The Unhokey Okie

Trailers for sale or rent,

Rooms to let fifty cents,

No phone, no pool, no pets.

Ain't got no cigarettes.

Ah but two hours of pushin' broom

Buys an eight-by-twelve fourbit room.

I'm a man of means,

By no means,

King of the road.

With a plunking background and a beat that makes it sound somehow like a lilting dirge, that bit of drifter's lingo is the hottest item on the current top pop charts. Out less than two months, King of the Road passed the three-quarters of a million sales mark last week, is fourth and soaring on this week's Billboard listing. The lyrics, music and vocal are all by a personable young man named Roger Miller, 29. He is no new Beatle, but he has got what they call something. Raised in Oklahoma on a farm and a fiddle, he owes an obvious debt to the country and Western tradition, but mostly he owes a debt to himself. "The things I tried to do like somebody else always came out different," he says. "It was frustrating--until I learned I'm the only one that knows what I'm thinking."

Unimposing Sounds. What he's thinking is very much his own. "You cain't roller-skate in a buffalo herd," suggests his favorite song, "but you can be happy if you've a mind to." In a twangy baritone that is happy scatting, whoop-whooping, country yodeling or just plain singing, he has recorded 25 songs on two LPs, all but one of them his own. But somehow his name is not widely known. It is probably because he does not impose himself, any more than he imposes his lyrics.

Privately, Miller rides a Honda, drives a Lincoln Continental, and bites his nails; publicly, he comes on like an abashed pixie. And the lulled listener may miss the humor in a sound like "good ain't fer ever and bad ain't fer good." Playing tricks with words is his lyrical delight: "The moon is high and so am I / The stars are out, and so will I be--pretty soon. / But come the dawn and it will dawn on me you're gone." That sounds like pretty fluid stuff, particularly the way his pronounced but easily understood accent runs it together.

Bars & Stripes. His humor spills over into his conversation too. "My parents were so poor I was made in Japan," he reveals with an easygoing delivery that takes the slickness off it. His college education he describes as "Korea, Clash of '52." After that it was bell-hopping in Nashville, the country music capital, for a dime a week and tips. He had been writing and singing songs since Korea, "though I don't know a bar from a stripe; I just sing through my nose by ear."

It wasn't until last year that Miller's break came with an album of his "goofy" songs, which included Dang Me and ChugALug. "I guess the reason a person writes," he says, "is he's not satisfied with what the world has and figures he can do better." But Miller is content just commenting. Observes one of his songs:

Squares make the world go round.

Sounds profane; sounds profound.

But government things cain't be

made do

By hipsters wearing rope-soled shoes.

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