Podcasts about sonny burgess

A sleepy time themed collection this week as we take a deep dive into classic sounds from the past and present, all with a blend of sentiments we hold close as midnight approaches. We'll have some old doo wop and early rock chestnuts from Jesse Belvin, The Fleetwoods, The Valentines and The Spaniels with just the right amount of rock, R&B and country. That means a little bit of Fats Domino, some rockabilly from Charline Arthur and Sonny Burgess, middling pop from Doris Day, Jimmy Durant and Dean Martin in store. Little Jimmy Dickens, Milton Brown and Swamp Dogg will also fill the air with country and blues. Friday mornings are the time to tune in for a fresh dose of America's music from the past 100 years hear on KOWS-LP, Occidental, streaming to all of Planet Earth on kowsfm.com/listen. Be sure to install the Radio Rethink app on your Apple device and look us up. We'd be glad to have you.

732. Make yourself a "crazy date" with that wild Aztec Werewolf™, DJ Del Villarreal and his mondo-loco radio program-o, "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!"  as he broadcasts LIVE over the airwaves of WCBN FM & on Tuesday nites! Originating from the fabulous Motorbilly Studios, the "Aztec Werewolf" is always spinning the latest wax from the BEST rockin' acts! Dig deep the twangy tones of Dixie Fried, Union Avenue, Marcel Bontempi, Mike Bell and the Belltones, Darrel Higham, Dylan Kirk, Satan's Pilgrims, Flash Cadillac & The Continental Kids,  Shakedown Tim, EIGHTBOMB, The Soapbox Saints, Apache Crotale, The Supersonics, The Caezars & MORE (whew!)! Always a bonanaza of boss retro sounds to enjoy in these epic broadcasts: wail with the raucous rhythms of  Kenny Baker, Carl Perkins, Glen Glenn, Buddy Holly, Jerry Reed, Pat Cupp and his Flying Saucers, Aubrey Cagle, Eddie Cochran, Wink Lewis, Sonny Burgess, Roy Orbison & MORE! Don't miss a single second! TUESDAY NIGHTS ROCK with DJ Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!

“A Texas Heroes & Friends Tribute to Randy Travis” has announced additional performers for the upcoming star-studded show at the Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie, Texas this Wednesday (Nov. 15). Paul Overstreet, Asleep at the Wheel‘s Ray Benson, Casey Donahew, Pecos & The Rooftop‘s Pecos Hurley, Mike Ryan, Jon Wolfe, Rosie Flores, Waylon Payne, Jolie Holliday and Sonny Burgess have all joined the lineup for the tribute show, which will be filled with many of Travis' 23 No. 1 hits performed live by some of his musical heroes and friends specifically from or greatly associated with the Texas music scene. Texas has been close to Travis' heart since he was a boy, learning about the cowboy lifestyle from his father in rural North Carolina. He always had a special connection with Texas fans and primarily resided in nearby New Mexico in the '90s. In the 2010s, Travis and his wife Mary moved to a ranch in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they now call home, and have had a deep rooted relationship with the Lone Star State, its culture and its music ever since. A portion of the proceeds from the evening will be donated to the Randy Travis Foundation. The foundation is focused on stroke and aphasia awareness and supporting music education in schools. Previously announced performers include Clay Walker, Cody Jinks, Joe Nichols, Neal McCoy, War Hippies, Braxton Keith, Jacob Tolliver, Whey Jennings, Casey Chesnutt and Garrett Miles. Also, Travis' original touring band will back all of the artists on some of his most enduring songs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hailing from the heart of Texas, Todd Barrow has emerged as a rising star in the country music scene, capturing the hearts of audiences worldwide. His remarkable journey in music is paved with numerous accolades, from the prestigious PRSA Award of Excellence to an Akademia Award for Best Country Album. Todd's talent and dedication have garnered him spotlights in respected publications like Alternative Roots Magazine, American Pride Magazine, and AVA Radio.A versatile artist, Todd's musical prowess extends beyond vocals. He effortlessly wields a diverse array of instruments, including piano, guitar, mandolin, harmonica, and drums. This multi-instrumentalist not only crafts soulful songs for himself but also lends his songwriting skills to fellow artists.While he draws inspiration from legends like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, Todd's melodies carry a distinct modern flair, setting him apart in the contemporary country music landscape. His music weaves stories that resonate with authenticity and sincerity, a testament to his deep connection to the genre.One of Todd's standout achievements is his single, "The House That Love Built," co-written with Sonny Burgess. The song's impact was felt not only in the music world but also in the community, as it was featured on RightNow TV and received an accolade from PRSA Fort Worth for its support of the Ronald McDonald House.Todd's artistry has led him to share stages and studios with some of country music's luminaries, including members of Miranda Lambert's band and acclaimed producer Bart Rose. He's made captivating appearances on television, gracing shows like Good Morning Texas with Jerry Matheny and PBS's Texas Music Café.His musical journey continues to evolve, with recent ventures including an exciting role in the short film "The Third Division." Todd's captivating performances have solidified his place in the entertainment world, earning him membership in esteemed organizations like the Entertainment Community Fund and SAG-AFTRA.In addition to his musical endeavours, Todd is an active member of a diverse range of associations, from the Country Music Association to the British Country Music Association. His commitment to his craft and the industry at large is evident in every note he plays and every lyric he pens.With his latest release, "Best of Me," Todd Barrow offers a poignant reflection of his life's story, inviting listeners into his world with open arms. As he continues to leave an indelible mark on the country music landscape, Todd's unwavering dedication and heartfelt artistry promise an exciting journey ahead. Stay tuned for his forthcoming TV series set to premiere next fall, as Todd Barrow's star continues to rise. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

239. Go man, GO! Join the Aztec Werewolf, DJ Del Villarreal as we begin to get excited for your big Rockabilly Summer! Enjoy NEW music from Snakebite, The Hicksville Bombers, Sirocco Bros. with Holly Anne, The Hub Caps, Isaac Webb Trio, Spuny Boys, The Hicks Men, Lean Canteen, Nicholas Campbell, The Barnestormers, Marcel Bontempi, Ray Black & The Flying Carpets and MORE! As always, a huge assortment of fabulous vintage tunes from Sonny Burgess, Jerry Cole & The Spacemen, Bob Luman, Tommy Sands, Warner Mack, The Everly Brothers, Nervous Norvus, Benny Joy, Pat Cupp, The Keil Isles, Dale Hawkins and, of course, PLENTY MORE! A fun "bowling" song set in honor of my first DJ gig at the Bowlero Lanes & Lounge this Thursday night. Hot rod action and plenty of hot requests for all the good rockin' boys & girls on DJ Del Villarreal's "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" -good to the last bop!™Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!

