Brown and put the record out. Released in 1948 it reached number 13 on the Billboard R&B chart, and a year later Wynonie Harris’s cover made it to number 1 on the chart. This attracted some attention from country artists looking for up-tempo songs. Bill Haley was one of them. His cover of Jackie Brentson’s “Rocket 88” had done very well, and he followed this in 1953 with “Rock the Joint,” a pioneer rockabilly record. The beat, structure, and lyrics of the song owed a lot to “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” but changes replaced the names of R&B dances to country dances, and there was a lot more echo effect in the recording and a penetrating guitar solo by Danny Cedrone, which he used again on “Rock around the Clock.”
Country and Rockabilly
Bill Haley was not the only country artist trawling through the R&B charts looking for suitable material for audiences wanting faster tempos and more exciting rhythms. Sidney Louie “Hardrock” Gunter of Birmingham was also trying to cross over. Gunter was a singer who got some of his first gigs on radio — playing guitar behind the Delmore Brothers on the Alabama Hayloft Jamboree show. Gunter formed the Hoot Owl Ramblers in 1938 to broadcast on local radio — allegedly the band came from Hoot Owl Holler in Birmingham. In 1939 he joined Happy Wilson’s Golden River Boys, who had a regular spot on WAPI radio, which helped them get booked into the Princess theater chain, which covered Alabama and Georgia. Gunter acquired his nickname after a trunk lid fell on his head while unloading the group’s gear and he continued unhurt. Much of his music harked back to the string bands and comedy routines of the previous generation of old-time players, but it was changing with the times. He told the story of country music’s postwar transformation in a song he wrote called “I’ll Give ’em Rhythm.” This is a song of two halves: one with steel guitar breaks and lyrics about “purty love songs,” country homes, and the “good ole radio.” But he laments that there’s something wrong — they don’t like my songs, they want rhythm with a solid beat. The song takes off in a faster tempo with roaring saxophones and pounding drums as Hardrock proves he can deliver what he calls “rhythm and blues.” Although it “hurts his soul to dig for gold,” he does it anyway, along with hundreds of his contemporaries, black and white, who were looking for inspiration across the color bar. In 1951, he recorded a song with Roberta Lee, the raunchy “Sixty Minute Man,” which was one of the first country records to cross over and appeal to R&B audiences.
Gunter was so popular on local radio that Manny Pearson, the owner of Bama Records, approached him with an offer to make some records. Bama was a small, independent local label with no offices and no recording studio, so Gunter went to the studios of WAPI to record “Birmingham Bounce,” and “How Can I Believe You Love Me.” The Golden River Boys (renamed the Pebbles for the session), were made up of Hardrock on guitar, Billy Tucker on fiddle, Ted Crabtree on steel guitar, Huel Murphy on piano, Jim O’Day on bass, and Bob Sanders on drums. “Birmingham Bounce” soon became a regional hit and Hardrock played for large crowds as he toured the Deep South. “Birmingham Bounce” is about having a good time in “a town we love called Birmingham.” Gunter’s song rocks along with a pounding boogie-woogie piano and drum beat, yet prominent fiddle and steel guitar breaks mark this disc as country. Gunter’s music sounds like old-time radio with a folksy spoken introduction and down-home banter, but it also has enough rhythm and excitement to qualify for early rock ’n’ roll, even though the trademark twangy electric guitar is absent. Country singer Red Foley recorded a version for the major Decca label that quickly climbed the national charts, finally making number 1 on the country charts for several months.
