Saturday, May 26, 2007

* "Who the Hell Is Roger Miller?"

I spent much of last night "backtracking" my only real responder to these blogs, feeling fairly blown away by her own clever and serendipitous blog entries (link added, on the right), and by those of her other "blog friends." She" is the best noun/pronoun that I can employ here, since it seems that everyone else in their right mind blogs anonymously. Obviously, I'm just a stupid old f#$k in this regard, to the potential detriment of my daughter in a Denver-suburb high school, and my own tenure at a Division I midwestern institution of higher education. But at last, even if I dubbed myself "Freakmeister X," I'd still feel incomplete not linking to my home page; and so . . . .

But what struck me last night was "mahnu.uterna"'s profile; under music, she listed "Roger Miller"! She's so much more hip/contemporary than I am in so many regards that I could scarcely believe that this is the Roger Miller whom I revered in the 1960's—singer/songwriter of "Dang Me," "Chug-a-Lug," and, my favorite, "Do-Wacka-Do." At the time, my other musical heroes were Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Waylon Jennings; but here was a man who did mutlisyllabic rhymes, who wrote songs about London ("England Swings"), who played an eccentric acoustic blues, and who, in sum, cared damned little about the musical norms of either Nashville or the two "pop" coasts. It's hard to describe, in fact, in today's musical milieu, how different he was allowed to be: nobody from the 1980's on has been so popular and yet so à rebours (against the grain).

2 comments:

mahnu.uterna said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mahnu.uterna said...

In "Dang Me," the man rhymed "purple" with "maple syrple," and in "In the Summertime," he didn't bother with rhymes at all. He had humor, edge, and brilliantly-felt vocals. IMHO, the most underrated singer-songwriter of the 20th century.

We'll have to jam sometime!

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