James Booker "Feel So Bad"Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five "June Tenth Jamboree"Eilen Jewell "Breakaway"Elvis Costello "Dr. Watson, I Presume"Precious Bryant "The Truth"The Yardbirds "Smokestack Lightning"Fats Waller "Whose Honey Are You?"Lyle Lovett "This Old Porch"Lucinda Williams "Minneapolis"The Replacements "Kiss Me On The Bus"Joe Hill Louis "Hydramatic Woman"Built To Spill "Aisle 13"Neil Young "Out On The Weekend"Art Blakey "A Night In Tunisia"Howlin' Wolf "House Rockin' Boogie"Cory Branan "No Hit Wonder"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Didn't It Rain"Sonny Burgess "Red Headed Woman"Bruce Springsteen "I Ain't Got No Home"Billie Holiday "Travelin' Light"Bonnie "Prince" Billy "This Is Far From Over"Etta Baker "Bully of the Town"Bob Dylan "Visions of Johanna"Ted Leo and the Pharmacists "A Bottle of Buckie"Nina Nastasia "What's Out There"Little Esther Phillips "Cherry Wine"Hank Williams "Cool Water"Jason Isbell "Cover Me Up"Effie Smith "Water! Water!"Jeff Beck "I Ain't Superstitious"Howlin' Wolf "Sitting On Top Of The World"Lucero "At the Show"Sleater-Kinney "Call the Doctor"Gillian Welch "Look At Miss Ohio"Tom Waits "Jersey Girl"Bill Boyd's Cowboy Ramblers "Fan It"Amos Milburn "My Baby's Boogying"Willie Dixon "Big 3 Boogie"John Moreland "Blacklist"Elizabeth Cotten "I'm Going Away"ZZ Top "Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell"Howlin' Wolf "Back Door Man"John Coltrane "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"

Singles Going Around- Summer Volume TwoChan Romero- "The Hippy Hippy Shake"Johnny Otis- "Willie and the Hand Jive"Elvis Presley- "Good Rockin' Tonight"Roy Orbison- "Ooby Dooby"Dale Hawkins- "Tornado"Tommy James and the Shondells- "Hanky Panky"Jerry Lee Lewis- "Jambalaya"Cruisers- "Betty Ann"Carl Newman- "Tom Tom"Link Wray-"Slinky"Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Two- "Luther Played The Boogie"Carl Perkins- "Matchbox"Billy Riley- "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll"Andre Williams- "Bacon Fat"Del Raney's Umbrellas- "Can Your Hassie Do The Dog"Jack Scott- "The Way I Walk"Eddie Cochran- "Twenty Flight Rock"The Champs- Midnighter"Johnny Burnette Trio- "Train Kept A- Rolling"Warren Smith- "Ubangi Stomp"Ronnie Lyn- "Who Doed It?Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps- "Who Slapped John"Sonny Burgess- "Red Headed Woman"Link Wray- "Fat Back"Roy Orbison- "Domino"Dick Dale- "Jessie  Pearl"* All selections taken from vinyl, no MP3's or streaming crap.

219. Hot rod rock 'n' roll fans, get ready to start your engines!!! Revvin' things up on the radio tonite with an exclusive chat with promoter Rachel Krupa from the 12th AZ Rockabilly Bash!!!  We'll gas up your tank with plenty of fast 'n' furious hot rod tunes  and catch up with Rachel to find out all that's going down in fiery Phoenix this weekend, test drivin' cool toons from The Guana Bats, Gino & The Lone Gunmen, The DeVillains, The RevTones, Motel Drive, Screamin' Rebel Angels AND The Delta Bombers new LP! PLUS tracks from ALL THE HOT NEW bands in the scene! Dig fresh music from Jared Pettys, Angela Tini, The Backyard Casanovas, The Flea Bops, The Royal Flush, Péter Egris One Man Boogie '55, The Reverend Horton Heat & Daddy Long Legs, too! Rachet up your groove with some uptempo R'n'B and enjoy some of the coolest cuts from the Motorbilly vintage vault including Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Art Adams, Ronnie Dee, Sonee West, Red Foley,  The Everly Brothers, Ben Hewitt, Sonny Burgess, Elvis Presley and American South Western 'string king,' Duane Eddy! We're driving up to and beyond midnight with that mad hispanic mechanic, DJ Del Villarreal on "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!"Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!

