Not Easy for Him to Say

If you look past a couple of generations before the current corral of country singer-songwriters - you know, the homogenized McGraw-Keith-Shelton-Bryan-Urban singing heads in high-end Stetsons and designer-label ball caps, and the interchangeable Lambert-Swift-Underwood sirens in top-end fashions by Marina Toybina and Mary Alice Haney - in a time when C&W music was more countrified than crossover pop and was reigned o'er by musicians with bona fide country cred the likes of Cash, Nelson, Cline, Jones, Twitty, Price, Lynn, Lee, Parton, and Jackson (Wanda, not Alan), you would find an unassuming, almost reticent figure who became a prolific songwriter and overcame a speech dysfluency to transform himself into one of country music's most endearing showmen.

Mel Tillis, age 85, succumbed to respiratory failure on November 19, 2017. He had earned a place in both the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame. The CMA awarded him Entertainer of the year in 1976, and, years later, he was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. In 2011, President Obama bestowed upon him the National Medal of Arts (pictured below).

Tillis once described himself as "the most unlikely to ever make it," mainly because of a pronounced stutter, which developed after a bout with malaria at the age of three. It was literally a speech impediment, as the stammer vanished when he sang in his rich baritone voice. He recorded more than 60 albums, with upward of 70 Top 40 country hits, 34 of which landed in Billboard's country Top 10, including six at No. 1 from 1969 to 1981. Among his long list of hits were such titles as "I Ain't Never," "Good Woman Blues," "Coca-Cola Cowboy," and "Heart Over Mind."

At the height of his popularity, he played up to 300 dates a year. As early as 1965, he observed, "It so happened that I found what I was good for. I'm lucky. A lot of people go through life and never find out."

Young Mel Tillis greets Dolly Parton on "The Porter Wagoner Show."

Born in Dover, Florida, and raised in Pahokee on the shore of Lake Okeechobee, Mel Tillis was the son of a baker who also played guitar and harmonica. His mother came from a musical family, so together with inspiration from rousing hymns in the local Baptist church, Mel was instilled with an early love of music. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1951, serving in Okinawa, where he was trained as a baker. "I served my country," he later joked, "I served them cakes and cookies and bread." Adept on guitar, violin, and drums, he formed a band with other servicemen called The Westerners and played at local clubs as well as performing on Armed Forces Radio.

When Tillis tried to break into the music business in the mid-1950s, a record company executive politely suggested he might be better off pursuing writing songs instead of performing. And, in fact, he flourished as a writer, creating songs recorded by Ray Price, Brenda Lee, Bobby Bare, Wanda Jackson, Webb Pierce, even Tom Jones.

Tillis would eventually credit Grand Ole Opry veteran Minnie Pearl with building his confidence and slowly easing him into singing his own songs. She initially hired him as a rhythm guitarist for her act in the late '50s and let him perform some of his compositions, although he was painfully ill at east with on-stage banter.

The irrepressible, ageless Minnie Pearl performs alongside
George "Goober" Lindsey at the Grand Ole Opry on Nashville's
legendary WSM AM radio station.

In a 2014 interview, Tillis remembered, "Minnie called me over one day, she said, 'Melvin, I noticed you have a little speech hang-up...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."

According to his obituary in The New York Times, Tillis "found a way to turn his speech impediment into an asset by using his ready smile and innate comedic timing to get his audiences to laugh along with him." In his 1984 autobiography, titled Stutterin' Boy, from a nickname used by Webb Pierce, he noted, "Stuttering brings out some very strange reactions. It makes some folks feel nervous and uncomfortable, while others laugh because they find it funny. A lot of people think I'm putting it on. But I don't worry about that because people who stutter know I stutter. And that's what counts."

The Washington Post remarked that Tillis turned a chronic stutter to his advantage, winning a following as a genial folksy performer."It was his self-deprecating humor that helped endear himself to fans. He referred to his female backup singers as the Stutterettes and dubbed his personal airplane Stutter One. He once joked that his CB handle would be "Old F-F-Flutterlips."

