Mel Tillis was a Florida-born country singer, songwriter, and entertainer who wrote more than a thousand songs — many of them top-of-the-chart hits for Webb Pierce, Bobby Bare, Ray Price, Brenda Lee, Ricky Skaggs, and Randy Travis — before stepping out as a chart-topping recording artist in his own right in the 1970s. A childhood bout of malaria left him with a chronic stutter that he turned into a defining part of his stage persona.