The 103rd Truth About Vintage Amps Podcast. Special guest Mason Stoops (Jackson Browne, Marcus Mumford) walks us through his crazy Marcus Mumford live rig! Plus: Dutch potatoes, shorting jacks, vintage road cases, and more. **Get a glimpse of what Mason is talking about by watching this video:  https://youtu.be/TH-bixpr-EQ and then listen to his explanation on our show (starts at 1:03:28).** :47 What's on Skip's bench: a Mesa Boogie Mark I 2:21 Kevin in Ohio has joined the Rustic Kegger in the Woods (Facebook link), nasty old pine trees 7:53 Eric Daw's Solid Sound book (order link); Daniel Petrzelka's replacement pilot light washers for SF Fenders (contact him via Instagram) 18:42 Easiest way to date a Fender amp; Portland, Oregon's Cast Iron Revival (Instagram link) 22:55 Music recommendation: Sonny Burgess 27:22 A Blonde Fender Bandmaster with failing volume; Nic Grabien 31:09 Gain vs volume, redux; Hotchpotch / hutspot potatoes with kale 38:14 Alternatives to a Fender Champ 12 42:39 Shorting jacks to reduce hum in amps? Mexican gumbo soup 50:32 A 1968 Fender Bassman head with two chokes and a non-original power transformer 54:25 A 1959 Gibson GA-9 with an erratic distortion once the volume is turned up 57:00 Taming the boost on 1979 Fender Princeton Reverb with the pull-boost; original Fender-branded tubes 1:01:34 Alternatives to a Music Man RD-50? 1:03:28 Special guest: Mason Stoops! Stoops' live rig touring with Marcus Mumford, Austen Hooks-modified Filmosounds + "Space Heater" amps, Kalamazoo Model 2s, a Peavey Studio Chorus, LED lights, playing with Jackson Browne, and so much more. Watch our video here to see what Mason is talking about (and his guitar and pedal setup): https://youtu.be/TH-bixpr-EQ (Thanks, Duncan!) This week's episode is sponsored by Calton Cases, Jupiter Condenser Co., Amplified Parts and Grez Guitars. You can also use the discount code FRET10 to save 10% off your Izotope purchase. Support us on Patreon.com for added content and the occasional surprise and don't forget to get a subscription to the Fretboard Journal (link). Digital subscriptions start at just $30. Submit your amp questions, recipes and life hacks to the podcast via podcast@fretboardjournal.com and don't forget to share the show with friends on social media. 

The swampy Americana songwriter, singer, and guitarist, covered by Keith Richards, Irma Thomas, and Sonny Burgess, has traveled a twisted road from juke joints in Monroe, La., and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to his Nashville home. Out on a string of dates with the Iguanas, he joins the band on a night off to issue a communiqué from the tour, in the first installment of a two-part episode. As KG says, they’re just trying to get to Memphis. Topics include a Midwestern tour, a procedure, solo acts, West Monroe, South Omaha, West Memphis, “Jungle Boogie,” a band director, marching bands, Jorie Graham, poetry, the punk ethos, an Elvis impersonation, live performance, Bo Ramsey and the Sliders, Freddie King records, meeting X, John Doe’s beer, Todd Rundgren’s cake, and much more. Intro music: “The Trucker Takes A Wife” by Styler/Coman Outro music: “Deuce and a Quarter” from “Down to the Well” by Kevin Gordon Support the podcast: Paypal or Venmo Join the Patreon page here. Shop for Troubled Men’s Wear here. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts or any podcast source. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Troubled Men Podcast Facebook Troubled Men Podcast Instagram Big Island Jazz and Blues Festival Iguanas Tour Dates René Coman Facebook Kevin Gordon Facebook Kevin Gordon Instagram Kevin Gordon Homepage

This week welcome, country music recording artist, Ron Williams! Ron Williams was born into an amazing family steeped in music tradition. The son of Internationally known singer/ songwriter Leona Williams, Ron has been surrounded by legends of the Country Music industry since childhood. Ron credits his distinct Traditional Country sound to the great , REAL country music he was exposed to as a child. At age 17, Ron began polishing his own unique style of music, and credits many country icons as influences, including Marty Robbins, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, Larry Gatlin, John Conlee, Lefty Frizzell , Keith Whitley and others. Performing and traveling all over the U.S. and Europe, Ron continues to build a huge fan base and has worked hard to keep real country music alive . Some of his career highlights include: regular host of the Ernest Tubb Midnight Jamboree; appearances on RFD-TV’s Midwest Country show; the San Antonio Rose Live show for the Aztec Theater on famous San Antonio Riverwalk; and international tours. Ron's songwriting credits include a co/written charted single on artist Joe Diffie, titled "Somethin' like this", the title track from the gospel album "Before you say amen" from Texas artist Justin Trevino, as well as single on Music City Records recording artist Sonny Burgess titled "Alone with you" and others.
 Recently , Ron was awarded the prestigious “ George D. Hay” award for his commitment to real country music , and the “ Little Jimmy Dempsey” award from the North American Country Music Association ( N.A.C.M.A.) for his efforts . Ron currently resides in Forsyth Missouri , and has been married to wife Amy, and together they have two beautiful daughters, Alexis and Olivia. For more information visit his website: RonWilliamsCountry.com.

Keep swingin' with that wild rockin' Aztec Werewolf™, DJ Del Villarreal and his devil-may-care musical extravaganza "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" Tonight we say HAPPY 85th BIRTHDAY to the killer, living "piano-destroyer" Jerry Lee Lewis and celebrate with some amazing new songs from Dylan Kirk, The Stray Cats, Lucky Jones, James Intveld, The Sirocco Bros., The Howlin' Ramblers and Danny Fisher. PLUS, you can thrill to favorites from the past like Eddie Cochran, Johnny Cash, Ritchie Valens, Pat Cupp and Sonny Burgess! Nothing entertains like that Motor City, hot-rod-hispanic DJ Del and his free wheelin' WCBN FM radio program, "Go Kat, GO!" Good to the last BOP!™

