“Music is who we are and what we do, but at the same time, I feel like the story of our relationship is bigger than that.
“For Dad to come from literally nothing and do what he’s done, it took some sacrifice. When you have this really big dream, people in your world, to a degree, have to accommodate that dream. There’s a price tag, and it’s not just you who pays it, it’s the people closest to you. That’s where acceptance comes in, because you can’t hold that [dream] against the person. And that’s what I had to come to terms with.”
Mel’s ambition did have an impact on his family life. But it also led him to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Few have climbed so high while overcoming so much. Born August 8, 1932, a childhood bout with malaria left Lonnie Melvin Tillis with a permanent and pronounced stutter. The only time the speech impediment vanished was when he sang.
His father, a baker, left the family when Mel was quite young, and his mother went to work in a canning factory. Her family was quite musical, and she instilled a love of country music in her boy. As a high schooler, Mel was performing it locally.
“I was in the National Guard, and I went to Columbia, South Carolina, to Fort Jackson,” Mel recalls. “They had a little band come and put on a dance for all the National Guardsmen there. Someone asked if I could get up and sing with them. They said, ‘Don’t worry. He can’t talk, but he can sing.’ I sang the Hank Williams song ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do.’ I did it one time, and they liked it so well, they asked me to do it again. That was my first time ever performin’ with a band. And I was hooked.”
He joined the air force. While stationed in Okinawa, he began to perform regularly in a country band. By the early 1950s, Mel was writing songs while making a living with a series of working-class jobs back home in Florida. He met a manager who brought him to Nashville in 1956. Everyone in the music business laughed at his stuttering, and the trip proved fruitless.
“At Acuff-Rose Publishing, Wesley Rose told me, ‘We don’t need any stuttering singers. We need songs.’
“Ray Price came to Tampa, Florida. I had a manager. He said, ‘You wanna meet him?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ I went over there to Tampa, I believe it was at the Armory. Ray asked me if I had any songs. I played him ‘I’m Tired,’ and he liked the song. He took it to Nashville, and he was singing it behind the stage at the Opry, the Ryman Auditorium. At the time [1956], he had a big hit out, ‘Crazy Arms.’ It had been in the charts for six months.
“Webb Pierce heard Ray Price singing my song. He said, ‘I like that song. Can I have it? You don’t need it. You have “Crazy Arms.”’ Ray said, ‘Yeah, you can have it.’ But he only gave him the first verse.”
Mel was listening to the radio in Florida when he heard Webb Pierce introduce his new single, “I’m Tired,” with two new verses supplied by songwriter Wayne Walker. Mel didn’t care. He was on his way as a tunesmith. He married his girlfriend Doris, and they moved to Nashville. Webb sang Mel’s “Honky Tonk Song” to the top of the charts in early 1957. Daughter Pam Tillis was born on July 24, 1957.
Songwriting royalty checks take months to arrive. To keep bread on the table, Mel took jobs playing guitar on the road with bigger stars.
“I remember the first time I met Patsy Cline, I was on tour, working for Judy Lynn. This was about 1958. I drove the car. Patsy was in the car, and so was Brenda Lee and Brenda’s mama. That’s how I became big buddies with Patsy. I’ve heard every joke, and boy, she had some good ones. I loved her. Patsy Cline was one of the boys. She’d have a beer with you. I think Patsy only recorded about fifty or sixty songs, and I happen to have two of them, ‘Strange’ and ‘So Wrong.’ She liked me, you know.
“Minnie Pearl hired me. She said, ‘But I need a fiddle player, too.’ I said, ‘I met one today.’ And I hurried on down to the Andrew Jackson Hotel. Roger Miller was in there, and he had his little bellhop uniform on. I said, ‘Roger, you said you could play the fiddle. You want a job with Minnie Pearl?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, you already have a job, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Yeah, but I’m gonna give them my two-minute notice!’ And we went on the road.
“Minnie was the first one to encourage me to talk onstage. I wouldn’t open my mouth, ’cause when I started talking onstage, they began to laugh at me. ‘Melvin,’ she said, ‘they’re not laughing at you. They’re laughing with you. Find your niche there.’ She said, ‘Melvin, just be yourself. And they’ll either like you or they’ll dislike you.’ It turned out that they liked me. So Miss Minnie was right. A dear lady.”
