On
The Writer’s Almanac website a couple of weeks ago I read that in 1940 Woody Guthrie wrote the folk classic “This Land is Your Land” because he was growing sick of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Mr. Guthrie must have had an extremely low tolerance level, because the rest of the world has been listening to “God Bless America” for 75 years now. Woody had been listening to it for only two.
Moving right along, yesterday my son-in-law called me to ask
“a very important question that we knew you would know the answer to.” It turned out that he and my daughter wanted to know who sang “King of the Road.”
Naturally, I told him that it was Roger Miller (who composed it and was the first to sing it and had an enormous hit with it, although many people recorded it later) and my son-in-law said, “Your daughter thought it was Arlo Guthrie and I didn’t have any idea who it was.” Well, it wasn’t Arlo Guthrie. As I just explained, it was Roger Miller.
My daughter and son-in-law didn’t know this either, but I have a sort of six-degrees-of-separation relationship (although it’s really only three) with Roger Miller. His sister married Vernon Hornell, a neighbor of mine in Texas. Vernon was the older brother of Bruce and Mary Grace and little Erick (whom we called “Putt-Putt”), and almost every Sunday from 1948 until 1958 I rode with the Hornell family to Sunday School at the local Methodist Church. We rode in a dark blue 1938 Buick until it fell apart, and then we rode in a 1957 two-tone Oldsmobile.
Arlo Guthrie, in case you were wondering, was Woody Guthrie’s son. You can read all about them
here (Arlo) and
here (Woody), if you like.
If you’d rather read about Roger Miller,
be my guest. Wikipedia calls him “an American singer, songwriter, musician and actor, best known for his honky-tonk-influenced novelty songs.” Wikipedia says about his early life, “Roger Miller was born in Fort Worth, Texas, the third son of Jean and Laudene (Holt) Miller. Jean Miller died from spinal meningitis when Roger was only a year old. Unable to support the family during the Great Depression, Laudene sent each of her three sons to live with a different one of Jean’s brothers. Thus, Roger grew up on a farm outside Erick, Oklahoma with Elmer and Armelia Miller.”
Note that there is no mention of a sister, just Roger and two brothers, from which I gather that either (a) Laudene continued to raise a daughter herself or (b) the “sister” of Roger’s that Vernon Hornell married was actually Elmer’s and Armelia’s daughter, Roger’s first cousin, with whom he was raised in (of all places) Erick, Oklahoma. All things considered, though, I think it was foreordained that Roger Miller’s sister or first cousin or whoever she was would marry Vernon Hornell if she was raised in Erick, Oklahoma, because you will recall that Vernon had a little brother named Erick (whom, as I told you earlier, we called “Putt-Putt”).
Don’t look at me that way. Stranger things have happened.
But if you’d rather just listen to Roger Miller sing, here’s
“Dang Me” (4:13) complete with an interview by Dick Clark on
American Bandstand, a commercial for Clearasil, and Roger’s imitation of a dial telephone. And here’s Roger’s signature song
“King of the Road” (2:26). And here’s the shortest but perhaps the sweetest,
“England Swings Like a Pendulum Do” (1:55). When you hear Roger talk, you are not listening to a Texas accent. You are listening to an Oklahoma accent.
I do regret to inform you that early in their marriage Vernon Hornell’s wife, whoever she was and wherever she was raised, was killed in an automobile accident.
In doing research for this post, I learned that Roger Miller died in 1992 at the age of 56, and I also found the obituary of his mother, Laudene Holt Miller Burdine. She died on October 10, 2001, in Scott County, Arkansas, at the age of 87 years, 9 months, and 4 days. The obituary notice said she was the widow of both Jean Miller and C.B. Burdine, and that one son, Roger Dean Miller of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and one daughter,
Joni Claudene Sims Hornell of Forth Worth, Texas, [emphasis mine] preceded her in death. She was survived by two sons, Harold Duane Miller of Ridge Crest, California, and Wendell Jean Miller of Hanford, California; one daughter, Elizabeth Ann Sims of Denton, Texas; 16 grandchildren; 25 great-grandchildren; one great-great-granddaughter and a host of nieces, nephews and friends.
So it turns out that Vernon Hornell’s wife probably wasn’t raised in Erick, Oklahoma, after all. I mean, her last name wasn’t Miller, it was Sims, so she probably wasn’t raised by Elmer and Armelia Miller, unless Armelia had a child from a previous marriage, plus there’s the fact that Laudene had still another daughter whose surname was also Sims who survived her.
Roger Miller is the only Country & Western artist ever to win a Tony award (for
Big River, a 1985 Broadway adaptation of Mark Twain’s literary classic,
Huckleberry Finn, for which Roger penned the 20-song score). He also won more Grammys than any other recording artist, and the record remained unbroken until Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame posthumously around 1995.
There’s more, lots more, in an article entitled
“Thirty or More Things You Should Know About Roger Miller.”
What any of this has to do with either Woody Guthrie or Arlo Guthrie is anybody’s guess.
Oh, I do want to say one other thing.
God bless America.
.JPG)
