‘Hee Haw’ Comedian, Gospel Singer Was 78

Lulu Roman, the brash Hee Haw comedian and gospel singer who delighted fans of the long-running country music variety show while turning her life around in the process, has died. She was 78.

Roman died Wednesday in Bellingham, Washington, her son, Damon Roman, told The Hollywood Reporter. She had moved there to be with him seven months ago. No cause of death has been determined.

Roman appeared on the first episode of CBS’ Hee Haw in June 1969 and on the last one, with the show in syndication, in June 1993. During its impressive run, she reinvented herself as a gospel singer, and she would release more than a dozen albums, perform in concert and record with the likes of Dolly Parton. (Watch and hear her sing “Crazy” here).

Born Bertha Louise Hable in a home for unwed mothers on May 6, 1946, Roman was dropped off at a Baptist facility for orphans in Dallas. A thyroid condition would cause her to be overweight, and she was never adopted.

She said she developed a drug problem while attending W.W. Samuell High School, and after graduating in 1964, she made ends meet performing in a comedy act billed as “Lulu Roman, the World’s Biggest Go-Go Dancer” in nightclubs owned by Jack Ruby.

She would become friends with country music superstar Buck Owens.

“He liked my sense of humor,” she recalled in 2020. “He told me once that he’d just sit and observe me. I said, ‘Lord have mercy!’ He said it was real interesting: ‘You’re a master at quick wit.’ I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I got hold of it later.”

With Owens set to star on Hee Haw — a country version of NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In that was going to serve as a summer replacement series for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour — he brought her to the attention of producers.

“They needed one boy next door, one fat dumb man, one fat dumb woman,” Roman said in an interview last year. “Buck said, ‘I got your girl! She’s in Dallas!’”

She started out in background videos filmed for the Nashville-based show, then was given speaking roles in such popular segments as “The Culhanes” — where the family would be seated in a row on a couch and deliver deadpan jokes — “Truck Stop” and “The Jug Band.”

The castmembers would meet twice a year to record 13 weeks’ worth of shows each time.

Roman left Hee Haw after she was arrested for drug possession in March 1971 (she said she used marijuana, speed, LSD and meth) and received a four-year sentence 10 months later. However, she converted to Christianity in 1973 and was rehired, convincing the producers to allow her to sing.

“After I gave my heart to Jesus, the Lord started working on me and making me into quite a different person than when I started,” she said.

Roman starred in the 1978-79 spinoff series Hee Haw Honeys, also featuring Misty Rowe and Kathie Lee Gifford. She also appeared in Corky (1972), a movie about stock car racing toplined by Robert Blake, and on episodes of The Love Boat and Touched by an Angel.

Roman released her first of more than a dozen albums in 1974. She received a Dove Award in 1985 for her LP You Were Loving Me and recorded with Parton, George Jones and others for an album of standards, At Last, in 2013.

In 1999, she was inducted into the Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame, and her autobiography, This is My Story; This Is My Song, was published in 2019.

Her youngest son, Justin, died in 2017.