Roger Miller was a popular country artist who made several crossovers onto the mainstream pop charts in the mid-sixties. His first big crossover hit, “Dang Me,” is today’s classic song of the day.
Roger Miller said he wrote “Dang Me” in four minutes in a motel room in Phoenix, Arizona. His friend Johnny Cash contradicts that story, saying he was driving with Miller through Joshua Tree National Park in California when his friend got out of the car with a pen and pad of paper. Cash asked Miller what he was doing, and Miller purportedly replied, “I’m writing a song. You can’t come look.”
However or wherever he wrote the tune, Miller took “Dang Me” into a January 11, 1964, recording session at Bradley Studios in Nashville. Musicians on that date included Ray Edenton and Harold Bradley on guitars, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and Buddy Harman on drums. Jerry Kennedy was the producer. The version of “Dang Me” you hear on record was actually just a run-through of the song; it was more than good enough to release as a single.
Smash Records released “Dang Me” to radio stations and record stores in May of 1964. It went all the way to #1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart (Miller’s first number-one country hit) and #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 mainstream chart. It won a Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Song of the Year and, in 1998, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
I remember listening to “Dang Me” on the radio back in 1964, when I was all of six years old, and singing along to some of Miller’s cleverly humorous rhymes and nonsense scatting. It really appealed to kids like me at the time. Come on, you know these lines:
Roses are red and violets are purple
Sugar is sweet and so’s maple surple
Well, I’m the seventh out of seven sons
My pappy’s a pistol, I’m a son-of-a-gun
Well, dang me, dang me
They oughta take a rope and hang me
High from the highest tree
Woman, would you weep for me?
That “maple surple” line gets me every time.
And here’s today’s daily bonus video of the day. It’s Roger Miller singing “Dang Me” on the July 11, 1964, episode of American Bandstand. Introduced, of course, by the immortal Dick Clark.
