BRANSON, Mo. -- Mel Tillis was 6 years old when he found his calling as a country music singer. That's when he learned that if he sang, he didn't stutter.

"When I started to school," Tillis recalls in that soft, slow Florida drawl of his, "that's when I realized that I stuttered. I stammered. And the other kids, they let me know that. And so I went home and I cried."But Mom, she told me, 'Well you're a little bit different. But there's something you can do. You can sing.' "

And so he did. At every opportunity.

"And then I found I could ad-lib without stuttering," he continues, smiling now as he sits in the dressing room at his Mel Tillis Theater. "So I ad-libbed my way through school."

It's been 60 years since that first day of school, and Mel Tillis still stutters a bit, though not quite as much as he does when he's in front of an audience that has come to see "country music's original stuttering boy" and his backup singers, "The Stutterettes."

But never mind, because Mel Tillis is still singing and ad-libbing his way through life, and not just for the kids at school anymore. But for hundreds of thousands of fans who show up to see him perform as many as 400 times a year.

"Nobody does as many shows as he does," says his daughter, Pam, whose name in the 1990s has become just about as synonymous with country-music stardom as her father's was in the 1970s and '80s.

"Little babies just starting out, they might do that many shows. But no big-name entertainer does," Pam Tillis adds, admiring her 66-year-old father.

To which he quickly ad-libs: "Well, the others don't owe $15 million on their theaters."

"He doesn't think of a show as a show," Pam Tillis says. "He thinks of that theater as our living room and those people in the audience are friends in our living room."

And so he does two shows a day from that big Branson living room, six days a week, nine months of the year. And when the town all but shuts down from January until April, he goes out on the road and does 50 or so more.

"I've got to get out on the road and let people know I'm still alive," Mel Tillis says.

Fifteen years after the record companies put him "out to pasture" for a younger, hipper group of country singers that came to include his baby-boomer daughter, Mel Tillis has come back. And on his own terms.

He did it by playing to huge crowds in Branson year after year for nine seasons and by building one of the plushest theaters in this middle-American entertainment town that boasts more than three-dozen music stages.

This year he has turned promoter as well, signing Pam, country music's 1994 female vocalist of the year, to play nearly 60 dates with him in his theater.

The result has been one of the town's most dynamic shows, with the elder Tillis singing from the heart on old country favorites like "Don't You Ever Get Tired of Hurting Me" and "Sugar Foot Rag," while Pam performs rocking crossover hits of her own like "Land of the Living" and "All the Good Ones Are Gone."

In between their separate acts there is some scripted squabbling as Pam strays too close to straight rock, prompting her bathrobe-clad father to storm on stage at one point and her to ask, "Am I grounded?"

Backstage, there's some real-life good-natured bickering between father and daughter, including an extended discussion of the country's political and moral standards.

"I guess you can tell I'm a Republican," Mel Tillis finally says, attempting to cut off the argument.

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"I'm a Democrat," his daughter adds, smiling. "Republicans don't have a monopoly on moral indignation."

"I'm much more conservative that you are, Pam," he shoots back.

Despite her father's 62 albums, his TV appearances, his 37 Top 10 country hits and his country music entertainer of the year award in 1976, Pam Tillis never realized how famous her father was until she traveled to a mountain music festival to see him perform in front of 70,000 people.

"Then you kind of get the idea of it," she quipped.

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