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Elvis Presley
Interview
‘Elvis kept following me!’ Country singer Mimi Roman on her all-star life – and
playing live again at 89
Gianluca Tramontana

She went from rodeo queen to right-hand girl of the King – but a
confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan made her shy from the spotlight. Now
she’s finally ready to take her bow
Wed 29 Nov 2023 15.00 CET

‘Oh good, they didn’t send me the photograph of me and Elvis to sign.” Mimi
Roman is opening mail in the kitchen of her Connecticut home on an autumn
afternoon. “I get three or four fan letters a week and they all send me that picture
of me and Elvis to autograph. I just hate that picture. I hate that dress I’m wearing
and the bag I’m carrying. I just wish there were one other picture out there.”
Although her friendship with a pre-fame Elvis is often the first line of her bio,
Roman has her own place in history as one of country music’s first female success
stories, as well as a Zelig of rock and pop’s early years. She witnessed the birth
of rock’n’roll, rockabilly and country’s sophisticated “Nashville sound”;
performed on iconic stages such as the Grand Ole Opry and recorded demos for
the the golden-era songwriters of New York City’s Brill Building. But by the mid-
80s, she had quit the business to prioritise family time and became an estate agent
– and later assistant to the musician Michael Bolton.
In that same kitchen during lockdown, Roman received a call from documentarian
Joe Hopkins, which resulted in the film Brooklyn Cowgirl: The Mimi Roman
Story, released last year. It led to an invitation to perform at this year’s Swelltune
Records Bay State Barn Dance in Beverly, Massachusetts. And so, in early
September, the 89-year-old performed for the first time in 40 years. “I never say
no,” she says. “If a door opens, I walk through.”
We retire to her living room where the guitar that has accompanied her throughout
her career lies in its case, her name inlaid along the fretboard. In 1934, Roman
was born Miriam Lapolito, daughter of a Radio City Music Hall rockette and a
Bronx bookmaker. By age 10 she was Mimi Rothman after her mother remarried
and moved to Brooklyn. In the 40s, the borough offered wide-open spaces, stables
and bridle paths and Mimi fell in with a group of equestrians called the Brooklyn
Cowboys. Before long she became a sharp-shooting, prize-winning horse rider.
When the annual rodeo came to Madison Square Garden, Mimi Rothman entered
as Mimi Rohman – having discovered that one of the judges was antisemitic – and
was named rodeo queen.

