The master's last words

I've already written about songs that make me cry. I'm not sure what this is about. Much of the time I can be stolid, even dour, but then I hear a silly song like Blossom Dearie's "Rhode Island Is Famous For You," and I lose it.

Which brings me to today's entry. Wednesday I was in Chicago for some business, and as I headed home in the afternoon rush-hour traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, I flipped through the radio stations. Presently I came to Radio Disney, one of my guilty pleasures from way back: in Chicago as elsewhere, the Disney company broadcasts children's songs and light pop on an AM station, and intersperses the tunes with the chattering of announcers and gleeful kids. I don't know why I love this, but I do.

But what was this song? It had thumping bass, pulsing synthesizers and a disco beat, which combined for an effect much like that of "We Like to Party" by the Vengaboys. But it had something else: loony scatting sped up to chipmunk speed. Or, more properly, hamster speed: it was "The Hampsterdance Song," a club hit from a few years back that was inspired by a maddeningly insistent web site.

I was already vaguely aware of the tune, but as I listened closely I was reminded that there is more to this song than a Eurodisco groove: the sped-up scatting is unmistakably that of Roger Miller, the Nashville tunesmith and singer responsible, in the 1960s, for modern masterpieces like "King of the Road" and "Dang Me." I have long loved Miller, and his songwriting sensibility is the exemplar I strive to imitate in my own tunesmithery: a little funny, a little silly and, when it needs to be, devastatingly sad. (All those qualities are present in my favorite Miller hook, perhaps my favorite songwriting hook of all time: "The Last Word in Lonesome is Me.")

But although Miller's songwriting skills are rightly celebrated, you don't always hear about his singing. Which is not right: he was one of Nashville's most inventive vocalists, a singer whose solid baritone crooning could, without warning, give way to whistling, shrieking, barking and goofy yelping.

And above all, there was his scatting. We mostly associate scat with jazz and vocalese singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Jon Hendricks, but Miller was one of the few country singers to explore the style. Unlike jazz singers, Miller didn't use scat for extended improvising; instead he punched up his tunes with brief, inimitable scatted interludes. It's great stuff, and the sped-up snippet of Miller's scatting kicks "The Hampsterdance" over the top, at least to these ears. (The scatted passage in the tune is from the Miller song "Whistle Stop," which was on the soundtrack of Disney's 1973 Robin Hood movie.)

In the car on Wednesday, "The Hampsterdance" caught me by surprise, and I wept a little as I reflected on Miller, and his marvelous writing and singing, and the long, slow decline of his career after his "King of the Road" heyday. But although some Miller aficionados might disagree, I think "Hampsterdance" is a fine coda to that career: an effervescent pop trifle that perfectly recalls the whimsy he poured into his sublime novelty songs, tunes like "Do-Wacka-Do" and "Squares Make the World Go Round."

Of course, novelty songs were only part of the winning Miller formula; the rest was despair. But sensitive people like me can only take so much despair.