Mel debuted on the charts with his self-penned Columbia Records single “The Violet and the Rose.” But one thorn in Mel’s side was that his manager was listing himself as the cowriter of the songs. Mel decided to break their contract. This meant tying up his royalties and the rights to his songs in court. Destitute and disillusioned, the Tillis family returned to Florida in 1959. Pam was two years old, and Doris had just given birth to second daughter Connie. Mel Tillis took a job as a delivery-truck driver back home in Pahokee. Frustrated by his lack of success as a vocalist, Columbia Records dropped him.
He was back on the bottom, but Mel wouldn’t stay there for long. Other artists continued to hit the charts with songs he penned, and in 1960, Mel signed as an artist with Decca with the help of benefactor Webb Pierce (1921–1991).
“Red Foley was my idol,” Mel relates. “He was the man that inspired me the most to get into the business. I remember one time he came to Nashville to record. He called the office and asked if I would come over to the Anchor Motel and bring some songs. I recorded for Decca at that time, and so did Red Foley. I got over there, and [guitar player] Grady Martin was over there. Boy, out came the jug. We got to drinkin’, Grady got to pickin’, and Red got to singin’. He did every song I guess he knew, and we set there for three days. I got kicked off the label [because Red missed his recording sessions].”
Mel signed with Ric Records, then Kapp Records. Despite his mellifluous singing voice, recording stardom continued to elude him. But his songwriting remained popular, particularly the blockbuster 1969 pop hit “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” recorded by Kenny Rogers & The First Edition.
“That’s a true story,” Mel says. “I was on my way home, and I got stuck in traffic. I had the radio on, and I was listening to the [Johnny Cash] song ‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.’ And I sang, ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.’ I got to thinking about someone I knew down in Florida. In fact, they lived in back of us in a little house. I used to hear them arguing over there. He was a GI who was wounded in Germany. He met the girl in England, a nurse, and he brought her to my hometown. He had some recurring problems with some of the wounds he had. Eventually, he divorced Ruby and married someone else. The ending to this story is that the guy killed himself and his third wife. Very sad.”
Mel and Doris’s family continued to grow with the addition of daughter Cindy and son Mel Jr., nicknamed Sonny. Then came their fifth child, daughter Carrie. Despite the added responsibilities, Mel continued to pursue his singing career. And when he wasn’t on the road raising Cain, he was raising it around Music City.
“Lefty Frizzell would always call me and Wayne Walker. He liked to party with us. I remember one night we was out for three days. He said, ‘Melvin, could you go home with me? Alice won’t get mad at me if you’re there. She likes you.’ So we went out there, and he said, ‘You better stay out here ’til I make peace.’ The next thing I knew, out come a big ol’ buffalo head. It came right by me, landed and knocked off one of the horns. And there he stood. Lefty said, ‘Melvin, I don’t think you better come in, but you can have my buffalo head. She don’t want it in the house anymore.’
“So I got the head, and I went home. When I got home, Doris threw the head out and broke the other horn off! Oh boy. And it took me forever to get back in the house. The buffalo head stayed out there two or three days. The dogs drug it off.”
His wild-and-wooly behavior sometime
s affected his professional life. One brawl in downtown Nashville cost him his job as a member of The Porter Wagoner Show, on television and on the Opry. Porter heard about the fight and didn’t want anyone in his troupe associated with anything so controversial.
“Porter Wagoner had asked me to become a member of his show,” recalls Mel. “It was around the same time he’d hired Dolly Parton. I was on there for six months or so [in 1968]. And then he fired me. The very next day, I get a call from Glen Campbell, who hired me to be on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. I went out there, and that exposed me to the world. Glen Campbell [on the CBS network] and all those syndicated television shows helped [country music] to get bigger and bigger and bigger, to what it is today.”
