a notable country music comedian and Grand Ole Opry member, noticed Mel's great sense of humor as he joked with band members off stage.
“Minnie Pearl was the one who convinced me to talk on stage,”
Tillis recalled. “She told me, 'If you want to be a singer, you have to learn to talk on stage.'.” I told her, "Miss Minnie, I just can't. They'll laugh." She replied, "Let 'em laugh. Goodness gracious, laughs are hard to get, and I'm sure they'll be laughing with you and not against you, Melvin."
"That first step was an important one."
“Minnie was right. That first step was an important one. I started to talk and joke some - a beginning. It took a long time before I made much progress, but it did happen over the years. It came real slowly. Still, just the idea that I could dare to talk in front of crowds of people was great.”
Tillis, who never had formal therapy, said his sense of humor carried him through some of the tough times. “Laugh through it, if you can,” Tillis advises people who stutter. “Don’t let it mess up your life.”
While Mel could joke about his stutter during performances later in life, he was careful never to poke fun at others who stutter. "It can be too painful," he recalled. Even he couldn't laugh it off in his younger days, when other school kids teased him about the “funny” way he talked. His advice to kids who stutter today: get help from a speech therapist. “When I was a child, we didn’t have that.”
In the end, the stage was where Tillis felt most comfortable with his speech. “When I’m on stage, I feel like I’m the king. This is my world,” Tillis said.
Readers looking for help with stuttering can obtain a list
of speech-language pathologists
who specialize in stuttering from the Stuttering Foundation. For more information, call 800-992- 9392 or visit
www.stutteringhelp.org.
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