"After a lot of years and more hurting than I like to remember, I can talk about it lightly," Tillis wrote, "which eases things a bit. It's a way of showing people that it hasn't licked me, so it doesn't have to lick others." He admitted, "Yes, I've made a lot of money talking this way. But I didn't ask to be called the singer who stutters. Sometimes I feel the stutter is bigger than the song. I like to think that I have some God-given talent, too."

Occasionally overshadowed by his whimsical humor, Tillis' artistic standing as a songwriter was often based on decidedly serious material. A prime example would be his song "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town," recorded in 1969 as a hit single by Kenny Rogers and The First Edition, a pop band Rogers fronted from 1967 to 1976 before embarking on his solo career as a country artist.

The song, depicting the anguished predicament of a paralyzed war veteran with a wandering wife, was risky in its bleak contemplation of homicide ("And if I could move I'd get my gun and put her in the ground") and its reference to "that crazy old Asian war." Some accounts say the lyric is a reference to the Korean War, although considering the year of its release, many listeners assumed it referred to Vietnam. In a 1969, the NBC news broadcast of "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" played the song to end a segment on the Vietnam War. Tillis himself said the inspiration for the song was a real-life murder-suicide involving a World War II veteran.

On their 2007 collaboration, "Raising Sand," Alison Krauss and Robert Plant included a cover of Tillis' "Stick with Me Baby," which was initially recorded and released in 1960 by The Everly Brothers.

As a singer of his own songs, Tillis had his first Top 40 hit in 1958 with "The Violet and a Rose," a charming little ditty about two flowers that fell in love. He came into his own as a recording artist in 1966 when he charted at #17 with "Stateside," a plaintive lament by a lonely American serviceman stationed in Japan. The song became a signature piece for Tillis and led him to name his band the Statesiders.

Mel's 1972 recording of "I Ain't Never," which he co-wrote with Webb Pierce, was his first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot Country Singles, followed over the remaining decade by a number of chart-toppers, including "Coca-Cola Cowboy," which not only found its way onto the soundtrack of Clint Eastwood's two-fisted outing "Every Which Way But Loose" but also landed the singer a cameo as himself in the 1978 film.

By the late 1970s, in fact, Mel Tillis had started parlaying his homespun country charm into a second career as a character actor. In 1975's "W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings," which featured Burt Reynolds as a gas station-robber masquerading as the promoter for a country music band, Tillis portrayed Good Ole Boy #2 in a supporting cast that included Conny Van Dyke (no relation to Dick), Jerry Reed, Ned Beatty, Art Carnet, and James Hampton (best known as incompetent Fort Courage bugler Dobbs in the mid-1960s western sitcom "F Troop" and as Burt Reynolds' sidekick "Caretaker" in 1974's "The Longest Yard").

In 1977, Tillis appeared on the short-lived, countrified crime series "Nashville 99," starring veteran character actor Claude Akins (best known for "The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo") as a metro police detective and Jerry Reed as his partner. Lasting a mere four episodes, the program featured various Nashville luminaries, including Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Chet Atkins, Johnny Paycheck, and Ray Stevens, while attracting such guest stars as Ned Beatty, Don Johnson, and Pat Hingle.

Clint Eastwood launched his thankfully short-lived good-ol'-boy phase with 1978's "Every Which Way But Loose," playing a trucker and itinerant bare-knuckle brawler with two sidekicks, one human, Orville, portrayed by scene-stealing character actor Geoffrey Lewis (who appeared with Clint in a half dozen pictures), the other a mugging orangutan called Clyde. The countrified comedy featured Eastwood's then-girlfriend Sondra Locke (whom he soon dropped like a hot tater) and, five years before being welcomed as Ellen Griswold in the "National Lampoon Vacation" films, the comedically gifted Beverly D'Angelo.

Clint Eastwood wonders what he's doing in a roadside honky-tonk,
listening to Charlie Rich croon "Behind Closed Doors."

The soundtrack featured "Coca-Cola Cowboy," a #1 hit for Mel Tillis, who also appeared in the movie as himself. Coincidentally, the song includes the lyric "You got an Eastwood smile and Robert Redford hair."

In 1979's "The Villain," Mel Tillis hooked up for the first time with director Hal Needham, the stuntman-stunt driver (he was the stunt coordinator on the previously mentioned "W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings") who stepped behind the camera to make "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Hooper," both starring Burt Reynolds, with whom Needham worked on a total of six motion pictures.

