Erick, Oklahoma: Town That Made Two Music Legends

Erick, Oklahoma produced two musicians whose combined catalog shaped American popular music for half a century. Shelby Wooley, known as Sheb Wooley, was born here on April tenth, nineteen twenty-one, and would go on to record the nineteen fifty-eight novelty smash about the one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater, as well as appear in High Noon and Rawhide. Roger Miller was born in Fort Worth but moved to Erick as a child to live with relatives, and it was Wooley who taught the young Miller to play guitar.

The two were connected by family; Wooley married a cousin of Miller's in nineteen forty. Miller would go on to write King of the Road, Engine Number Nine, and Dang Me, winning six Grammy Awards in a single night in nineteen sixty-six. The street where Route sixty-six passes through Erick is today named Roger Miller Boulevard, and a museum in Miller's honor opened in a nineteen twenty-nine building downtown in two thousand four, though it closed in two thousand seventeen.