Tillis, Pam

views updated

Pam Tillis

Singer, songwriter

For Pam Tillis, being the daughter of a famous country star has been a mixed blessing. Tillis’s success as a singer-songwriter came after years of avoiding the sort of traditional country music popularized by her father, the stuttering Grand Ole Opry favorite Mel Tillis. The attractive young country star actually cut her teeth on pop, rock and roll, jazz, and even punk rock before settling into more mainstream country fare. As Jack Hurst noted in the Chicago Tribune, however, Pam, “a fixture on Nashville’s progressive end for more than a decade, suddenly appears to have found her father’s ladder to stardom.”

The breakthrough for Tillis was Put Yourself in My Place, her first release for Arista Records. She wrote or co-wrote seven of ten songs on the album and earned her first Top Ten country hit with the winsome “Don’t Tell Me What To Do.” Both the album and the single reveal a new commitment to country music by an artist who all but shunned the genre in her earlier years. Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Dan DeLuca lauded Tillis for her move to the country mainstream, concluding: “Add Pam Tillis to the growing list of savvy young country-music women who write ‘em and sing ‘em their own way.”

Like many children of entertainers, Pam Tillis had an erratic childhood. The oldest of the Tillis children, she was born in Plant City, Florida, shortly before her father began to pursue a singing career. She was very young when the family moved to Nashville with little more than the clothes on their backs, but her father slowly made his way in the country music field and then hit super-stardom in the late 1960s. Pam began studying piano at age eight and received her first guitar at eleven. Though she liked country music, she was also influenced by many other styles. “I like it all,” she told a Chicago Tribune reporter, “rockabilly, honky-tonk, Celtic folk—and you can’t go any further back than that.”

Joined Rock Band

What she did not like—and still remembers painfully— were the occasions when her father would drag her onto the stage at the Grand Ole Opry. “I hated it,” she recalled in People. “It was an ego-bruiser. I just couldn’t stand getting up there and having all that [creativity] in me and having to go through his material. And I felt I was, like, on display: ‘Here, he’s got offspring!’”

Tillis was 15 when her parents divorced. Her personal rebellion took the form of an interest in hard rock and punk music. A brief stay at the University of Tennessee ended when she joined a rock band and began to perform. The band was not terribly successful, however, and by 1976 she found herself back in Nashville,

For the Record…

Born July 24, 1957, in Plant City, FL; daughter of Mel Tillis (a country singer-songwriter); married Rick Mason (a painter), c. 1978 (divorced); married Bob DiPiero (a songwriter), February 14, 1991; children: (first marriage) Ben.

Singer and songwriter, 1975—. Made first stage appearance with father, Mel Tillis, at age 8; wrote songs for father’s music publishing company, 1976–77; member of a jazz band in San Francisco, 1977–78; signed with Warner Bros., Nashville, c. 1982; moved to Arista Records, Nashville, 1990; had first Number One song, “Don’t Tell Me What To Do,” 1991; staff writer for Tree Publishing.

Awards: Nominated for a Horizon Award, Country Music Association (CMA), 1991.

Addresses: Record company —Arista Records, 1 Music Circle, Nashville, TN 37203. Other— P.O. Box 25304, Nashville, TN 37202.

writing songs for her father’s music publishing company. The following year she moved to San Francisco, where she worked in a jazz band.

Tillis related in People that throughout her youth her father pressed her to record country music, promising to find her a producer and an agent. She could not accept his help on his terms, though. “My daddy doesn’t necessarily understand the kind of music I do,” she said. “He always had me singing little-girl songs, and I’d be crushed, and then he’d get mad at me.” Becoming part of the punk scene of San Francisco, Tillis married a painter and had a son. The marriage soon ended, and she drifted back to Nashville, determined to make music in her own style.

Signed With Arista Records

In 1983 Tillis signed a contract with Warner Bros, and released her first album, Above and Beyond the Doll of Cutie. The work was a departure from standard Nashville fare, to say the least. One critic compared it to the recordings of Pat Benatar and other hard-rocking female vocalists. Tillis noted in People that her career choices were strongly influenced by her father’s fame. “I think I subconsciously chose pop and rock and R & B, everything but country, because I didn’t like competing on turf,” she said. For his part, Mel Tillis reacted to his daughter’s choice of material with equal parts of indifference and mild criticism.

Warner Bros, released Tillis after her first album sold moderately but did not yield any hits. She continued to write songs, this time for Tree Publishing, and she was pleasantly surprised when the executives from Arista Records offered her another opportunity to record. Her 1990 contract with Arista was tendered after producer Tim Dubois heard her sing at the famed Bluebird Cafe.

Late in 1990 Tillis released Put Yourself in My Place, a more traditional work that features a number of songs she wrote herself; the LP’s first Number One hit was “Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” a song Country Music’s Rich Kienzle described as having “a strong lyric, one that Pam more than does justice.” Tillis remarked in the Chicago Tribune that she switched to so-called “pure country” in reaction to audience demand. “Being a musician, my personal taste is to the… left,” she said. “But getting out there and playing for people—I’ve been doing shows even without a record, playing all over—you just get a feel for what people want to hear. I don’t think it’s a thing of the album pandering or catering. People are calling it ‘new traditional’ or ‘solid country,’ but there are things I’m bringing to the table vocally that I picked up from other styles. I just think it’s an honest arrival at a point.”

Demonstrated Versatility

Put Yourself in My Place was well received by critics and country audiences alike. Songs such as the autobiographical “Melancholy Child,” the hit “Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” and “I’ve Already Fallen”—a ballad Tillis co-wrote with her husband, Bob DiPiero—demonstrate the versatility the singer achieved after years of experimenting with various musical styles. Kienzle called the album “a quirky but likable effort with a distinctive edge that… tips its hat to contemporary, country-rock and traditional sounds, combining the best of them all.” Praising the album in Entertainment Weekly, Alanna Nash found that “Tillis shows here how well she can craft smart and sassy country material—everything from bluegrass to Celtic to country-pop—and also sell it with a commanding, big-voiced presence.”

Needless to say, Tillis’s father is happy that she has returned to the country fold. Pam expresses little regret for the route she has taken to stardom—she still maintains that she has learned from all of her experiences, good and bad, and that she is ready to embrace success on her own terms. Hurst contended that the multi-talented Tillis “is following in [her father’s] footsteps by becoming one of Nashville’s finer songwriters…. [Her work] also makes clear that she is one of the town’s more adept singers.” The critic concluded: “Having grown up in the midst of ‘traditional’ Nashville, [Pam] now shows not only that she has the talent to perform her father’s style of music but also that she can do it with stunning emotional authenticity.”