"The Villain," an unsubtle parody of westerns played out like a live-action Wile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner cartoon, gave marble-mouthed Arnold Schwarzenegger his first major role in a feature film as "Handsome Stranger." Kirk Douglas played the title character, Cactus Jack, with Ann-Margret as Charming Jones and Paul Lynde as Chief Nervous Elk in a cast that included Foster Brooks, Ruth Buzzi, Jack Elam, and Strother Martin. Mel Tillis had a cameo as a stammering telegraph agent (pictured below). He also performed (but did not write) a handful of songs on the movie's soundtrack.

Tillis would appear in three more feature films for Needham in the early 1980s: "Smokey and the Bandit II," "The Cannonball Run," and "The Cannonball Run II."

The brainless, star-studded "Cannonball Run" pictures, produced by Albert S. Ruddy (best known as the producer of "The Godfather" and the original "The Longest Yard"), were based on the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an illegal cross-country race from New York City to Redondo Beach that ran five times in the mid- to late-1970.

"Cannonball" director Paul Bartel acts in a scene Martin Scorsese,
Sylvester Stallone, and some not too subtle product placement.

The race had previously inspired a pair of low-budget action comedies, 1976's "Cannonball" (pictured above), directed by Paul Bartel and starring David Carradine (with Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese in cameos as gangsters), and, from the same year, "The Gumball Rally" (far superior to Needham's "Cannonball" pictures), featuring Michael Sarrazin in a cast that actually drove their vehicles at real speeds (pictured below).

Nicholas Pryor and Michael Sarrazin, in the 1966 Shelby Cobra,
and Tim McIntire and Raul Julia, in the 1974 Ferrari Daytona,
race along the Los Angeles River in "The Gumball Rally."

At least, Hal Needham and screenwriter Brock Yates brought a note of authenticity to the proceedings as both had raced together in the real Cannonball. Yates, in fact, was a co-founder of the original race.

In 1981's "The Cannonball Run," Mel Tillis and career Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw portrayed good ol' boys named Mel and Terry who enter the Cannonball in a 1976 Chevelle Laguna. This was the second screen role for Bradshaw, who was still playing professional football. He made his film debut in 1978's "Hooper," director Hal Needham's raucous tribute to Hollywood stuntmen starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. Bradshaw, in a ludicrously obvious toupee, played a conventioneering SWAT cop who engages Burt and his fellow stunt players in a barroom brawl (pictured below).

It's a little known fact that in 1976, Terry Bradshaw took time off the gridiron to record a country album, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." His recording of the title tune, a remake of the Hank Williams song, reached #17 on the Billboard country singles chart. He put out two more albums in 1981, but Mel Tillis needn't have worried about the competition.

Director Hal Needham and producer Albert S. Ruddy got such a kick out of the on-screen chemistry between Mel Tillis and Terry Bradshaw in "The Cannonball Run" that they tried to pitch a possible comedy series featuring their screen characters to NBC.

Mel Tillis and Terry Bradshaw take a dip in "The Cannonball Run."

Needham directed the pilot, "Stockers," featuring Tillis and Bradshaw as stock car racers trying to outwit and outrun a bill collector called Crusher, played by bald-pated movie tough guy Robert Tessier (best known as the serial killer martial artist in "The Longest Yard," with Burt Reynolds).

Robert Tessier, seen here alongside Burt Reynolds in "The Longest
Yard," was of Algonquian Indian heritage. A working stuntman, he
formed Stunts Unlimited with Hal Needham. A decorated veteran
of the Korean War, he made a career out of portraying bullet-headed
menaces before his death from cancer in 1990. He was only 56.

The network president was enthusiastic about the pilot for "Stockers," which had been described as a "Dukes of Hazzard" copycat, but before any further developments took shape, he was fired. Meanwhile, one production honcho said, "It's extremely improbable that Terry could play football if the show became a series."

In a scene from the pilot, Tillis helped Bradshaw select a hairpiece, advising, "Here's your Robert Redford, here's your Burt Reynolds." During the broadcast of the program, Tillis phoned Bradshaw and said, "Well, it ain't 'Gone with the Wind.'" At least the experience inspired Terry to become active in car racing circuits, eventually joining the NASCAR team HighLine Performance Group Racing to form, with Armando Fritz, FitzBradshaw Racing.

