“My name is Roger Miller, probably one of the greatest songwriters that ever lived, and I have written a few songs, probably eight or nine hundred in my professional career and I would like to do about 700 or 750 here tonight, whatever we have time for.” Bantering with the crowd at a live performance, […]

Produced by Colby Barnum Wright and Roger Miller’s son Dean Miller, the star-studded “King of the Road: A Tribute to Roger Miller” is out today on BMG. Album cover art provided

“My name is Roger Miller, probably one of the greatest songwriters that ever lived, and I have written a few songs, probably eight or nine hundred in my professional career and I would like to do about 700 or 750 here tonight, whatever we have time for.”

One of my earliest memories of music is Roger Miller, depicted as a lute-toting rooster, whistling over the credits to Disney’s Robin Hood. The tune still gets stuck in my head on a near daily basis (probably to the chagrin of my wife and colleagues). I rediscovered Miller as a teenager, at a time when songs like […]

Roger Miller was part Hank Williams, part Will Rogers, yet a wholly original talent with a densely populated mind from which sprang some of the most noteworthy and enduring songs of the 1960s. Amid the yeah-yeah-yeahs of the British Invasion and the protests that “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Miller was a poet of the uncommon […]

His songs transcended genre. They topped country and pop charts and were performed everywhere from Broadway to “The Muppet Show.” The singer-songwriter might be best known for his off-kilter sense of humor, evident in songs like “You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd.” But he also penned devastating ballads such as “Husbands and Wives.”