Lulu Roman, who brought her big-hearted Texas sass and full-throated gospel vocals to the enduring variety show “Hee Haw,” known for its corn-pone comedy sketches and musical interludes provided by a constellation of country stars, died on April 23 in Bellingham, Wash. She was 78.
Her son and caretaker, Damon Roman, said she died of heart failure at his home, where she had been living.
Ms. Roman’s broad comedic skills and down-home persona proved a valuable asset to “Hee Haw,” which debuted on CBS in 1969 as a folksy heartland answer to NBC’s “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a network take on contemporary mod culture known for its Day-Glo graphics and risqué one-liners delivered at Gatling-gun pace. It was originally a summer replacement for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” an even edgier variety show that had run afoul of censors for its pointed takes on race relations, drugs, religion and the Vietnam War.
But “Hee Haw” was the opposite of hip, and intentionally so. It was the television equivalent of a big country breakfast, heavy on the cheese grits. And it worked.
While the show was initially blasted by critics, its mix of back-40 humor and musical appearances by Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and seemingly every other Nashville star propelled it to television institution status. (Although CBS canceled the show in 1971, “Hee Haw” rolled on in syndication, lasting more than a quarter of a century in various iterations.)
The show was hosted by the avuncular honky-tonk hitmaker Buck Owens and Roy Clark, a veritable Hendrix of the haystacks on guitar, banjo and other instruments. Other regulars included Minnie Pearl, with her trademark $1.98 price tag dangling from her flowered straw hat and a voice as dulcet as a record scratch, and Misty Rowe, who with her plunging necklines and meringue swirl of blond hair was basically a temptress version of Elly May Clampett from “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
While celebrated for her comic timing and rich vocal stylings, Ms. Roman was under no illusions about her role, which involved frequent punchlines about her weight.
As she put it in a 2020 interview with Florida Weekly magazine, the show’s creators were looking for “a gorgeous blonde, one gorgeous brunette, one boy-next-door type, one girl-next-door type, one fat dumb man and one fat dumb woman. And Buck Owens said to them, ‘I got a fat girl for you, she’s perfect.’” (The “fat dumb man” was Junior Samples.)
She was born Bertha Louise Hable on May 6, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Pilot Point, Texas, north of Dallas. Abandoned by her mother, she lived with a great-grandmother until “the poor thing could no longer handle me,” Ms. Roman said in a 2016 interview with The Dallas Morning News. (“Lulu” was a derivation of her middle name; the surname she used for most of her life came from an early marriage, which was annulled.)
She then went to live at the Buckner Orphans Home in Dallas, where she stayed until she was 18. She later said that she often cried herself to sleep because the other children were constantly taunting her about her weight and named the school bus “Big Bertha” after her.
“I think food became my drug probably the day that they put me in the orphans’ home,” she said in a 2011 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network show “The 700 Club.” “Sugar became my friend, because it didn’t hurt me, and it didn’t talk back to me, and it didn’t call me names.” She added that she was later diagnosed with a thyroid problem.
As a student at nearby W.W. Samuell High School, she found some solace in music and theater, but she also started to dull her pain with drugs, a habit that eventually led to an outsize appetite for marijuana, methamphetamine and LSD. (She told The Dallas Morning News that she once dropped as many as 25 tabs of acid in a single night.)
After graduating in 1964, Ms. Roman eventually gave comedy a shot, finding work through a dancer friend at a Dallas nightclub, where she came up with an act called “Lulu Roman, the World’s Biggest Go-Go Dancer.” It was there that she caught the eye of Mr. Owens.
“The next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Hollywood and riding a limo to the CBS studios,” Ms. Roman said in 2006. “The first person I saw was Carol Burnett, with my mouth wide open. She said, ‘Shut your mouth, child. You’re fixin’ to be one of us.’”
Initially, “Hee Haw” seemed like an odd fit for an edgy comic whose musical tastes ran to Grand Funk Railroad and the Moody Blues. “I was the proverbial hippie,” she told Florida Weekly. “I was into the drug scene.”
To “Hee Haw” fans, though, she fit right in as a character in running skits like “The Culhanes,” featuring four phlegmatic family members seated on a sofa and exchanging deadpan punchlines, and “Lulu’s Truck Stop,” on which she played the take-no-guff proprietor.
Despite her success, she still battled her demons. After multiple drug arrests and suicide attempts, she found Christianity — and sobriety, she said — in 1973. “What I was unconsciously trying to do was kill myself,” she said. “I tried many times, but it never worked out. I had no idea that God had any kind of a calling on my life.”
Her musical star turns singing gospel on “Hee Haw” eventually blossomed into a second career, which continued after her run on the show ended in the 1990s. Over the years, she released more than a dozen albums on Christian and independent labels. Her 2013 album of standards, “At Last,” included “I Will Always Love You,” a duet with the song’s composer, Dolly Parton.
Ms. Roman, who was married multiple times, leaves no immediate survivors apart from her son Damon; another son, Justin Roman, died in 2017.
She continued to struggle with her weight into the 2000s. Finally, when she was nearly 400 pounds and experiencing myriad health and mobility problems, she had lap-band surgery. Along with changes to her diet and routine, the procedure helped her lose more than 200 pounds, dropping her to about a size 14 from around a 58.
“I have a lot of people say, ‘You’ve achieved so much,’” Ms. Roman told The Dallas Morning News. “I guess when I look back, I have. But it was not that I wanted to achieve anything. It was survival. It still is.”