Television exposure of his unique personality and excellent singing led to the radio success that had eluded him for so long. At the dawn of the 1970s, Mel signed with MGM Records and began having consistent top-ten hits, including “Commercial Affection,” “Let’s Go All the Way Tonight,” and “Memory Maker.” Mel also turned his stuttering speech impediment into a comedic device that delighted millions. The readers of Music City News voted Mel their Comedy Act of the Year for six straight years, 1973–1978.
“And then from there, Burt Reynolds put me in the [1975] movie W.W. and The Dixie Dancekings. I played a gas station attendant. I only had a few lines in it. He pulled up at my gas station, and I delivered my lines. He said, ‘Cut!’ and shot me with a water pistol, right in the head. He said, ‘Mel, I hired you to stutter in this! You’re not stuttering.’ I said, ‘I’ve learned my line, so I don’t stutter as bad.’ He rewrote the line, and the next time, I really stuttered.”
In 1976, Mel Tillis was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was also named the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year, much to his surprise.
“I remember when that happened. Tennessee Ernie Ford said, ‘The winner is—and I love him—Mel Tillis!’ I was in the audience, and I had a pipe. I guess in those days you could smoke in the auditorium. I didn’t expect to win, ’cause I was up against [Ronnie] Milsap, Dolly, Willie, and Waylon. I said, ‘There ain’t no way for me to win this thing.’ But I won, and I took the pipe and stuck it in my tux pocket. I got up onstage and, man, it started burnin’ up in there! I hurried up my acceptance speech.”
Now at the peak of his profession, Mel signed with MCA Records in 1976 and became an even bigger star than ever. But his prolonged absences, carousing, and female flings upset his wife. After several separations and earlier divorce filings, he and Doris finally divorced in 1977. The experience profoundly depressed him. He married second wife Judy in 1979 and had daughter Hannah. Mel and Judy are also now divorced.
Things might have been turbulent personally, but professionally, Mel Tillis rose higher than ever in both music and film. He appeared in several movies, including The Villain (1979) with Kirk Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Every Which Way But Loose (1978) with Clint Eastwood, and Cannonball Run (1981) with Burt Reynolds. He was also the star of his own showplace in the Ozark Mountains tourist boomtown of Branson, Missouri, from 1990 to 2002.
MEL TILLIS AND HIS daughter Pam Tillis are now mutual admirers, and she cherishes the time she spends with her famous father. But as both will admit, this was not always the case.
Pam was a self-described “melancholy child,” a withdrawn loner, a bookish dreamer. Although she lacked self-confidence, she did accompany Mel to the Opry when she was eight and performed “Tom Dooley” on its stage. As a youngster, Pam was fascinated by the Opry’s glamorous female stars.
“Ooh they were beautiful, they were fabulous. They would walk into the room, and they smelled good and their hair was big and they sang so great. I remember the first time I heard Tammy Wynette sing, and she had that unbelievable range.
“I don’t know if I wanted to be that, or even if I thought I could be that. They were stars. People who were popular back then, they were larger than life.
“The late, great Dottie West—she was a star. They were flashy, they were tragic, they were all these wonderful things. They were elegant ladies. And they were feisty.
“I’ve known Dolly since I was a little girl. To me, she was just this deity, this country-music diva. She’s so beautiful. It was such a thrill to work with her [on the 1993 single “Romeo”]. I told her, ‘Dolly, I don’t even need money to come over here and work with you. All I want is some hair tips.’ She said, ‘Oh honey, I’ll give you a whole bag of hair.’
“My favorite thing about awards shows is not being nominated or any of that stuff. It’s being backstage and talking to these gals who have been around the block.”
Pam grew up immersed in music. She took classical piano lessons for nine years and picked up the guitar at age twelve. She was writing songs by age thirteen and performing in Nashville nightspots at age fifteen. Mel was not pleased.
“They were very strict,” says Pam of her parents. “We weren’t allowed to do a lot of things. So I didn’t have to stray too far to be on the wrong side of the law. So if I was rebellious, it’s because everything I was trying was outside the bounds of acceptability, for the most part. I remember it was a huge deal to go to concerts or to take road trips with my friends.”
Mel would return from concert tours and try to lay down the law. As a teenager, Pam resented it.
