LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Herbert Mills, one of the four original Mills Brothers whose fluid harmonies and instrumental imitations brightened the 1930s and 1940s, has died, hospital officials said Thursday. He was 77.
Mills died Wednesday -- on his birthday -- of viral meningitis at Valley Hospital, where he had been hospitalized for more than three months.
Mills' death leaves one surviving member of the famed quartet. Donald Mills, 73, lives in Los Angeles. Brother Harry died in 1982 at 68 and John Jr., the oldest, died in 1936 at 25.
Herbert Mills, born April 12, 1912, is survived by his widow, Dorothy, and one daughter, Linda. The family has lived in Las Vegas for 20 years. Funeral services were pending.
The Mills Brothers recorded more than 1,300 songs, including such hits as 'Tiger Rag,' 'Paper Doll,' 'Glow Worm,' 'Bye-Bye Blackbird' and 'Up a Lazy River.
The group appeared with such jazz greats as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and was known for tight, toe-tapping melodies and four-part harmonies.
The brothers also appeared in several movies, including 'The Big Broadcast' in 1932, 'Twenty Million Sweethearts' in 1934, 'Broadway Gondolier' in 1935, 'Chatterbox' in 1943, 'Ebony Parade' in 1947 and 'When You're Smiling' in 1950.
Members of the original quartet were just 11 to 14 years old when they first appeared together in Ohio in 1926 as Four Boys and a Kazoo.
They changed their name to Four Boys and a Guitar and then simply to The Mills Brothers.
When John Jr. died in 1936, the singers' father, John Sr., a barber, joined the group and performed with his sons for 20 years. He retired in the mid 1950s and the brothers continued as a trio.
Some of their other popular songs included 'You're Nobody's Sweetheart Now,' 'Old Rockin' Chair,' 'Lazy Bones, 'Sleepy Head,' 'I'll Be Around,' 'Poor Butterfly,' 'Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall,' 'Opus One,' 'Standing On the Corner Watching All the Girls Go By' and 'I Love You So Much It Hurts.'
Until Harry's death, the trio continued to perform live throughout the United States and abroad. They completed a three-day engagement at an Atlantic City hotel two days before Harry entered the hospital for surgery.
'I don't know why our songs are so popular now,' Harry Mills said during an interview in 1969 when their recording of 'The Jimtown Road' rose in the pop charts.
'Maybe people want to hear plain, simple songs and easy harmony. We've never changed our style. We sing mostly ballads and standards with a little novelty thrown in now and then. I guess folks like to tap their feet and sing along with us.'
Harry Mills once explained that the brothers' popular style of instrumental mimicking, best exemplified in its version of 'Basin Street Blues,' developed from a mistake in those early years.
'Dad let us listen on the radio to bands from New York and Cincinnati,' he said, 'and that's how we wanted to sound, like a band.
'So we got hold of these little tin horns, kazoos they call them, and we tried to imitate the sound of horns with the sounds of these kazoos. We'd sing a chorus and then we'd hold up the horns to our mouths and imitate the sounds in four-part harmony. It went over real good and we were asked to entertain all around town.
'Then finally I lost my kazoo on stage one night and the sound came out of my hand like a trumpet sound. That's the story of the Mills Brothers. We threw away those kazoos and started imitating different horns with just our throats and voices. We could do any kind of horn, pretty near.'