Terry Bradshaw was sadly absent when Mel Tillis (sort of) reprised his role in the 1984 sequel "The Cannonball Run II." Instead, for whatever reason, Tillis was paired with Tony Danza, who was between successful runs in the sitcoms "Taxi" and "Who's the Boss?" and was cast as Mel's city cousin. Unfortunately, the two were repeatedly upstaged by the tiresome antics of an orangutan who poses as their "chauffeur" (don't ask).

Behind the ape is George "Goober" Lindsey as the boys' uncle, a
showboat of a used car salesman who uses the orangutan in TV ads.

The chauffeur was played by Manis the Orangutan, part of Czech-born showman Bobby Berosini's Las Vegas act. Manis was Clyde, Clint Eastwood's antic sidekick, in the redneck comedy "Every Which Way but Loose," a "role" he shared with another orang in the  sequel, "Any Which Way You Can." Danza, by the way, was no stranger to working with Manis, as the simian performer had been one of three orangutans who costarred with Tony and Danny DeVito in the 1981 comedic misfire "Going Ape!" Berosini's Vegas career was eventually derailed after a Stardust showgirl videotaped him manhandling, shaking, slapping, and punching his orangutans prior to taking the stage.

Tony Danza and Mel Tillis respond to director Hal Needham's motto:
"Screw the dialogue, let's wreck some cars."

In 1986, Mel Tillis was paired with "Hee Haw" cohost Roy Clark as unemployed, bumbling conmen  mistaken for bank robbers in the good ol' boy period comedy "Uphill All the Way," written and directed by Frank Q. Dobbs, a colorfully named filmmaker (remember Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre") who later co-produced the Larry McMurtry miniseries "Streets of Laredo" and "Dead Man's Walk."

"Uphill All the Way" featured the colorfully diverse supporting cast of Burl Ives (in one of his final roles), Glen Campbell, Trish Van Devere, Elaine Joyce, Frank Gorshin, Sheb Wooley, Burt Gilliam, Gailard Sartain, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, and Burt Reynolds as a gambler. Both Tillis and Clark were credited as executive producers of the picture.

Burt Reynolds poses on the set of "Uphill All the Way"
with first assistant director C. Ted Devlin, who would later
executive produce "George of the Jungle," with Brendan Fraser.

In 1994, Hal Needham directed four made-for-television movies featuring the character Bandit from his "Smokey and the Bandit" pictures with Burt Reynolds. No Burt here, Bandit was played by Brian Bloom, an actor with almost translucent blue eyes who portrayed the villainous mercenary Pike in the 2010 big-screen reboot of "The A-Team." No Sheriff Buford T. Justice here, either, nor Snowman, but Bandit's sidekick was portrayed by Brian Krause (best known as guardian angel Leo Wyatt on the WB series "Charmed"). Packaged as part of a block of TV movies called "Action Pack" by Universal Television, the "Bandit" films featured such guest stars as Tony Curtis, Donald O'Connor, Richard Belzer, Charles Nelson Reilly, Elizabeth Berkley, Kathy Ireland, and Traci Lords. Mel Tillis appeared in the first of the small-screen pictures, "Bandit Goes Country."

Brian Bloom poses on the set of "Bandit Goes Country" with
Brian Krause and Elizabeth Berkley, who went from class president
on "Saved by the Bell" to a pole dancer in "Showgirls."

Hit country music artist Toby Keith co-produced and co-wrote the 2008 contemporary comedy western "Beer for My Horses," inspired by the single of the same name Keith recorded with Willie Nelson in 2003. Starring Toby and Rodney Carrington, the comedian and country musician who co-scripted the film, and directed by Michael Salomon, who directed Keith's music videos, the movie included appearances by Willie Nelson, Ted Nugent, Barry Corbin, Tom Skerritt, Mac Davis, David Allan Coe, and Mel Tillis as Bob the Plumber.

Tom Skerritt (center) poses with "Beer for My Horses"
stars Toby Keith and Rodney Carrington.

