Biography
Leroy Pullins stands out as a textbook novelty one-hit wonder whose decision to emulate Roger Miller yielded a single moderately successful country release, the 1966 track “I’m a Nut,” plus a handful of comparable songs over the next several years, yet almost no further chart activity. Virtually nothing is documented about his life or professional path beyond the details supplied in Colin Escott’s liner notes for Bear Family’s 2007 compact disc I’m a Nut, an anthology that gathers every surviving Pullins recording and cites a 1984 obituary Valarie Honeycutt wrote for the Lexington Herald Leader. Born Carl Leroy Pullins in Berea, Kentucky, on May 12, 1940, he first entered music as a teenager, putting together the rock-and-roll group the LeSabres at age nineteen. After that band disbanded he headed to Nashville and landed a deal with Kapp Records, a Decca affiliate, in 1966. The label signed him expressly to ride Roger Miller’s coattails, a strategy that paid off immediately when his debut single, the original composition “I’m a Nut,” reached number eighteen on the country charts. A full album followed the same year and a second appeared in 1967, but both the LPs and their accompanying singles failed to register commercially. Once momentum faded, Pullins’ songwriting tapered off as well, leading him to exit the music business, return to Berea, and work as a firefighter. He remained there until a heart attack claimed his life in May 1984 at the age of forty-four. A few months later Bear Family issued an LP titled I’m a Nut, a project already in preparation before his death rather than a posthumous tribute; it stayed the only Pullins collection in circulation for years until the label released an entirely separate 2007 compilation that carried the same title.