder-suicide, but the piece resonated with American listeners during the Vietnam War. In 1969, the NBC News program The Huntley-Brinkley Report played the song to close a segment about the sacrifices of U. S. servicemen in Vietnam.
By that time, Tillis had slowly eased into singing his own songs. He credited comedian Minnie Pearl with helping build his confidence. She had hired him as a rhythm guitarist for her revue in the late 1950s and allowed him to try out some of his compositions.
He would walk to centre stage, perform and then slide into the background, clearly ill at ease with stage banter.
“Minnie called me over one day, she said, ‘ Melvin, I noticed you have a little speech hang-up,’ “he told the Modesto Bee in 2014. “But she said, ‘Let me tell you this, if you are going to be in this business, you need to introduce your own songs, and when you’re finished, you need to thank them yourself.’ I said, ‘Minnie, they’re laughing at me.’ She said, ‘ They’re laughing with you.’ So that’s how I started talking on stage.”
As a recording artist, Tillis did not come into his own until 1966 when he charted with Stateside, the lament of a homesick American serviceman stationed in Japan. The song became one of his signature pieces and led him to name his road band the Statesiders.
Tillis put 34 songs in the Billboard country Top 10 — six in the No. 1 position — from 1969 to 1981.
They covered a range of styles: drinking songs such as Stomp Them Grapes ( 1974); the randy I Got the Hoss (1977) with the refrain, “I got the hoss if she’s got the saddle, together we’re gonna ride, ride, ride”; and the sentimental I Believe in You (1979), written by Buddy Cannon and Gene Dunlap.
As a singer he was at his height that decade, with hit recordings including Heart Over Mind in 1970, Good Woman Blues in 1976 and Coca- Cola Cowboy in 1979.
“He was a very good and very expressive singer when he was doing traditional country and as a songwriter, he had an ability to capture the feelings of the working person,” said country historian Rich Kienzle.
By the late 1970s, Tillis parlayed his country boy charm into a second career as character actor. He appeared in the Clint Eastwood comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and in several movies starring Burt Reynolds, including Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) and The Cannonball Run (1981). He co-hosted a TV variety show in 1978 with the husky-voiced singer and actress Susan Anton.
Lonnie Melvin Tillis was born in Dover, Fla., on Aug. 8, 1932, and grew up mostly in Pahokee, a town near Lake Okeechobee. He attributed his stutter, which disappeared when he sang, to a bout with malaria at 3.
Tillis, who also was adept on guitar, violin and drums, formed his first band while serving with the Air Force in Okinawa. Unable to become an aviator, he trained as baker. “I served my country,” he quipped. “I served them cakes and cookies and bread.”
He worked as a strawberry picker, railroad fireman, milkman and delivery man before Webb Pierce recorded a string of hit songs co- written by Tillis in the late 1950s: I’m Tired, I Ain’t Never, Tupelo County Jail and Honky Tonk Song. ( Tillis’ revivals of I Ain’t Never and Honky Tonk Song topped the country charts again in the late 1970s.)
Pierce l ater employed Tillis as a writer for his publishing company, Cedarwood Music. In 1983, Tillis bought Cedarwood, by then one of the largest song catalogues in Nashville.
In 1998, he collaborated with fellow singers Bare, Waylon Jennings and Jerry Reed on the double album Old Dogs, a song cycle by writer Shel Silverstein about growing old.
Tillis had five children with his first wife, Doris, including singer- songwriter Pam Tillis, before divorcing. His second marriage, to Judy Tillis, with whom he had a daughter, also ended in divorce. He is survived by his partner Kathy DeMonaco; six grandchildren; a great grandson; and two siblings.
Tillis was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1976 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007. President Barack Obama awarded him the 2011 National Medal of Arts.