Mel Tillis' swan song to the cinema came when he and his "Uphill All the Way" costar Roy Clark acted as the storytellers in "Palo Pinto Gold," a low-budget western directed by onetime Palo Pinto County, Texas rancher Anthony Henslee, who also wrote, produced, and edited the picture as well as appearing on-screen as a Texas Ranger and performing stunts. Country recording artist Trent Willmon starred as a farmer-turned-lawman, while singer-songwriter-humorist-columnist and erstwhile independent candidate for governor of Texas Kinky Friedman was cast as...what else?.. the Governor of Texas.

Roy Clark and Mel Tillis take a break from going over their lines
as storytellers on the set of "Palo Pinto Gold."

During the 1970s, Mel Tillis appeared on the TV shows "Love, American Style," "Tony Orlando and Dawn," "Match Game," "The Hollywood Squares," "Hee Haw," "The Dukes of Hazzard," and "The Love Boat."

Mel Tillis cracks up the host on a January 1972 airing of
"The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour."

In 1978, he was paired with leggy model and singer Susan Anton in a summer replacement variety series on ABC-TV titled "Mel and Susan Together." Produced by the Osmond Brothers, the program's pairing seemed unlikely considering that at the time, Mel was little known outside country music circles, while Susan was famed for little more than a series of seductive commercials for Muriel Cigars. The show, which lasted four episodes, led to Anton being included in Time magazine's "Most Promising Faces of 1979."

Mel Tillis gives leisure suits a bad name in an
embarrassing publicity photo for his summer-
time TV gig with Ms. Anton, "Mel and Susan."

Besides his movie and TV gigs, Tillis increased his media visibility in commercials for the San Antonio-based fast food franchise Whataburger.

When his chart success began to ebb in the 1980s, Tillis turned his attention more to business ventures. He owned radio stations, which he sold for a sizable profit, and acquired several music publishing companies with thousands of songs in their catalogs.

A little soft focus goes a long way for this head-scratching 1981
collaboration between Mel Tillis and Nancy Sinatra.

A longtime spokesperson for the Stuttering Foundation of America, Tillis disappointed fans later in his career when he had largely conquered his trademark stammer and spoke effortlessly in performances. He once related, "I had a guy come through my autograph line not too long ago. He said, 'Mel Tillis! I paid $35 to hear you stutter, and you ain't stuttered one damn bit!' I said, 'I'm trying to quit, sir.'"

In 1998, Mel Tillis collaborated with Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare, and Jerry Reed on a two-disc album called "Old Dogs," featuring songs about aging written primarily by Shel Silverstein, a poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, and children's book author who wrote the Johnny Cash hit "A Boy Named Sue." The record came about after Bare complained to his friend, Silverstein, that there were "no good songs about growing old."

With Waylon Jennings' death in 2002, Jerry Reed's passing in 2008, and now that Tillis is gone (Shel Silverstein himself succumbed to a heart attack a year after the album's release), 82-year-old Bobby Bare stands alone as the sole Old Dog.

Mel Tillis maintained a 1400-acre farm west of Nashville, where he raised cattle, corn, and tobacco.

Country music historian Rich Kienzle noted, "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."

Eddie Stubbs, a longtime announcer for the Grand Ole Opry, said, "Mel Tillis was a guy who had it all...There's a big difference between a concert and a show. Mel Tillis always put on a show."

"Mel Tillis spent a lifetime giving us joy and laughter and music," remarked Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young. "Had he never stepped on a stage, he still would been one of the funniest and most genuine people on the planet." Young added, "He wrote some of country music's most compelling songs, he fronted a remarkable band, and he sang with power and emotion. He also shone as an inspiration, revealing what others called an impediment as a vehicle for humor and hope."

Pam Tillis, seated between musicians Terri Clark and Suzy Bogguss,
had 13 Top 10 hits in the 1990s and often made references to her
father, including her 2002 album "It's All Relative: Tillis Sings Tillis."

One of the proudest moments in Mel Tillis' life was when his daughter, singer Pam Tillis, a successful country recording artist herself, personally inducted him into the prestigious Grand Ole Opry in 2007. Later that same year, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Pam Tillis is one of six children who survive Mel Tillis.