When Roger Miller and “Whispering” Bill Anderson were first writing the song that would become Miller’s first Top 10 hit in the backseat of Miller’s bright green Rambler station wagon, the musicians obviously thought that the song was good enough to keep singing over and over again, all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, to San Antonio, Texas, for fear that they might forget the melody somewhere along the lengthy overnight drive. With no portable tape recorders to speak of in late 1960, rote memorization was their only option.
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But some time after Miller released the track, which he loosely based on a 1951 sci-fi film, the early country icon told fellow musician Roy Clark it was the “worst thing” he ever wrote. Decades later on Country’s Family Reunion, Clark shared a theory about what made Miller change his mind.
Roger Miller and Bill Anderson Wrote This Top 10 Hit on an Overnight Road Trip
Roger Miller, Bill “Whispering Bill” Anderson, and Johnny Seay were making the long trek from Nashville to San Antonio in late 1960 when inspiration struck. Miller had already begun kicking around the idea of naming a song after the 1951 sci-fi film, When Worlds Collide. Anderson wrote in his memoir, “‘You know,’ he’d say, ‘it’ll be about the separate worlds of a man and a woman being on a collision course.’ And I would argue, ‘But we can’t steal the title of a movie and make it into a song.’ ‘Okay, so we’ll change it a bit,’ he agreed, and we did. When the song came out, it was called, ‘When Two Worlds Collide’.”
After the seedlings for their new song started to sprout, Miller moved from the driver’s seat to the backseat with Anderson. There, they began writing their new song line by line with Seay at the wheel. “We were so knocked out with what we were drifting that, even though we finished the song somewhere around midnight, we didn’t dare go to sleep for fear we wouldn’t remember it when we woke up the next morning. When we pulled into San Antonio around eight a.m., neither one of us had closed our eyes all night. But we knew our new song awfully well.”
Once the musicians arrived at their hotel, Miller called a local disc jockey, Neal Merritt, and asked him to come to their room with a tape recorder. “Neal did. And there in that little hotel room, Roger and his guitar cut the original demo of ‘When Two Worlds Collide’. Only when we were finally assured that the machine had worked and the song was safely on tape did we allow ourselves to fall limply across the beds and go to sleep.”
Not Long After, the Country Icon Called It the “Worst Thing He Ever Wrote”
Roger Miller and Bill Anderson obviously knew they were onto something if they were willing to pull an all-nighter just so they didn’t forget their new song. Considering “When Two Worlds Collide” became Miller’s first song to break into the Top 10, it would seem as though the musicians were right. Yet, some time afterward, Miller was talking to fellow musician Roy Clark on the road and had a far different take on his first Top 10 hit.
“I said to him one time, I said, ‘Roger, that is a great song,’” Clark recalled on an episode of Country’s Family Reunion. “He said, ‘It’s the worst thing I ever wrote.’ Out of that, I had a feeling it frightened him to get—back then—that serious and that open. It was better going ‘chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug,’ and that kind of stuff than those ballads and things.”
Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
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