Guest
Poor Butterfly - Written by Raymond Hubbell/John L. Golden You’ll Never Know - Written by Harry Warren/Mack Gordon. This right here is the legendary ragtime piano player, Rod Miller. He was a fixture at Disneyland for many years. For me, there was only one reason to go to Disneyland, and it was to see Rod play his great tunes. The fact that Disneyland has fantastic rides and entertainment came second to seeing him do his thing. In what was a general fog of stupidity of my youth, I somehow had the presences of mind to bring an old video camera and I videotaped him playing a few times. Thank goodness I did. For a long time, I had these videos on another channel of mine, and I repeatedly got direct messages from viewers asking if this was for real. They asked me to be honest and reveal if I had sped up the videos in some way. Nope! This guy was the real thing. He was both the best of entertainers and the best ragtime piano player I’m sure I will ever witness in my life. His playing is creativity and performance genius at work. Just insanity. I want to thank Askar for helping me identify some of the tunes he played in these videos. And I want to include here two great comments from my previous channel: “Rod is a true Disney Legend. I had annual passes in 1984 and 1985 and spent many hours hanging out with Rod. Sometimes my only reason to go there was to hang out with him. And I was only a little surprised when I returned in 1995, and he immediately asked where I had been the last decade, and what I had been up to. Of all my memories of Disneyland, Rod is my happiest one. They should rename that to “Rod Miller Corner.” If anybody watches his videos, they should realize this is a man that could not read music, and was entirely self taught. Every score was his own creation, and he knew over 600 songs from memory. Add into that the fact that he had been clocked at over 22 notes per second, he is one of the best piano players of all time.” - Michael Martin “Rod was the best they ever had at Disneyland. He was there 36 years. I met him in 1969 the year he started. I worked in accounting at the park then.” - Frank Marter We love you, Rod!
