Mel Tillis Fax on Stuttering

Fax to Art Nefsky

Sept. 30, 1997

Art,

I wish I could tell you that I have cured myself of stuttering, but I can’t. It’s still very much a part of my life. I have come to think of it (the stutter) as my old friend. It’s always there and will always be there.

Stuttering, unfortunately, is the only handicap that I can think of that makes people laugh, and hey!, they’ll laugh in your face, too. I was six years old and attending Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Plant City, Florida, when I realized that no one was immune to laughter. So I said to myself, “Well, if they’re gonna laugh at me, then I’ll give them something to laugh about”. I have for fifty-nine years. It was pretty rough those first six grades, but Mama said, “Kids will be kids”, and Mama was right. ‘Course, it was hard for me to understand it at the time.

We moved quite a lot when I was a child; the Great Depression had a lot of people on the move in those days looking for work. I hated to move because it meant having to meet new kids, and I’d have to go through the same ordeals again.

We moved to Pahokee, Florida, in 1942, and I started the sixth grade. Pahokee was a nice town for a kid to grow up in. Lake Okeechobee was practically at our front door. I assured myself many times that I could hit it with a rock if the levee wasn’t there. Many, many great times were had in that big lake.
One of my high school teachers brought to my attention one of the world’s greatest ancient Greek orators of all times. His name was Demosthenes, and he had a speech defect, an inarticulate and stammering pronunciation, that he overcame by speaking with pebbles in his mouth and by reciting verses while running out of breath. He also practiced speaking before a large mirror. He was laughed at by many, but he persevered.

One day, while skipping rocks on Lake Okeechobee, I thought about Demosthenes, and I said to myself, “Well, if it worked for ol’ Demosthenes it might work for me”. Well friend, I loaded my mouth up with several nice pebbles and proceeded to talk to the lake. I didn’t get very far into Shakespeare’s “T-T-T-TO B-B-BE OR NOT T-T-TO B-B-BE” before swallowing about half of them. That ended that experiment!

Years later I told Johnny Carson about that experience, and I was certain that was how I got kidney stones. It wasn’t too funny at the time. It scared the hell out of me! But you can see how I turned that little incident into an asset. It added to my list of anecdotes I use on stage today in my show.

A lot of great men and women have stuttered, or do stutter. It’s mostly men who do. Some of them were Moses (his brother Aaron had to do some of the talking for him), Winston Churchill, King George VI, Al Capp (the creator of Lil’ Abner), Tommy Smothers (Smothers Brothers), Bob Newhart, George Burns, and Jane Froman (she was a great singer in the forties who was killed in an airplane crash). John Glenn’s wife (he was the first astronaut to orbit the Earth in 1962) also stuttered, and she went to a school somewhere in Virginia, and it helped her so much that today she gives speeches all around the country.

There used to be a speech clinic at the University of Tampa. When I was discharged from the Air Force in 1955, I attended a couple of sessions before quitting. I wanted to go to Nashville and become a singer, which I did, but not before those music folks in Nashville told me, “We don’t want any stuttering singer. The record would be as big as a washtub”. They had a big laugh out of that. Big as a washtub!!

I arrived in Nashville in 1957 and quickly landed a job with Minnie Pearl, the great country comedienne. She had about a hundred Fair dates booked in the Mid-West and needed a band to back her up. She hired me to play rhythm guitar and another newcomer, Roger Miller (the Roger Miller) to play fiddle. We were to share the singing chores because Minnie couldn’t sing a lick, although she tried. When she played the piano and sang “Love, Oh Love, Oh Careless Love”, it sounded more like the Conelrad Alert than singing.

Minnie noticed, whenever she’d introduce me to sing, I wouldn’t say a word before or after my song. She told me, “If you want to be a singer, you have to learn to talk on stage”. I told her, “Miss Minnie, I just can’t. They’ll laugh”. She replied, “Let ‘em laugh. Goodness gracious, laughs are hard to get and I’m sure that they’re laughing with you and not against you, Melvin”. She always called me Melvin.

Just like my mother, Miss Minnie was right. I started talking on stage, but not a lot at first. I’d attempt to introduce my song. Sometimes I’d make it, and sometimes I wouldn’t. Roger Miller would then step in and introduce the song for me. That usually got a big laugh. As time went by, I began telling little things that had happened to me recently or in the past. Before long I had several routines that I could do, and they were almost certain to get laughs.

The word began to circulate around Nashville about this young singer from Florida who could write songs and sing, but stuttered like hell when he tried to talk. The next thing I knew I was being asked to be on every major television show in America. To name a few: The Johnny Carson Show, The Merv Griffin Show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Dinah Shore Show, The David Letterman Show, and The Phil Donahue Show. You name it, and I was on it. From there, I went on to make thirteen movies. Some of the more familiar ones are: “Smokey and the Bandit”, “Every Which Way But Loose”, “The Villain”, and “Uphill All The Way”.

After thirty-three years on the road, I found the little town of Branson, Missouri, was becoming more and more a destination for tourists. I decided to build a theater there, and I did. It’s a beautiful 2700 seat performing arts theater. I’ve been here eight years now and look forward to many more.

Back to when I was discharged from the Air Force, my folks had moved from Pahokee to Plant City. I applied for several jobs in and around Millsboro County, but without much luck. The last place I interviewed for a job was in Plant City at Miller Candy Company. I met a very nice man who invited me into his office. He was the owner of the company, I assumed, because he introduced himself as Mr. Miller. I can’t recall his first name. That was forty two years ago, and that man changed my life. I didn’t get the job, but he told me he once stuttered. Then he gave me a piece of paper, and he said, “Read this over ten times before you go to bed tonight. It changed my life; maybe it will change yours”.

I left his office feeling more dejected than ever. “How could a piece of paper change my life?” I thought. I was already in bed when I remembered the piece of paper. I got up and took it from my shirt pocket and began to read: “Oh Lord, Grant me the Courage to change the things I can change, the Serenity to accept those I cannot change, and the Wisdom to know the difference. And God, Grant me the Courage to not give up on what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.”

For the first time in a long time, I slept well that night. I woke the next morning with a different outlook on life. I told myself that if I couldn’t quit stuttering, then the world was going to have to take me like I was. What you see is what you get. From that day on, things started looking up for Mel Tillis. Soon after, I headed for Nashville in a ‘49 Mercury with a wife and a four month old baby girl — her name was Pam.
Mel Tillis