Floyd Tillman

Floyd Tillman achieved his greatest renown as the composer of “It Makes No Difference Now,” a country standard he assigned to Jimmie Davis for $300 in 1938 and later witnessed become a success for Davis, Cliff Bruner, Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, and additional interpreters. The song ranked among the earliest works to articulate the resigned acknowledgment of romantic disappointment that would later define countless country pieces. As a performer in his own right, Tillman helped originate honky tonk country music and was repeatedly cited as an influence by Willie Nelson and other Texas artists.

Born in Ryan, OK, and raised in a sharecropper household in Post, TX, he took up guitar and mandolin while still a child, supplying accompaniment for local fiddlers. In 1933, at age 19, Tillman joined the house band of Adolph and Emil Hofner at Gus’ Palm Garden in San Antonio. Two years afterward he became leader of the Blue Ridge Playboys, a Houston group that produced several of the most inventive country musicians of the pre–World War II period. Beginning in 1936 he sang and played electric guitar, mandolin, and banjo with the Mack Clark Orchestra, a Houston pop ensemble. These varied engagements allowed him to absorb a broad spectrum of 1930s music and to encounter the rhythmic elasticity of jazz. He also started writing songs and occasionally taking lead vocals; one early composition, created with Blue Ridge Playboy Leon Selph, was “It Makes No Difference Now.” Late in life he regained ownership of the song.

With jukeboxes proliferating across the industrializing Southwest and the market for recordings recovering as the Depression eased, Tillman launched a solo recording career on the Decca label in the late ’30s. He enlisted in the Army during World War II yet remained in Texas and continued composing and performing. His signature vocal approach, sometimes likened to a blend of Ernest Tubb and Frank Sinatra, began to crystallize; it merged the understated inflections of the crooner with compact country phrasing. His first number-one hit arrived in 1944 with “They Took the Stars Out of Heaven,” and his songwriting, shaped by wartime separation, matured alongside his vocal style. Two Top Five successes, “G.I. Blues” and “Each Night at Nine,” voiced the soldier’s distance from loved ones while helping establish postwar country’s lexicon of loneliness. Reports indicate these recordings were frequently aired by Japanese propaganda broadcaster Iva Toguri, known as Tokyo Rose, in an effort to encourage desertion among American troops.

After the war Tillman kept performing around Houston and scored two further major hits in the late ’40s with his own material: 1947’s “I Love You So Much It Hurts” displayed his singular country-jazz vocals at full strength, and 1949’s “Slippin’ Around,” one of the first country songs to address infidelity, was recorded by Jimmy Wakely and Margaret Whiting and gained equal familiarity among pop listeners. Tillman continued to draw inspiration from current events in pieces such as the widely covered “This Cold War With You.” Solo success extended to 1960 with “It Just Tears Me Up,” after which he maintained his songwriting and made occasional appearances throughout Texas. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984 and died August 22, 2003, following a long struggle with leukemia at the age of 88.