MICKEY GILLEY,
1936-2022

Mickey Gilley, the singer and actor whose nightclub was ground zero for the Urban Cowboy movement in country music, died Saturday in Branson, Mo. He was 86.

Gilley was home after performing 10 shows in April. His family and close friends were by his side when he died.

He had 17 #1 country singles between 1974 and 1983, among them "Room Full of Roses," “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time” and “Bring It on Home to Me," and six Top 10 country albums. He received a half dozen ACM Awards, including Entertainer of the Year in 1977.

Gilley recorded for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Records in the 1970s, then moved to Epic in 1979, just before country music had its Saturday Night Fever moment.

He gained national fame for Gilley's, his honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, which boasted a dance floor that could accommodate 5,000 people and a mechanical bull. Having opened in 1971, it was the setting for much of the hit movie Urban Cowboy in 1980. The soundtrack, released on Asylum and Irving Azoff’s Full Moon, hit #3 and scored six Top 40 singles. (Azoff also co-produced the film, with the legendary Robert Evans).

Long before his cinematic fame, Gilley had learned to play piano from his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis—televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was another ivories-tickling cousin—assaying boogie-woogie and gospel. He went on to make honky-tonk versions of R&B classics like Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and the Ben E. King hit “Stand By Me.”

Gilley cut his first side, “Ooh Wee Baby,” in 1957. (It went nowhere until it was featured in a Yoplait commercial in 2012.) He had some minor hits thereafter but mostly played locally in Texas through the 1960s.

After Urban Cowboy, Gilley acted in such TV series as CHiPS, Murder She Wrote, The Fall Guy, Fantasy Island and Dukes of Hazzard.

The original Gilley’s closed in 1989 after a falling out between Gilley and his partner, Sherwood Cryer. The following year he opened a theater in Branson, where he later premiered a second venue. He was also the proprietor of nightclubs in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.