Songwriter, singer, guitarist, fiddler, drummer, TV star, humorist, honky-tonk man, Broadway composer, and perhaps above all else, an awesome wit- Roger Miller was all of these and more. Roger Dean Miller was born January 2, 1936, in Fort Worth, Texas, the youngest of three boys. His father, Jean Miller, died at the age of 26 from spinal meningitis. Roger was only a year old. It was during the depression and Rogers mother, Laudene Holt Miller, was in her early 20s. She was just not able to provide for the boys. So each of Jeans three brothers came and took one of the boys to live with them. Roger moved in with Armelia and Elmer Miller on a farm outside Erick, Oklahoma. Roger later joked, It was so dull you could watch the colors run, and, the town was so small the town drunk had to take turns. Roger had a difficult childhood. Most days were spent in the cotton fields picking cotton or working the land. He never really accepted the separation of his family. He was lonely and unhappy, but his mind took him to places he could only dream about. Walking three miles to his one-room school each day, he started composing songs, the first of which allegedly went a little something like this: Theres a picture on the wall, Its the dearest of them all, Mother Roger, of course, painted a somewhat more humorous and inventive picture of his school days. The school I went to had 37 students, he once said, me and 36 Indians. One time we had a school dance and it rained for 36 days straight. During recess we used to play cowboy and Indians and things got pretty wild from my standpoint. Nevertheless, Roger, who also liked to tell people that he even flunked school bus, did let his humorous guard down now and then to comment on the insecure loner he truly seems to have been as a child. We were dirt poor, he once explained. What Id do is sit around and get warm by crawling inside myself and make up stuff... I was one of those kids that never had much to say and when I did it was wrong. I always wanted attention, always was reaching and grabbing for attention.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 20:57:54 +0000
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