“I’m like, ‘Who are you to tell me anything? Because you’re never here.’ Daddy worked so much. I figured it up one time, and from the time I was born to the time I was eighteen, I felt like I had maybe three years of any kind of interaction with him. Now that’s pretty crazy.
“It’s really hard [for him] to be an authoritarian. . . . That was another rub. I knew for a fact he was telling me not to do a lot of stuff that he was doing. I mean, The Statesiders were infamous. I always characterized them as the Led Zeppelin of country music.
“Plus, my parents had trouble in their relationship, and that rubs off on young kids. It was just a really tough time, and they eventually split up.
“I’m sure he had his own feelings—You’re at the top of your game, and everybody tells you how wonderful you are, and then you come home and everybody’s got a laundry list of why you’re in the doghouse. That’s hard to take.
“So there’s this whole big aura of uncertainty, and this person who’s larger than life. And you don’t quite know how to please him. Anyway, in my teenage years, to say I felt alienated from my dad is an understatement.”
The advent of the Beatles completely pushed aside any country daydreams Pam might have had. To Mel’s dismay, she became completely immersed in pop music.
“Daddy was like, ‘Where did I go wrong? What have I done?’
“It’s very painful to say—I knew Daddy loved me, but I was never totally convinced that he liked me. Daddy’s real tough. He’s not a flatterer. In fact, if you ever got a compliment out of him, that was huge.
“At one point, I couldn’t be in the same room with him without feeling so sad. I was just on the verge of tears. I had all these feelings, and I didn’t know how to process them. I distanced myself from the situation until I could get a handle on it.”
Country-to-the-core Mel strongly disapproved of Pam’s musical direction. He also disapproved of her friends. When she was sixteen, she was out partying with them when a car crash sent her face-first through the windshield. Pam’s facial bones were shattered in thirty places.
“People ask me, ‘What’s your fondest Christmas moment?’ This is going to sound weird as all get out, but when I had my wreck it was Christmas Eve, and I woke up [in the hospital] Christmas morning. When you’re a kid, your very first thought is, ‘Well, I’m not gone, now my parents are going to finish me off.’ Instead, there was that total look of acceptance. My best gift was knowing that there was nothing I could do that they wouldn’t love me and be there for me. Even though they were having a lot of trouble, they worked together as parents.”
Five years of plastic surgerie
s restored her looks. After high school, Pam attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
“My majors in college were music and partying. The first week, I signed up for a rock ’n’ roll group and my classes, in that order.”
She dropped out after two semesters, determined to make her living with music. Pam sang pop tunes at top nightspots in Los Angeles, then moved to San Francisco and performed in a jazz group. She also married. She returned to Nashville to have her son Ben in 1979. Almost immediately afterward, she divorced.
“I had gone through a very bad relationship,” she recalls. “My first marriage was really bad. So in the process of dealing with that, I went, ‘Okay, let’s start at the beginning.’ I came home and got into counseling. I just laid it all out and looked at it long and hard. What I came to realize is that Daddy is not a bad guy.
“Over time, we did have some really serious, good heart-to-hearts that might have hurt and might have been painful at the time. But we cleared the air.”
Mel had taken her on the road as his backup vocalist in 1978, but that had only resulted in a clash of wills.
“I wanted to be Bonnie Raitt. He wanted me to be, like, I don’t know, some girl with a gingham skirt on. I didn’t hear my music the way he heard it. That was our first rub, professionally.
“It didn’t help my self-confidence any, but at the same time, it made me very resolute. So it was really a blessing in disguise that he was really tough on me.”
Despite their differences, Mel featured her singing a prominent harmony part on his 1980 hit “Your Body Is an Outlaw.” He also signed Pam to be a staff writer for his publishing company. Country stars recorded her tunes, and Barbara Fairchild had a minor hit in 1978 with Pam’s “The Other Side of the Morning,” but often her biggest successes were songs she wrote for R&B stars such as Chaka Kahn, Rebbie Jackson, Dorothy Moore, Bettye Lavette, and Gloria Gaynor. Pam spent two years singing soul songs herself, working on the motel-lounge circuit in Music City.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 7