Toby is joined by country singer Todd Barrow to talk about his unique style of music and his new single 'Girl Like You'.Todd Barrow is making a name for himself as a country artist to watch. The Texas singer-songwriter has racked up more than a few accolades, from a PRSA Award of Excellence, an Akademia Award for Best Country Album, and an artist spotlight in Alternative Roots Magazine, American Pride Magazine and AVA Radio. He has appeared on television shows including Good Morning Texas with Jerry Matheny and Texas Music Café on PBS. He's even shared the stage and studio with some of country music's heaviest hitters, from CMA musicians in Miranda Lambert's band to Fort Worth Producer of the Year Bart Rose. But it's more than just Todd's success to date that makes him such a compelling country artist. What's most readily apparent in Todd Barrow's music is his heart. Todd's music is no country for old men. While he undoubtedly draws his sonic influence from titans like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, his melodies skew modern. He plays almost every instrument, from piano to guitar, mandolin, harmonica, and drums, and the multi-instrumentalist doubles as a songwriter for himself as well as for other artists. “"If I can put a smile on someone's face through song, well that just means the world to me,” he says. “I try to get to the real heart and soul of a song. To me, it's not just words but a story, and I do my best to portray that with every line. That's my main draw to country music; the stories, the people, and the sincerity that comes from the heart." It's precisely that heart that has won over audiences around the world. Todd Barrow's recent single, “The House That Love Built”, co-written with Sonny Burgess, was featured on RightNow TV and was honored by PRSA Fort Worth for its fundraising efforts on behalf of the Ronald McDonald house. Todd was featured in the lineup for Bo's Extravaganza festival at John Schneider's Studio, alongside such artists as Kid Rock and Tom Wopat from Dukes of Hazzard. He has received radio airplay from Italy Radio 6.75 for his single “Hot Southern Night”. Todd Barrow just released his latest single, “Girl Like You,” written about love during COVID-19! Todd is a proud member of the Harry Fox Agency, the Country Music Association, the International Singer-Songwriters Association, the Texas Music Office, BMI, the Fort Worth Songwriters Association, American Music Podcasting, the NSAIDFW Songwriters Association, the Dallas Songwriters Association, the British Country Music Association and the Bayou Country Music Association.Email:Toddwaynebarrow@yahoo.com Phone: 817-983-4168Website: http://www.ToddBarrowMusic.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/ToddBarrowMusic Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ToddBarrowMusicInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/ToddBarrowMusic1YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/ToddBarrow See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s theme time once more. We’ve got songs about the broken hearts, tears, and childhood souvenirs…but mostly broken hearts. Lost love, faded love, and remembering old love letters from the book of broken hearts featuring country, soul, and rhythm, all from the past century. Join in for some classic country from Don Williams and Billy Walker, brassy vocals from Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday, late movie Elvis, and a couple of rockabilly legends named Sonny Burgess and Warren Smith. And don’t miss out on Mary Wells, Jimmy Ruffin, Tom Petty, and The Louvin Brothers this week. It’s all there…a common theme in songwriting for being relatable, illustrative, and purposeful in its singular stories of love and loss. Tune into KRJF 92.3 FM, Sonoma County Community Radio with your host Dave Stroud this Friday evening at 9 Pacific.

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter The 53rd episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with singer-songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin, and is sponsored by Harry's men's grooming products. If you’re listening to this, you can get a Harry’s trial set at harrys.com/burning. You’ll get a weighted ergonomic handle for a firm grip; a five blade razor with a lubricating strip and trimmer blade; rich lathering shave gel with aloe to keep your skin hydrated; and a travel blade cover to keep your razor dry and easy to grab on the go. Go to harrys.com/burning to start shaving better today! I am incredibly excited that I got to talk to Dave Alvin. I first heard the Blasters, the band he formed with his brother Phil in 1979 or so, 30 years ago, in 1990, when a compilation called The Blasters Collection came out, and I was just blown away. Their music was a mix of rockabilly, blues, country, hillbilly music, Forties jump blues and Fifties R&B – they basically threw everything into a blender and somehow turned it into one thing, all driven by Dave Alvin’s lead guitar and Bill Bateman’s massive drums, which could really be a whole conversation on their own. Dave Alvin’s made close to twenty albums since leaving the Blasters, including a couple with Phil in the last few years but also a whole string of records with his band the Guilty Men, some collaborations with country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore and rockabilly singer Sonny Burgess, and guest appearances on a million things, because he’s a kick-ass guitar player with a unique style and sound that a lot of people want to use for things. And now he’s got a new band called the Third Mind, which was the impetus for this interview. They don’t really sound like anything else he’s done before – their music is highly improvisatory psychedelic rock, with some touches of very early jazz-rock fusion thrown in there, too. So if you were wondering how a roots-rock semi-traditionalist singer-songwriter winds up on this podcast, well, that’s how. This conversation is really fascinating, and goes down a lot of pathways I wasn’t expecting. We talk about Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Dick Dale, Sun Records, growing up in California…Dave Alvin’s a hell of a sharp guy who knows a lot about music, and I had a fantastic time talking to him. I’m sure you'll enjoy hearing our conversation. If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks! Music heard in this episode: The Blasters, "Long White Cadillac" (Non Fiction) The Third Mind, "Journey in Satchidananda" (The Third Mind)

It's our annual Train Show on Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour!  We spin an hour of train-themed tunes to celebrate National Train Day on May 9th!  Come ride the rails and hear tunes from Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Dale Watson, Rosie Flores, John Fogerty, Tom Jones, George Jones, Big Jon Atkinson, Conway Twitty, Stray Cats, Carlene Carter, Kim Wilson, Sonny Burgess and an instru-Mental Breakdown with Jimmy Bryant and Sean Mencher!!  Allllllll aboard!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed: Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   Carl Perkins- "Rock Island Line" Big Jon Atkinson- "Trainfare Blues" Johnny Cash- "Casey Jones" Conway Twitty- "Long Black Train" Stray Cats- "Devil Train" John Fogerty- "Train Of Fools" George Jones & The Smoky Mountain Boys- "Night Train To Memphis" Carlene Carter- "Little Blakc Train"   instru-Mental Breakdown: Jimmy Bryant- "Railroadin'" Sean Mencher- "Mystery Train"   Tom Jones- "Everybody Loves A Train" Sonny Burgess- "Fast Train" Kim Wilson- "Mean Old Frisco" Dale Watson & His Lone Stars- "Rattlesnake Train" Merle Haggard- "Hobo Bill's Last Ride" Johnny Cash- "Daughter Of A Railroad Man" Rosie Flores- "Heartbreak Train"   Outro Music Bed: Kenichi Yamaguchi- "Memphis Train"

