R.I.P.: Songwriter John D. Loudermilk Was 82

John D. Loudermilk, the writer of numerous pop and country hits, including "Tobacco Road," "Indian Reservation," "Abilene" and "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye," died Wednesday, according to a Facebook post from his longtime friend and fellow songwriter Bobby Braddock.

He was 82, according to Rolling Stone.

Born March 31st, 1934, Loudermilk grew up in Durham, North Carolina. His mother, Pauline, was a missionary, and his father, John D. Sr., a carpenter who assisted in the building of Duke University, as well as several tobacco factories and hosiery mills.

Perhaps his best-known composition, "Tobacco Road" has been covered nearly 200 times, with its greatest success coming in 1964, when the Nashville Teens, a British Invasion group, had a Number 11 pop hit with it.



The hard-charging tune, most recently recorded by Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle, painted a bleak picture of a poor, abandoned child yearning to break free from his surroundings, and although Loudermilk's own family was poor, he said during a 2007 "Poets and Prophets" interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, "I didn’t even know my family didn't have any money. I always had a place to play, had a camp under the house or a tree house to play in. And I had a bicycle, a pair of shorts and no shoes, and you could go all over Durham with that, but you had to be back by dark."

When Loudermilk was 7, his mother taught him to play a ukulele his father had made with a cigar-box body. At 13, he performed on Durham radio station WTIK as Little Johnny Dee. When guitarist-produced Chet Atkins recorded his "A Rose and a Baby Ruth," he invited Loudermilk to visit
Nashville, where he met songwriters Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Encouraged by their success as full-time songwriters, Loudermilk soon began experiencing his own success with his compositions.

The 1956 version of "A Rose and a Baby Ruth" was a Top Ten pop hit for George Hamilton IV and would go on to be recorded by several other acts, including, in 1999, Marilyn Manson. His next big hit, "Sittin' in the Balcony," was the first chart record for rocker Eddie Cochran in 1957.



A 1958 deal with Columbia netted Loudermilk little success as a solo artist but three years later, he signed with RCA and earned a Top 40 hit, "Language of Love," which also reached the U.K. Top 20. His biggest solo country hits were "Bad News" in 1963 (later cut by Johnny Cash) and "That Ain't All," a Top 20 entry two years later. In 1963 he scored another George Hamilton IV pop and country smash with the co-written "Abilene." The 1967 Casinos pop hit "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye" was a Number One country hit a year later for Eddy Arnold and was subsequently cover by Glen Campbell, Neal McCoy and Joss Stone, among many others.


But it is the 1971 Paul Revere & the Raiders recording of his "Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)" that would be his biggest hit. The platinum-selling single topped the pop chart and would later be referenced in Tim McGraw's 1994 hit "Indian Outlaw."