Country singers Pam Tillis and Lorrie Morgan have a lot in common — they are both the daughters of famous country artists, they recorded most of their own hits in the 1990s and they are around the same age.
They've become good friends and now are performing around the country in their "Grits & Glamour" tour, coming Thursday to the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto.
"We both sit on the stage the whole time," Tillis, 54. "We go back and forth. It's kind of like a musical dialogue. She'll do a hit and then I'll do a hit. The songs play off of each other. We thought it was an interesting concept. I've never seen anybody do it quite like that. We're really enjoying it. She sings on some of my songs and I sing on some of her songs."
The daughter of Mel Tillis ("I Ain't Never," "Good Woman Blues"), Tillis was all over the radio in the 1990s with hits like "Maybe it was Memphis," "Shake the Sugar Tree," "Let That Pony Run" and "Spilled Perfume."
In 1994, she won the Country Music Association's female vocalist award. She has written songs for an array of diverse artists, including Chaka Khan, Martina McBride, Juice Newton and Conway Twitty and she performed on Broadway in 1999 in "Smokey Joe's Café." In 2002, she released the CD "It's All Relative," a musical tribute to her father, now 79, that featured covers of his most famous songs.
"It was a real scary process," Tillis said. "All of the expectations for that were more heightened. I was so close to it emotionally — I always want my albums to be great but I wanted that one to be doubly great. I wanted to make him really proud of that."
She succeeded. Tillis said her father liked her interpretations so much, he wants her to release a second volume of his hits.
As a side project, Tillis writes an occasional Southern cooking column for Country Weekly Magazine. "There's a big correlation between cooking and music," she said. "I make up my own recipes a lot. In both cooking and music, it's good to be experimental. You shouldn't feel that you can't trust your own intuition.
"Cooking should be from the heart instead of what someone else says. That kind of explains what I've done musically. I've always resisted being pigeon-holed. I think my music is very eclectic. I like to be original."
The daughter of George Morgan ("Candy Kisses," "Room Full of Roses"), Morgan, 52, opened for George Jones at 21 and had her first hit with "Two People in Love" in 1979. She became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1985 but her career didn't really take off until 1989 with "Dear Me." Over the next decade, she recorded the No. 1 hits "Five MInutes," "What Part of No" and "I Didn't Know My Own Strength."
Morgan and Tillis made their first forays into country music performing when they were teenagers and both appeared on Ralph Emery's morning TV show in Nashville. The two women didn't actually meet, though, until 1997 when they were stars and shared some bills together.
"When we weren't touring, we were going a million miles an hour," Tillis said. "I think in a way, when you're that busy and you're that involved, it's a solitary kind of existence. She had her camp and I had my camp. We were on different buses. We didn't get to know each other the way I would have liked."
They've got to know each other much better in recent years and ride in the same bus on their tours.
"We both have so much perspective now on our careers and our lives," Tillis said. "It's pretty cool to get to compare notes on that stuff — motherhood and being a wife and traveling and all the things that go into our lives. We share a common bond because she knows how much it takes to give to an audience night after night. We both appreciate the demands of that."
WHAT: Lorrie Morgan and Pam Tillis
WHEN: 7 p.m. Thursday
WHERE: Rogers Theater, Gallo Center for the Arts, 1000 I St., Modesto
TICKETS: $19-$69
CALL: (209) 338-2100
ONLINE: www.galloarts.org
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