Vandaag Vic solo van Frits is weekje afwezig. Vandaag het tweede uur van de top 30 van 2019. Je hoort de nummers 16 tm 30 met o.a. Sonny Burgess, Serge Gainsbourg, Slapback Johnny, Roy Head, Jim Murple Memorial, Caroline Loeb en The Mad Lads.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—-  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”:   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them.   They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”:   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”:   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”]   But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”]   It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.   “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”:   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”.   Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”:   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”:   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Train Kept A-Rollin'" by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Jump, Jive, an' Wail", by Louis Prima. ----more----  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I've mostly used Billy Burnette's self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It's a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I've been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes' relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on "Train Kept A-Rollin'", and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn't seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we're going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There's a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we'll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades -- the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys... rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken -- over each other's heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette's case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They'd grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black's brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group -- the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey's at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn't like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin' Wolf. Burlison's guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf's electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf's early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I've seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow's "I'm Moving On":   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, "I'm Moving On"]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night's show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn't just get three random people he'd never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was "you", and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn't long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, "You're Undecided", for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "You're Undecided", Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called "Rockabilly Boogie", which they didn't get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, "Rockabilly Boogie"]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word "rockabilly", and Billy Burnette, Dorsey's son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny's son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one -- that it's a portmanteau of the words "rock" and "hillbilly", to describe rocking hillbilly music -- but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it's just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison's old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they'd come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn't go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, "Shattered Dreams", although that song didn't get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "Shattered Dreams"]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They'd simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn't need them.   They didn't have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called "Tear It Up", which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of "You're Undecided":   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, "Tear It Up"]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that's what they were -- a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio weren't happy at all about their recordings. They didn't want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn't know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley's studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they'd been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he'd ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley's studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we've already looked at "Rocket 88", which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville "A-Team", the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison's.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock 'n' Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry":   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"]   But that was a good five years after the Rock 'n' Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, "Honey Hush", was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Honey Hush"]   It's not one of Turner's best, to be honest -- leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work -- but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock 'n' Roll Trio's cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Honey Hush"]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called "Train Kept A-Rollin'".   "Train Kept A-Rollin'", like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called "Cow Cow Boogie", which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, "Cow Cow Boogie"]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title "Train Kept A-Rollin'":   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, "The Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock 'n' Roll Trio's version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison's guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   The single wasn't a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words "the train kept rolling all night long".   Sadly, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio didn't last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by "Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio", and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette's backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit -- he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren't even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material -- Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents' TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like "Believe What You Say", "Waiting In School", "It's Late", and "Just A Little Too Much":   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Just a Little Too Much"]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name "the Burnette Brothers":   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, "Warm Love"]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, "There Was a Tall Oak Tree", which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a "most promising newcomer" award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey's, were in a very different style from the Rock 'n' Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, And You're Mine":   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, "You're Sixteen"]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny's solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we'll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined "the Sun Rhythm Section", a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin', and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette -- Johnny and Dorsey's sons -- on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

