Pam Tillis and Lorrie Morgan, bringing hits of '90s country to Mount Airy, were told 'It'll never work'

MOUNT POCONO, Pa. — Platinum-selling, chart-topping country music singer Pam Tillis said she and her record-producer husband were "kicking around the idea" of working with other artists when, at the Grand Ole Opry, they found themselves watching similarly successful singer Lorrie Morgan.

"I went, ‘Ohh,'" Tillis said. “And we just stood there for a moment and listened to her sing, and my husband and I looked at each other and we said, ‘We should call Lorrie.’"

Tillis noted both were Opry members, daughters of famous country singers [George Morgan and Mel Tillis], musical contemporaries and even less than two years apart in age.

"We have so much in common," Tillis said.

But Tillis said that when the two singers went to lunch with Morgan's business manager, she told them, "It sounds so wonderful, it’ll never work. It’s never gonna happen."

"She just went, 'It’s too good to be true,' basically," Tillis said.

Fifteen years later, Tillis and Morgan still are on the road, playing shows together as the Grits and Glamour Tour of stories and songs.

The show stops at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 16, at Mount Airy Casino. Tickets, at $55 and $65, remain available atthe Mount Airy website.

"That was 15 years ago," Tillis said in a recent call from her home in Nashville, Tennessee. "And it’s been an interesting journey.

“And it’s just been one of the best. … She’ll tell you, we’ve just gotten so close.”

'We didn't get to know each other'

Tillis and Morgan both were top country music stars in the 1990s, when Morgan produced four platinum and three gold albums, with five of those breaking the Top 10 on the Country chart.

Morgan had 20 Top 20 hits, including the chart-toppers "Five Minutes," "What Part of No" and 1995's "I Didn't Know My Own Strength."

She was nominated for six Academy of Country Music Awards and six Country Music Association Awards, including a 1994 win for Album of the Year for "Common Thread."

Tillis had three platinum and two gold albums and 19 Top 20 Country hits, including the chart-toppers "When You Walk in the Room" and "Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)," both in 1994.

Tillis was nominated for nine Academy of Country Music Awards and 13 Country Music Association Awards — winning Female Vocalist of the Year in 1994.

She also won a Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals in 1999 for "Same Old Train."

In the interview, Tillis pointed out that she and Morgan worked together far before their current show.

With fellow chart-topper Carleen Carter, in the mid-1990s they joined for the all-female Crack Macaroni & Chicks tour — a forebear for female collaborations such as Lilith Fair.

“Lorrie and I were on the first all-female tour. This is when The Dixie Chicks were still in training bras," she said with a laugh.

But Tillis said, “It’s funny, at that time, everybody was at the heights of their careers. We had separate buses and separate entourages and to tell you the truth, we didn’t get to know each other very well. We didn’t."

Making records together

Tillis and Morgan also did two duet albums, starting with 2013's "Dos Divas."

“I’ll tell you how that came about: This was pre-COVID, and we were signing autographs after every show — we’d go out into the lobby and we would sign," she said.

“We’d be thinking about what didn’t we do that we would like to be in the show? We’d talk about either an old song that we wanted to do or we’d joke around and somebody would say something and I’d go, ‘That’s a title! We need to write that.’

“And we started writing songs ideas down on the backs — we’d say, ‘Hand me an 8-by-10 glossy — I’ve got to write something on the back of them. I started coming home with all these 8-by-10 glossies with song ideas on the back of them,” she said, laughing again.

“So it kind of came out of that. … Usually it started out as a funny idea, and then it would turn into something a little more serious. But we just started making things up, and then we kinda got a feeling of what this could be, and so just went into the studio and did it."

A second duet album, 2017’s “Come See Me and Come Lonely,” came together because they "wanted to do some of our favorite covers — just some songs that we always wanted to sing that we never got to sing.

“In the show we talk about the ladies that we looked up to in country, and we just started going through our record collections and grabbed a few, you know, out of several hundreds,” she said with a laugh.

Courtesy Absolute Publicity

/

A still-new solo album

The only solo album Tillis has released since “Come See Me and Come Lonely,” was 2020's "Looking for a Feeling" [Morgan has not released a disc since.]

“The premise of the record — a lot of artists will do an album of influences, and I had done one called ‘Tillis Sings Tillis’ [in 2002] and it was all my dad’s songs," Tillis said.

"But I started thinking, ‘Well, you know, that was only part of the story of my influences, 'cause I was also a child of, well, I grew up in a very interesting period in the second half of the ‘70s — great singer-songwriter time."

She noted artists such as Carole King, James Taylor and Joanie Mitchell — "who was just like a goddess to me. And I’m so glad she’s getting all these honors and things now."

Tillis said she also listened to Neil Young and Paul Simon, but also Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.

“And I thought, ‘I want to do an album — and my albums are always country ‘cause I’m country — but I wove in a lot of, I felt, those ‘70s. It’s not real overt — it’s not hit you over the head.

"But I felt like some of that sound, I wanted to express that in a record.”

She said she's not currently working on new music — she said "Looking for a Feeling" was made during the pandemic and she feels like people still are discovering it.

"I don’t put out records every year," she said. "I guess maybe I should, but I don’t. And I guess especially because of the pandemic, I just feel like I’m still letting people know that there was a record.

“They cost a lot to make, they take a lot of time, and by golly, I want to make sure I’ve gotten that one as much exposure as it can get before I go onto the next one."

A program that's evolved

Tillis said the Grits and Glamour Tour has evolved over the years.

"Let me just tell you this part of the story, too: First two or three years, it was shaky. It had its magic moments, but it could also be very shaky," she said with a laugh.

“And there may be some nights — and everybody has off nights – where one or the other of us would lose our way. It’s like, ‘Where am I going with this story? Is there a punchline?" she said, laughing again.

“And then what we found out over time is, like, somewhere we formed a truth: Like, we’re not going to fight for attention. Nobody’s going to try to get the upper hand. We figured out nobody wins if the goal is that I look better than you.

“And so the big thing is, OK, at the end of the day we have each others’ backs. And if somebody’s having a kind of a tough night, the other one’s propping them up."