Picking up in the early 1980s
From selected pages at rogermiller.com:
In 1981, Roger got a call from Willie Nelson who had been recording a series of duet albums with old friends like Ray Price. When Willie asked Roger, he said, "Well, Will, you've done a duet with about everyone." Willie replied, "I know, but we're down to the M's."
Roger agreed and offered a new song, "Old Friends," which he had written for his mama and dad back in Oklahoma, and of which he was especially proud.
Ray Price joined them for the session, and the sweetly melancholy tune made a respectable showing on the charts. As it turned out, "Old Friends" was the last most people heard of Roger Miller until Huck Finn floated down Broadway.
The story of Big River is as fantastic as any of Roger's life. The key man was Rocco Landesman, a former Yale professor at the Yale School of Drama who happened to be the world's #1 Roger Miller fan.
"I thought he was an absolute genius," Landesman says. On the way to a New York appearance by Roger at the Lone Star Cafe, Landesman conceived the notion that Miller ought to write a Broadway score - and the Adventures of Huckelberry Finn would be the perfect vehicle. He approached Roger's wife, Mary, after the show. She encouraged him to write a letter to Roger with the idea. Roger jokes, "He made me an offer I couldn't understand."
Nevertheless, Landesman wrote a number of letters to Miller and about a year later had him convinced he was the right man for the project. Roger was off on another new journey. Landesman commissioned William Hauptman to adapt Twain's book and the project was underway.
Roger, initially intimidated, spent a year and a half on the first phase of the musical. He was "writing from every corner of my heart," as he put it. The play opened at Harvard's American Repertory Theatre, then moved to La Jolla, California, where a struggling young actor named John Goodman took the role of Huck's father, Pap....
As it turned out, the play was a smash hit, earning seven Tony Awards, including Miller's for best score. When Goodman left the role for the movies, Roger took over his part for three months....
It was in the fall of 1991 that Miller found out he had a form of lung cancer. His last performance was during CMA week in Nashville. Publicly, he refused to let his illness phase him. After a year of treatment and one remission, Roger Miller died at the Century City Hospital on October 25, 1992, at the young age of 56....
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