  Episode forty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Train Kept A-Rollin'” by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, and how a rockabilly trio from Memphis connect a novelty cowboy song by Ella Fitzgerald to Motorhead and Aerosmith. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail”, by Louis Prima. —-more—-  Resources   For biographical information on the Burnettes, I’ve mostly used Billy Burnette’s self-published autobiography, Craxy Like Me. It’s a flawed source, but the only other book on Johnny Burnette I’ve been able to find is in Spanish, and while I go to great lengths to make this podcast accurate I do have limits, and learning Spanish for a single lesson is one of them. The details about the Burnettes’ relationship with Elvis Presley come from Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick. Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum has a chapter on “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, and its antecedents in earlier blues material, that goes into far more detail than I could here, but which was an invaluable reference. And this three-CD set contains almost everything Johnny Burnette released up to 1962.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are some records that have had such an effect on the history of rock music that the record itself becomes almost divorced from its context. Who made it, and how, doesn’t seem to matter as much as that it did exist, and that it reverberated down the generations. Today, we’re going to look at one of those records, and at how a novelty song about cowboys written for an Abbot and Costello film became a heavy metal anthem performed by every group that ever played a distorted riff.   There’s a tradition in rock and roll music of brothers who fight constantly making great music together, and we’ll see plenty of them as we go through the next few decades — the Everly Brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the Beach Boys… rock and roll would be very different without sibling rivalry. But few pairs of brothers have fought as violently and as often as Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The first time Roy Orbison met them, he was standing in a Memphis radio station, chatting with Elvis Presley, and waiting for a lift. When the lift doors opened, inside the lift were the Burnette brothers, in the middle of a fist-fight.   When Dorsey was about eight years old and Johnny six, their mother bought them both guitars. By the end of the day, both guitars had been broken — over each other’s heads.   And their fights were not just the minor fights one might expect from young men, but serious business. Both of them were trained boxers, and in Dorsey Burnette’s case he was a professional who became Golden Gloves champion of the South in 1950, and had once fought Sonny Liston. A fight between the Burnette brothers was a real fight.   They’d grown up around Lauderdale Court, the same apartment block where Elvis Presley spent his teenage years, and they used to hang around together and sing with a gang of teenage boys that included Bill Black’s brother Johnny. Elvis would, as a teenager, hang around on the outskirts of their little group, singing along with them, but not really part of the group — the Burnette brothers were as likely to bully him as they were to encourage him to be part of the gang, and while they became friendly later on, Elvis was always more of a friend-of-friends than he was an actual friend of theirs, even when he was a colleague of Dorsey’s at Crown Electric. He was a little bit younger than them, and not the most sociable of people, and more importantly he didn’t like their aggression – Elvis would jokingly refer to them as the Daltons, after the outlaw gang, Another colleague at Crown Electric was a man named Paul Burlison, who also boxed, and had been introduced to Dorsey by Lee Denson, who had taught both Dorsey and Elvis their first guitar chords. Burlison also played the guitar, and had played in many small bands over the late forties and early fifties. In particular, one of the bands he was in had had its own regular fifteen-minute show on a local radio station, and their show was on next to a show presented by the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. Burlison’s guitar playing would later show many signs of being influenced by Wolf’s electric blues, just as much as by the country and western music his early groups were playing. Some sources even say that Burlison played on some of Wolf’s early recordings at the Sun studios, though most of the sessionographies I’ve seen for Wolf say otherwise.   The three of them formed a group in 1952, the Rhythm Rangers, with Burlison on lead guitar, Dorsey Burnette on double bass, and Johnny Burnette on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. A year later, they changed their name to the Rock & Roll Trio.   While they were called the Rock & Roll Trio, they were still basically a country band, and their early setlists included songs like Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On”:   [Excerpt: Hank Snow, “I’m Moving On”]   That one got dropped from their setlist after an ill-fated trip to Nashville. They wanted to get on the Grand Ole Opry, and so they drove up, found Snow, who was going to be on that night’s show, and asked him if he could get them on to the show. Snow explained to them that it had taken him twenty years in the business to work his way up to being on the Grand Ole Opry, and he couldn’t just get three random people he’d never met before on to the show.   Johnny Burnette replied with two words, the first of which would get this podcast bumped into the adult section in Apple Podcasts, and the second of which was “you”, and then they turned round and drove back to Memphis. They never played a Hank Snow song live again.   It wasn’t long after that, in 1953, that they recorded their first single, “You’re Undecided”, for a tiny label called Von Records in Boonville, Mississippi;   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “You’re Undecided”, Von Records version]   Around this time they also wrote a song called “Rockabilly Boogie”, which they didn’t get to record until 1957: [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio, “Rockabilly Boogie”]   That has been claimed as the first use of the word “rockabilly”, and Billy Burnette, Dorsey’s son, says they coined the word based on his name and that of Johnny’s son Rocky.   Now, it seems much more likely to me that the origin of the word is the obvious one — that it’s a portmanteau of the words “rock” and “hillbilly”, to describe rocking hillbilly music — but those were the names of their kids, so I suppose it’s just about possible.   Their 1953 single was not a success, and they spent the next few years playing in honky-tonks. They also regularly played the Saturday Night Jamboree at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium, a regular country music show that was occasionally broadcast on the same station that Burlison’s old bands had performed on, KWEM. Most of the musicians in Memphis who went on to make important early rockabilly records would play at the Jamboree, but more important than the show itself was the backstage area, where musicians would jam, show each other new riffs they’d come up with, and pass ideas back and forth. Those backstage jam sessions were the making of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, as they were for many of the other rockabilly acts in the area.   Their big break came in early 1956, when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and won three times in a row. The Ted Mack Amateur Hour was a TV series that was in many ways the X Factor or American Idol of the 1950s. The show launched the careers of Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Gladys Knight among others, and when the Rock and Roll Trio won for the third time (at the same time their old neighbour Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show on another channel) they got signed to Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca Records, one of the biggest major labels in the USA at the time.   Their first attempt at recording didn’t go particularly well. Their initial session for Coral was in New York, and when they got there they were surprised to find a thirty-two piece orchestra waiting for them, none of whom had any more clue about playing rock and roll music than the Rock And Roll Trio had about playing orchestral pieces.   They did record one track with the orchestra, “Shattered Dreams”, although that song didn’t get released until many years later:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “Shattered Dreams”]   But after recording that song they sent all the musicians home except the drummer, who played on the rest of the session. They’d simply not got the rock and roll sound they wanted when working with all those musicians. They didn’t need them.   They didn’t have quite enough songs for the session, and needed another uptempo number, and so Dorsey went out into the hallway and quickly wrote a song called “Tear It Up”, which became the A-side of their first Coral single, with the B-side being a new version of “You’re Undecided”:   [Excerpt: The Rock and Roll Trio, “Tear It Up”]   While Dorsey wrote that song, he decided to split the credit, as they always did, four ways between the three members of the band and their manager. This kind of credit-splitting is normal in a band-as-gang, and right then that’s what they were — a gang, all on the same side. That was soon going to change, and credit was going to be one of the main reasons.   But that was all to come. For now, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio weren’t happy at all about their recordings. They didn’t want to make any more records in New York with a bunch of orchestral musicians who didn’t know anything about their music. They wanted to make records in Nashville, and so they were booked into Owen Bradley’s studio, the same one where Gene Vincent made his first records, and where Wanda Jackson recorded when she was in Nashville rather than LA. Bradley knew how to get a good rockabilly sound, and they were sure they were going to get the sound they’d been getting live when they recorded there.   In fact, they got something altogether different, and better than that sound, and it happened entirely by accident. On their way down to Nashville from New York they played a few shows, and one of the first they played was in Philadelphia. At that show, Paul Burlison dropped his amplifier, loosening one of the vacuum tubes inside. The distorted sound it gave was like nothing he’d ever heard, and while he replaced the tube, he started loosening it every time he wanted to get that sound.   So when they got to Nashville, they went into Owen Bradley’s studio and, for possibly the first time ever, deliberately recorded a distorted guitar.   I say possibly because, as so often happens with these things, a lot of people seem to have had the same idea around the same time, but the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s recordings do seem to be the first ones where the distortion was deliberately chosen. Obviously we’ve already looked at “Rocket 88”, which did have a distorted guitar, and again that was caused by an accident, but the difference there was that the accident happened on the day of the recording with no time to fix it. This was Burlison choosing to use the result of the accident at a point where he could have easily had the amplifier in perfect working order, had he wanted to.   At these sessions, the trio were augmented by a few studio musicians from the Nashville “A-Team”, the musicians who made most of the country hits of the time. While Dorsey Burnette played bass live, he preferred playing guitar, so in the studio he was on an additional rhythm guitar while Bob Moore played the bass. Buddy Harmon was on drums, while session guitarist Grady Martin added another electric guitar to complement Burlison’s.   The presence of these musicians has led some to assume that they played everything on the records, and that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio only added their voices, but that seems to be very far from the case. Certainly Burlison’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and the effect he puts on his guitar is absolutely unlike anything else that you hear from Grady Martin at this point. Martin did, later, introduce the fuzztone to country music, with his playing on records like Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry”:   [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Don’t Worry”]   But that was a good five years after the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio sessions, and the most likely explanation is that Martin was inspired to add fuzz to his guitar by Paul Burlison, rather than deciding to add it on one session and then not using it again for several years.   The single they recorded at that Nashville session was one that would echo down the decades, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Aerosmith to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.   The A-side, “Honey Hush”, was originally written and recorded by Big Joe Turner three years earlier:   [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Honey Hush”]   It’s not one of Turner’s best, to be honest — leaning too heavily on the misogyny that characterised too much of his work — but over the years it has been covered by everyone from Chuck Berry to Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello to Jerry Lee Lewis. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s cover version is probably the best of these, and certainly the most exciting:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Honey Hush”]   This is the version of the song that inspired most of those covers, but the song that really mattered to people was the B-side, a track called “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.   “Train Kept A-Rollin'”, like many R&B songs, has a long history, and is made up of elements that one can trace back to the 1920s, or earlier in some cases. But the biggest inspiration for the track is a song called “Cow Cow Boogie”, which was originally recorded by Ella Mae Morse in 1942, but which was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in an Abbot and Costello film, but cut from her appearance.   Fitzgerald eventually recorded her own hit version of the song in 1943, backed by the Ink Spots, with the pianist Bill Doggett accompanying them:   [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots, “Cow Cow Boogie”]   That was in turn adapted by the jump band singer Tiny Bradshaw, under the title “Train Kept A-Rollin'”:   [Excerpt: Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    And that in turn was the basis for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio’s version of the song, which they radically rearranged to feature an octave-doubled guitar riff, apparently invented by Dorsey Burnette, but played simultaneously by Burlison and Martin, with Burlison’s guitar fuzzed up and distorted. This version of the song would become a classic:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The single wasn’t a success, but its B-side got picked up by the generation of British guitar players that came after, and from then it became a standard of rock music. It was covered by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages:   [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   The Yardbirds:   [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets:   [Excerpt: Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Aerosmith:   [Excerpt: Aerosmith, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    Motorhead:   [Excerpt: Motorhead: “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]   You get the idea. By adding a distorted guitar riff, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio had performed a kind of alchemy, which turned a simple novelty cowboy song into something that would make the repertoire of every band that ever wanted to play as loud as possible and to scream at the top of their voices the words “the train kept rolling all night long”.   Sadly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio didn’t last much longer. While they had always performed as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, Coral Records decided to release their recordings as by “Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio”, and the other two members were understandably furious. They were a band, not just Johnny Burnette’s backing musicians.   Dorsey was the first to quit — he left the band a few days before they were due to appear in Rock! Rock! Rock!, a cheap exploitation film starring Alan Freed. They got Johnny Black in to replace him for the film shoot, and Dorsey rejoined shortly afterwards, but the cracks had already appeared.   They recorded one further session, but the tracks from that weren’t even released as by Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, just by Johnny Burnette, and that was the final straw. The group split up, and went their separate ways.   Johnny remained signed to Coral Records as a solo artist, but when he and Dorsey both moved, separately, to LA, they ended up working together as songwriters.   Dorsey was contracted as a solo artist to Imperial Records, who had a new teen idol star who needed material — Ricky Nelson had had an unexpected hit after singing on his parents’ TV show, and as a result he was suddenly being promoted as a rock and roll star. Dorsey and Johnny wrote a whole string of top ten hits for Nelson, songs like “Believe What You Say”, “Waiting In School”, “It’s Late”, and “Just A Little Too Much”:   [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Just a Little Too Much”]   They also started recording for Imperial as a duo, under the name “the Burnette Brothers”:   [Excerpt: The Burnette Brothers, “Warm Love”]   But that was soon stopped by Coral, who wanted to continue marketing Johnny as a solo artist, and they both started pursuing separate solo careers. Dorsey eventually had a minor hit of his own, “There Was a Tall Oak Tree”, which made the top thirty in 1960. He made a few more solo records in the early sixties, and after becoming a born-again Christian in the early seventies he started a new, successful, career as a country singer, eventually receiving a “most promising newcomer” award from the Academy of Country Music in 1973, twenty years after his career started. He died in 1979 of a heart attack.   Johnny Burnette eventually signed to Liberty Records, and had a string of hits that, like Dorsey’s, were in a very different style from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records. His biggest hit, and the one that most people associate with him to this day, was “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re Mine”:   [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen”]   That song is, of course, a perennial hit that most people still know almost sixty years later, but none of Johnny’s solo records had anything like the power and passion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio recordings. And sadly we’ll never know if he would regain that passion, as in 1964 he died in a boating accident.   Paul Burlison, the last member of the trio, gave up music once the trio split up, and became an electrician again. He briefly joined Johnny on one tour in 1963, but otherwise stayed out of the music business until the 1980s. He then got back into performing, and started a new lineup of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, featuring Johnny Black, who had briefly replaced Dorsey in the group, and Tony Austin, the drummer who had joined with them on many tour dates after they got a recording contract.   He later joined “the Sun Rhythm Section”, a band made up of many of the musicians who had played on classic rockabilly records, including Stan Kessler, Jimmy Van Eaton, Sonny Burgess, and DJ Fontana. Burlison released his only solo album in 1997. That album was called Train Kept A-Rollin’, and featured a remake of that classic song, with Rocky and Billy Burnette — Johnny and Dorsey’s sons — on vocals:   [Excerpt: Paul Burlison, “Train Kept A-Rollin'”]    He kept playing rockabilly until he died in 2003, aged seventy-four.

