Miller, the youngest of three boys, was born in
Fort Worth, Texas, to mother Laudene Holt Miller and father Jean Miller. Jean died when Roger was one year old, and he was subsequently sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Elmer and Armelia Miller, in
Erick, Oklahoma.
Miller had a lonely and unhappy childhood. Heavily influenced by the
Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights and the
Light Crust Doughboys on
Fort Worth radio, he desperately wanted to be a
singer-songwriter. When he was 17 he stole a
guitar, but turned himself in and chose to join the
Army rather than go to jail. He later quipped, "My education was
Korea, Clash of
'52."
On leaving the army, he went to
Nashville to work on his music career. In 1959 he wrote his first number-one song, "Billy Bayou" recorded by
Jim Reeves.
Although usually grouped with
country music singers, Miller's unique style defies easy classification. He had a string of pop hits in the 1960s, and also his own TV show in 1966. Many of his recordings were humorous
novelty songs with whimsical lyrics, coupled with
scat singing or
vocalese riffs filled with nonsense syllables. Others were sincere ballads, which also caught the public's fancy, none more so than his signature song,
King of the Road, a major 1965 hit, about a presumed
hobo who relishes his life and freedom, riding the rails.
Miller wrote and performed three songs in the 1973 animated
Robin Hood film as the rooster/minstrel
Alan-a-Dale. (One of these songs was later sampled and sped up to form the basis of the
Hampster Dance.) In the 1970s, Miller appeared in ads for Monroe
shock absorbers, backed by a re-recording of "King of the Road".
Miller was married to Mary Arnold, who herself was a musician, a member of Kenny Rogers' backing band,
Kenny Rogers and The First Edition. Band leader
Kenny Rogers introduced the two. Arnold now manages Miller's estate.
His eldest son,
Dean Miller, is a singer-songwriter in his own right. Roger's Christmas song "Old Toy Trains" was written about his son who was only 2 years old when the song came out in 1967.
A lifelong
cigarette smoker, Miller died of
lung and
throat cancer in 1992. In a TV interview, he once explained that he composed his songs from "bits and pieces" of ideas he wrote on scraps of paper. When asked what he did with the unused bits and pieces, he half-joked, "I smoke 'em!" One of his songs, "A Man Can't Quit", centered on the subject of addiction to cigarettes.
In addition to 11
Grammy Awards, Roger Miller won
Broadway's Tony award for writing the music and lyrics for
Big River, which won a total of 7 Tonys including best musical in 1985.
He was voted into the
Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973 and the
Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995. In
Erick, Oklahoma where he grew up, a thoroughfare was renamed "Roger Miller Boulevard."
A high-pitched
sample of his song Whistle Stop was used as the musical accompaniment for the
internet phenomenon the
hampsterdance.
The chorus of one of his songs, "England Swings", was used for the 1998
BBC radio program,
15 Minutes of Misery. The song was also featured in the 2003 movie
Shanghai Knights.
In his 1997 autobiography
Johnny Cash compared Miller's bass vocal range favorably with his own, saying it was the closest to his own that he had heard.
In early 2006, Roger Miller's 1967 single "Walkin' In The Sunshine" was featured in a
Mastercard commercial.
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