This week we lost one of the titans of American advertising.

He was born in Tampa in 1923, and grew up listening to yodeling programs on the radio. He graduated from high school and started work in a meatpacking plant, where he lost part of a finger. He stuttered uncontrollably until his girlfriend Alma helped him overcome it; they later eloped. When World War 2 broke out, he joined the Navy and spent much of the war entertaining his shipmates with his singing and yodeling. He was left-handed and the only guitar on board was right-handed, so he taught himself to play it backwards, with the chord patterns upside-down.

After the war he played gigs at the local supermarket and radio station, and was heard by a producer named Colonel Tom Parker. This got him appearances on “Louisiana Hayride” alongside Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. His first hit, “Love Song of the Waterfall” (later used in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) got him noticed, and his second, “Indian Love Call,” (later used as a musical weapon to kill aliens in “Mars Attacks”) convinced him he could quit his day job as a postman. He toured as a headliner, supported by another of Tom Parker’s clients, a handsome young fella whose name was once misspelled as “Ellis Presley.”

In 1954, he recorded “Rose Marie” and with that song exploded onto the pop music scene – in England, that is. “Rose Marie” eventually rose to #1 on the English pop charts and stayed there for 11 weeks, a feat never replicated, not even by the Beatles. He remained a major star there for decades. But here in the States, his appeal was strictly limited to a country audience, and a fairly narrow one at that. Perhaps it was because of his eclectic repertoire that included Broadway standards, European folk songs, religious music, cowboy tunes, and romantic schlock, all sung in a high falsetto spiked with incessant yodeling.

But perhaps more than anything else, the world will remember him for his magnificent musical marketing. In 1979, he launched a direct-to-consumer advertisement for a compilation album, “All My Best.” The album became an instant best-seller and transformed the previously unknown musician into a household name. The advertising, however, became the subject of ridicule. He was one of Johnny Carson’s favorite targets and Second City TV spoofed him for years. But he yodeled on and on, rolled out one successful album after another, and became a cultural icon and one of the best-selling musicians of all time.

In his later years he kept such a low profile that in 2008 a rumor spread that he had died. Most folks thought him a joke, but Paul McCartney credited him for giving him the idea of playing leftie, George Harrison cited him as one his biggest influences, and Michael Jackson called him one his ten favorite singers. He is in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and has a star on Hollywood Boulevard.

For himself, Ottis Dewey “Slim” Whitman Jr. merely said he’d like to be remembered for a having “a good voice and a clean suit.”

This week he passed away, for real, at age 90.