It's our 2nd annual "Sun-Sational" Show as we once again kick off Summer Sun Fun (official first day of Summer is June 21st) with Connor Rocket co-hosting an hour of songs recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis, TN (located at 706 Union Avenue).  We've got tunes from a variety of artists including Elvis Presley, Charley Pride, Dale Watson (with Sarah Gayle Meech & Hillbilly Casino), Howlin' Wolf, John Mellencamp, Roy Orbison, Chris Isaak, Jerry Lee Lewis, Don Diego, Hot Rod Walt & The Psycho DeVilles, Johnny Cash, Barbara Pittman, Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley & The Little Green Men, Charlie Rich, Billy "The Kid" Emerson, Carl Perkins, James Cotton and Roscoe Gordon! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed: Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   Charley Pride- "(There's My Baby) Walkin' (The Stroll)" Chris Isaak- "Everybody's In The Mood" Charlie Rich- "Philadelphia Baby" Roscoe Gordon- "Booted" Dale Watson (w/ Sarah Gayle Meech & Hillbilly Casino)- "iF yoU" Carl Perkins- "Birth Of Rock and Roll" Billy "The Kid" Emerson- "Red Hot" Billy Lee Riley & The Little Green Men- "Baby Please Don't Go" James Cotton- "Cotton Crop Blues" Johnny Cash- "Country Boy" Elvis Presley- "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" (slow version) Sonny Burgess- "We Wanna Boogie" John Mellencamp- "No Better Than This" Howlin' Wolf- "Oh, Red!" Don Diego- "Road To Memphis" Jerry Lee Lewis- "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" Hot Rod Walt & The Psycho Devilles- "Lucky" Barbara Pittman- "I Need A Man" Roy Orbison- "Claudette"   Outro Music Bed:  Sonny Burgess- "Thunderbird"

