Country music star Mel Tillis was frequent Las Vegas performer
Country music star Mel Tillis, who died Sunday at age 85 at Munroe Regional Medical Center in Ocala, Florida, performed frequently in Las Vegas.
In 2015, before performing with Brenda Lee at the Golden Nugget, Tillis told Ira David Sternberg of KUNV-FM (89.5) he once performed for 18 straight weeks at the Frontier, working eight shows a week.
Tillis also performed at Boulder Station in 2011 and 2005, performed solo at the Santa Fe in 2008 and was part of a parade of country musicians performing at then-Las Vegas Hilton in 1999 (the off-Strip hotel-casino is now the Westgate).
The 1999 appearance was part of a recording of “Prime Time Country With Gary Chapman,” a show on the now-defunct TNN cable network. (TNN has since become Spike TV). Trisha Yearwood, Mark Wills, Mark Chestnutt, Sherrie Austin, the Dixie Chicks and Jo Dee Messina joined Tillis as acts recording the show that year.
In 2003, TIllis performed with his daughter Pam at the Las Vegas Hilton, part of a tour to promote her tribute album “It’s All Relative: Tillis Sings Tillis.”
“The album focused, for me, on what was some of Dad’s coolest music,” Pam Tillis told the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mike Weatherford then. “Some of those eras that people just kind of forgot.”
Mel Tillis said of the tribute album, “She kept threatening to do it, I told her: ‘Don’t do it like Natalie Cole. Do it now while I’m still around, so I get the cash.’”
Tillis overcame a stutter, which manifested when he spoke, but not when he sang, to perform. He told KUNV’s Sternberg that he didn’t know how pronounced his stutter was as a child until his elementary school classmates mocked him. He told his father and brother had also stuttered and he thought it’s how people talked.
“She said, ‘Well, son, if they’re going to laugh at you, give them something to laugh about,” Tillis said. “I started back at school the next day, that was my first day in show business. I learned the secret of humor.”
The Killers, who originated in Las Vegas, nodded to Tillis on their 2007 “Sawdust” album, recording his “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”
Contact Matthew Crowley at mcrowley@reviewjournal.com. Follow @copyjockey on Twitter.