An unpublished photo from Mimi Roman’s personal collection, when she was a
cowgirl in Brooklyn Photograph: Mimi Roman
Her love affair with country music had started at 16 when a friend played her
Jimmie Rodgers’ Waiting for a Train. “The simplicity of the song and the story –
I just fell in love with the music,” she recalls. “I just craved it, so I would spend
my nights trying to get radio stations from places like West Virginia, Washington
and Texas.” She began singing and made her way on to the television talent show
circuit, and in Tennessee was introduced to the pre-fame Everly Brothers.
Although she failed to convince them that they needed a female singer, they
became friends and Roman accompanied them when they visited New York.
“They were really two completely different personalities,” she says. “Phil was
goofy and he was kind of funny and Don was very serious. I was friends with the
goofy one”.
Roman was soon invited to perform on Cincinnati’s Midwestern Hayride TV
show and recorded a daily 15-minute radio show with the pre-fame country group
the Willis Brothers. “The funny part was at the end I had to sing a hymn,” Mimi
laughs. “You know how many hymns a Jewish singer from Brooklyn knows? Not
too many! I learned on the job.”
Roman landed a recording deal with Decca. Owen Bradley, her future producer
and a key architect of the Nashville sound, played piano on her first recordings,
made in the empty Ryman auditorium – home of the Grand Ole Opry radio show.
“That affected me more than any of the other shows I did,” says Roman. “I had
listened to the Opry on the radio for so many years and I knew all the artists like
Hank Williams who had been on that stage. It meant something to me.” She would
soon perform on the same stage, for WSMU’s radio broadcast.
This was at the dawn of the Nashville sound, which would replace the gritty honky
tonk sound with more polished and accessible productions featuring crooning
vocals, piano and, often, backing singers and strings. Roman became one of the
few women to break through in that era. “When Mimi started, Nashville had all
these preconceived notions that young women didn’t sell records or tickets,” says
singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell, who discovered Roman while hosting a country
music radio show in the early 90s. “Loretta Lynn hadn’t had hits yet and Patsy
Cline was just getting started, so there weren’t that many models for successful
women in country music. Mimi bridged a period between the honky tonk era and
the emergence of rock’n’roll, which would upend things in Nashville and tilt it
towards it finding another commercial sound that could compete with it. Mimi
was there right at that moment.”
‘I just fell in love with the music’ … Mimi Roman in 1955 Photograph: Robert
Dye/Alamy
Her label Decca soon dropped the “h” from her name and rebranded her as Mimi
Roman from Salinas, California. The blur of activity that followed included
supporting Johnny Cash and performing to 100,000 people at the annual
celebration of country musician Jimmie Rodgers. And, of course, meeting Elvis.
At the 1955 country music disc jockey convention in Nashville, Elvis was named
most promising male star. “He knew who I was, but I didn’t know who he was,”
says Roman. “I looked to get away from him and he kept following me.” Their
friendship developed when Elvis visited New York with his manager Colonel
Tom Parker. “He was such a good-looking kid and he had that charisma,” says
Roman. “Some people just are destined for fame.”
Frequent dinners and trips to the movies followed. “One of the movies we saw
together was Helen of Troy,” says Roman. “I looked at Elvis, and I thought: he’s
better looking than the guy on the screen. He had a magnificent profile, like a
Roman coin. He still had that baby face and was very handsome, and just a really
nice boy. He called [his mother] every single day.”
Walter Winchell, the most influential gossip columnist and radio broadcaster in
the US, reported that they were having an affair. “We were just 19 – there was
nothing!” laughs Roman. “Elvis was just a nice southern kid who thought all this
tumult about him was very amusing. He never really quite understood it at that
age.” When Roman rode with Elvis to the airport immediately after The Ed
Sullivan Show, “these girls were running after the limo and I realised that that was
probably the last time I was going to see him. When I played Memphis, the
number that he had given me was no longer in service and he had already moved
to California.”
It’s difficult for her to reconcile the jump-suited Elvis with the handsome teenager
she knew. “When Elvis died, I remember just feeling so badly,” she says. “When
I knew him, we’d go wherever he wanted. Later I realised that he was trapped.
That was the reason I really never cared about being a big star. He was a bloated
caricature of the kid that I knew. It was just a horrible thing to happen to a very
nice boy.” Roman had staved off Parker’s advances to manage her. “I told my
manager at the time, I want nothing to do with this guy,” she says. “There was
something about him I didn’t like – just smarmy. If you were a New Yorker, which
I was, you could spot a conman.”
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The law said you couldn’t seat Blacks and whites together, but nobody said they
couldn’t stand together
Still, Roman had her own brush with superstardom in 1956. “Me and Patsy Cline
were recording the same weekend,” says Roman. They shared the same producer,
Owen Bradley, who joked that Cline was “a country singer who wants to sing
pop” and Roman was “a pop singer who wants to sing country”. As songs were
divided between them, Cline got Walking After Midnight, which became a
million-selling single and is considered one of the best country songs ever.
Roman’s songs – Honky Tonk Girl and We’re Taking Chances – failed to chart.
But Roman has no time for what-ifs. “That was her destiny,” she says of Cline,
“and mine was to be wherever I was. I never thought twice about it. Everything
comes with a price.” If it had been her song, she says, “I would have been on that
plane” that crashed and killed Cline.
The 1950s were the days of package tours. In 1957, Roman joined the Philip
Morris Agency’s touring show, which included some of the biggest and most
popular stars in the country: Carl Smith, Goldie Hill, briefly Little Jimmie
Dickens. Initially meant to last 13 weeks, it was so successful it ran for 18 months.
Roman was usually the only woman on a bus full of men. She laid down the rules
as soon as she got on board: “No Jewish jokes!” It was gruelling work, ricocheting
around the south on a bus with no toilet or air conditioning. “We burnt out two
buses!” says Roman.
The tour found a way around segregation. “The law said you couldn’t seat Blacks
and whites together,” Roman explains, “but nobody said they couldn’t stand
together.” This arrangement was not appreciated in New Bern, North Carolina.
“The Ku Klux Klan drove back and forth in front of the building, five or six cars,
four of them in each car with their hoods on,” Roman says. “We played straight
through with no intermission.” After the show, the Klan and the police escorted
the bus out of New Bern. “I said, ‘If they knew there was a Jew on this bus, we
wouldn’t have a chance!’ We had all the lights out. It was very scary. Our bus
driver had a gun. We were scared – and they wonder why I gave up show
business!”
That was the end of Roman’s touring life. “It pushed me over the edge,” she says.
She returned home to New York. By the early 1960s she had a daughter with
songwriter Paul Evans. She spent the next decade as a staff demo singer for
Associated Recording Studios and pop hit factory 1650 Broadway. Burt
Bacharach, Goffin and King, Lieber and Stroller, Doc Pomus and Neil Sedaka
would enter the studio, sit at the piano and hand her a lyric sheet. Occasionally
she sang demos with Paul Simon. Roman’s memories are a blur, she says – she
knows she recorded demos, commercials, scratch recordings for musicals Funny
Girl and Chicago. “I sang for just about every writer in the neighbourhood.”
Sometimes, if a publisher thought Roman’s demo was good enough, they would
release it as a single. She took on a pop alter ago, Kitty Ford, whose Don’t Play
Number 9 by Mann and Weill was covered by Ricky Valance.
But when Roman remarried and moved to Connecticut, she stopped singing to
raise her step-children. After divorcing, she worked as a disc jockey in Bridgeport
and played with a local country band at weekends. When she remarried in the
mid-80s, she quit music altogether and became an estate agent. “Singing was great
while it lasted, but it just didn’t fit into my life at that point,” she says. She had no
regrets. “I never had any interest in being that famous. Even if I could have
achieved that kind of level of stardom I didn’t want to pay the price.” Music was
behind her. “I was married for 25 years and my husband never heard me sing.”
Even Michael Bolton, who hired her as his personal assistant after buying a house
from her in the late 1980s, never knew of her past. “I never mentioned it,” says
Roman.
After Roman’s return to performance in September, Cantrell has invited her to
perform with her band in December as part of the Brooklyn edition of her States
of Country concert series. “I just connected with her as a woman who made music
because she wanted to,” says Cantrell. “I just loved her energy and she’s got great
stories.”
For Roman’s part, she says she’s delighted to have her achievements
acknowledged, “even if it was in the 50s!” she laughs. “I’m happy to take a bow,
now that I’m still here.”
Mimi Roman plays at the States of Country concert at Union Pool, Brooklyn,
New York on 3 December
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