"Dang Me" is a 1964 song by American country music artist Roger Miller, and that year's Grammy Award winner for Best Country & Western Song. Miller's first major country hit and first Top Ten pop music hit,^[1] it was a novelty song^[1] whose "jazzy instrumental section" helped make it "the quintessential example of Miller's lighthearted humor, which brought him many more hits".^[1]

History

Newly signed with the Mercury Records subsidiary Smash Records, Miller gathered on January 10-11, 1964, with music producer Jerry Kennedy, music arranger Bill Justis, and session musicians Ray Ederton and Harold Bradley (guitars), Hargus "Pig" Robbins (piano), Bob Moore (bass), and Buddy Harman (drums) at the Quonset Hut Studio on Nashville, Tennessee's Music Row.^[2] On the second day, they recorded "Dang Me," which Miller, in his official biography, recalled as having written in four minutes in a Phoenix, Arizona hotel room.

Kennedy had already started work on many other of that sessions' songs before he eventually brought the recording of "Dang Me" to his home. Upon playing it, he recalled, "My kids came screaming down the stairs when 'Dang Me' came on. They thought that was the greatest thing they'd ever heard. I started playing it over and over and over again...".^[2] Kennedy and Mercury Records chose "Dang Me" (copyrighted by Tree Publishing, BMI) as the first single of the May 1964 LP Roger and Out (Smash SRS-67046).^[3] The album was shortly retitled and rereleased that year as Dang Me (Smash SRS-67049)

The song spent 25 weeks on the Billboard country-music chart,^[2] reaching number one,^[4] and peaked at number seven on the magazine's pop chart. It went on to appear on numerous Miller compilations. On film or tape, Miller performs it, with other songs, in the 1966 concert film The Big T.N.T. Show, and as part of a closing-number medley on season three, episode #21, of The Muppet Show in 1979.^[5]

Cover versions

"Dang Me" has appeared on recordings by at least eight other performers as disparate as Johnny Cash on his 1999 album Folsom Prison Blues; Sammy Davis, Jr. on the live album That's All (1967); and rockers Country Bob & the Blood Farmers' 1985 Goin' to Hell in a Hatbasket.

References