Bama followed the success of “Birmingham Bounce” with another single in 1950: “Gonna Dance All Night” / “Why Don’t You Show Me That You Love Me.” This record has a place in the history books as it claims one of the first mentions of the term “rock-’n’-roll,” years before deejay Alan Freed popularized it. Gunter remembered later that he had often heard the term at dances, especially after a good up-tempo number. So he started to use it in his introductions—“here’s one you can rock ’n’ roll to”— in order, as he admitted, to be “in with the kids.”2 Bill Haley had done the same thing: he had picked up the phrase that formed the title of his song “Crazy Man, Crazy” from the teenagers in his audience. Country singers and their fellow professionals in R&B were incorporating the vernacular of their audiences in their songs and putting both “rock” and “roll” in the lyrics. On “Birmingham Bounce” Hardrock sang, “When the beat starts rockin,’ no one’s blue,” and he added to this on “Gonna Dance All Night” with: “We’re gonna rock ’n’ roll while we dance all night.” While solidly in the country genre — his next Bama release was “Dad Gave My Hog Away” / “Lonesome Blues”— Hardrock was playing rock ’n’ roll and defining it as up-tempo songs that “the kids” can dance to.
Unfortunately for Gunter, his regional hits did not help his career as a recording artist, and he remained in radio and television. In 1953 he returned to Birmingham, where he was a deejay on radio station WJLD. The program director there was Jim Connally, who was related to Sam Phillips, owner of the small Sun label in Memphis. Phillips had expressed an interest in recording Hardrock in Memphis, but Gunter could not find the time to travel up there, so he remade “Gonna Dance All Night” at a Birmingham radio station. The tapes were sent to Memphis, and in May 1954 Phillips released it on the Sun label.
Elvis Presley was another country singer signed to Sun. Phillips always told the story that he was searching for a young white kid who could put over the rhythm and blues that was so popular with his black customers, and Presley turned out to be that person. “Birmingham Bounce” was Sun’s #201 release and soon after came Sun #209, “That’s Alright Mama,” a reworking of bluesman Arthur Crudup’s earlier record. Sun Records were trying to cover all their bases for Presley’s first release, for on the flip side of this R&B cover was a country standard, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” done over in a much faster and louder rockabilly style. Elvis’s second Sun release, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (Sun #210), was a cover of Wynonie Harris’s hit. Birmingham musician Lenard Brown: “See, black people were doing that for so long before Elvis, it was unreal. They [Sun Records] just had the money to put behind it — he was not doing anything different.”
Enter the King
Although the country radio stations steered well clear of “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley knew that they were onto something. During 1954 Elvis continued to perform as “The Hillbilly Cat” (backing Bill Haley and the Comets on one occasion) and playing gigs in Alabama, including one-nighters in Sheffield and Montgomery, and some say a honky-tonk in Prattville. Elvis Presley was gaining exposure, especially after he secured gigs on Louisiana Hayride, a Saturday night country radio show that was broadcast all over the South. One day in November 1955 Ken Shackleford was eating lunch with RCA executive Ed Hines in Gulas’s restaurant in downtown Birmingham. Shackleford was a new entry into the record business: “I got out of the navy and came to Birmingham and went to work in a bank. I won a contest to sell accounts, and I won and got a tape recorder — a reel-to-reel. Being a musician myself, and I met this guy, a saxophone player and he said, ‘You need a mixer.’ So I went out and got a Boken mixer. My friend said, ‘We should go downtown and start a studio.’ I had a friend downtown who had a blood bank, who gave me the upstairs for nothing. We go in and build a studio … We would tape a session and we would send our tapes to RCA [in Nashville] and then they would [custom] press them. We sent them the tape and they did the rest. We knew nothing about soundproofing and recording … The only thing [recording studio] they had at that time was Homer Milam [of Reed Records]. He’s a good friend, but he didn’t have the kind of equipment we did. At the time the best stuff on the market was an Ampex two-track reel to reel … Homer had a three-track, that’s what he did all the Reed stuff on … In the meantime we were recording various people, a session for Marion Worth, who got a Columbia record contract, she was like Patty Page.” While the two were eating, Ed Hines, “the RCA head honcho in Nashville,” blurted out “We bought Elvis’s contract from Sun Records for $35,000!” Shackleford
