Ain't Got No Cigarettes: Memories of Music Legend Roger Miller

ROGER MILLER WAS an uncategorizable talent who was best known for his hit songs “King of the Road” and “Dang Me”. Although he had the record for the most Grammys ever won until the 1980s, he never quite found the lasting success he longed for. Miller was not only a singer/songwriter, he was a comedian, an actor, a clock builder, and he even wrote the score for the Broadway Tony winning musical Big River.

To those that knew him, Roger Miller was a genius, whether referring to his unbelievable wit, or to his impressive songwriting. However, with the genius came a dark side. In the 1960s and 1970s he was known for walking off stage halfway through a show, getting into fights and going days without sleep. He struggled with depression and had a serious addiction to drugs which cost him two marriages. Miller died at the age of 56 in 1992.

Ain’t Got No Cigarettes is Roger Miller’s extraordinary life as told in taped interviews by those that knew him best: more than sixty well-known musicians and entertainers including Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. A man who influenced some of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars, he was respected and loved by his peers.

“When you’ve got a name like Lyle E. Style, your only career options are playing point guard for the Kentucky Colonels circa 1973 or chronicling country music, and readers should be grateful that Style has chosen the latter path…Through a quirk of deliberate or accidental genius, what Style has actually assembled is a living document of country music in its hootin’, hollerin’ outlaw heyday.” — Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review