John D. Loudermilk ranked among the most eccentric personalities in early rock & roll, even though his compositions rarely veered into outright strangeness. Far better known for crafting songs than for performing them—despite issuing numerous recordings—his catalog displayed striking inconsistency. At one extreme he delivered the blandest, most sentimental pop confections; at the other he produced stark, blues-inflected numbers that carried the raw authenticity of Mississippi Delta classics. “Tobacco Road” represented the latter approach, and that single composition would have earned Loudermilk a permanent entry in any chronicle of popular music.
Across a long career that bridged rock, pop, and country, Loudermilk generated many additional compositions. He initially pursued a performing career in a restrained pop-rockabilly vein, yet his first breakthrough arrived as a writer when George Hamilton IV carried “A Rose and a Baby Ruth” into the Top Ten in 1956. Under the name Johnny Dee he cut several singles for North Carolina’s small Colonial label; the strongest and most successful, “Sittin’ in the Balcony,” reached the Top 40 in 1957. Eddie Cochran’s cover, which closely followed Loudermilk’s arrangement while adding greater drive and presence, outsold the original and climbed into the Top 20, eclipsing Johnny Dee’s version.
Upon signing with Columbia in 1958, Johnny Dee reverted to the name John Loudermilk, moved to Nashville, and shifted primary attention to songwriting, eventually joining Chet Atkins’s team at RCA. Although his voice proved serviceable, his early releases rarely rose above lightweight or awkwardly comic material such as “Asiatic Flu.” “Tobacco Road” stood apart as a brooding, percussive portrait of Southern hardship imbued with blues textures largely missing from his other work. A short-lived British Invasion band, the Nashville Teens, captured the song’s full menace in their powerful 1964 rendition, which entered the U.S. Top 20. Subsequent covers came from Lou Rawls, the Jefferson Airplane, Edgar Winter, and additional artists.
“T Tobacco Road” was only one of Loudermilk’s many hits. During the late 1950s and early 1960s he supplied songs to country artists, teen idols, and pop-rock performers, among them “Waterloo” for Stonewall Jackson, “Angela Jones” for Johnny Ferguson, “Ebony Eyes” for the Everly Brothers, “Norman” for Sue Thompson, and “Abilene” for George Hamilton IV. In the mid-1960s his material briefly attracted British interest: the Nashville Teens recorded both “Tobacco Road” and “Google Eyes” (the latter a U.K. hit though a U.S. miss), while Marianne Faithfull scored a British success with the atmospheric “This Little Bird.”
Loudermilk maintained his own recording career, yet treated it as secondary to writing for others. Much of his output continued along a whimsical pop-novelty line, rendering his more serious pieces all the more striking by contrast. His final major songwriting achievement arrived with another somber composition, “Indian Reservation,” which Paul Revere & the Raiders took to number one in 1971 (Don Fardon had previously charted with it in Britain). Loudermilk then stepped away from professional music to pursue ethnomusicology studies. He passed away at his home in Christiana, Tennessee, in September 2016 at the age of 82.