J.C. Hulsey has lived in Midlothian, Texas over thirty years. He's a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He has been married for 59 years. He enjoys Western movies and TV Shows, (especially the older ones) and reading about Mail-Order Brides. He is also the owner of six cats (all stray cats, showed up on the back porch) and one dog (rescue dog) He worked for 33 years at Bell Helicopter. He served in the USAF for five years, and the Air National Guard for four years. He started writing songs in his early twenties. He recorded a couple of songs in the late 1960s. He started writing poetry in the 1970s to share with others. He self-published them on Amazon in 2013. He still felt the need to write something different. He tried writing a book in the 1970s, but it was never finished. In 2014, he felt the urge to write a Western novel. However, he needed something different than what was on the market. What about a young Christian Gunfighter? That book turned into a series of seven books that won First Place for Best Westen Series in 2015 from Texas Association of Authors. Music by Sonny Burgess, Bobby Marquez & Jim Bush Chad Prather's Thought For The Day Special Guest Author Doug Hocking

Connor Rocket co-hosts our Sun-sational show to kick off summer sun fun! Summer officially starts June 21st and we thought we'd also focus on some of the great Sun Studio recordings to give double meaning to the "Sun" fun!  All the songs this hour were recorded at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, TN.  We'll hear from B.B. King, Billy Lee Riley, Charlie Rich, Dale Watson, Elvis Presley, The Prisonaires, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chris Isaak, Sonny Burgess, Johnny Cash, Joe Hill Louis, Margo Price, Howlin' Wolf, Carl Perkins, Charlie Feathers, Jake Calypso, Roy Orbison and Rufus Thomas! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   B.B. King- "B.B.'s Boogie" (1950) Howlin' Wolf- "Howlin' Wolf Boogie" (1951) Joe Hill Louis- "Dorothy Mae" (1952) The Prisonaires- "Just Walkin' In The Rain" (1953) Rufus Thomas- "Bear Cat" (1953) Elvis Presley- "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" (1954) Johnny Cash- "Ballad Of A Teenage Queen" (1957) Carl Perkins- "Caldonia" (1956) Jerry Lee Lewis- "Lovin' Up A Storm" (1959) Roy Orbison- "I Like Love" (1957) Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison (Class Of '55)-  "Waymore's Blues" (1985) Charlie Feathers- "Peepin' Eyes" (1955) Billy Lee Riley- "I Want You Baby" (1957) Sonny Burgess- "We Wanna Boogie" (1956) Charlie Rich- "Everything I Do Is Wrong" (1959) Chris Isaak- "Live It Up" (2011) Dale Watson- "You Can't Undo The Wrong" (2012) Margo Price- "About To Find Out" (2016) Jake Calypso & His Red-Hot- "Trouble Bound" (2015)   Outro Music Bed: Jerry Lee Lewis- "High School Confidential"

Time to rev up the jukebox with new tracks from Joshua Hedley ("Mr. Jukebox"), Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, The Delta Bombers, Little Lesley & The Bloodshots plus rockers from Chuck Mead, TJ Mayes, Gene Summers, The Sirocco Bros., Nikki Lane, Elvis Presley and an answer song from LaVern Baker, our instru-Mental Breakdown and more!  Plus, our Heavy Hitter Triple Threat segment this week is about The Blasters with covers by Janis Martin and Sonny Burgess!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   The Delta Bombers- "Let Her Go" Lucky Marcell & The Ramblin' Three- "Rock & Roll Rhythm" Little Lesley & The Bloodshots- "For Your Love" Gene Summers- "Tennessee Saturday Night" The Sirocco Bros.- "Bop" Jerry Landis (Paul Simon)- "Lone Teen Ranger" Modern Don Juans- "Turned Out A Fool" TJ Mayes- "Dig It Up"   instru-Mental Breakdown Larry Scott (w/ James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, etc.)- "Six Days On The Road" Marco Di Maggio- "All Aboard, Cats"   Joshua Hedley- "Mr. Jukebox" Chuck Mead- "Short Goodbye"   Heavy Hitter Triple Threat The Blasters- "I Don't Want To" Janis Martin- "Long White Cadillac" Sonny Burgess with Dave Alvin- "Flattop Joint"   Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives- "Homesick" Nikki Lane- "Funnel Of Love" Elvis Presley- "Little Sister" LaVern Baker- "Hey Memphis"   Outro Music Bed:  Danny B. Harvey- "Honky Tonk Barbie"

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Buenas tardes!! Hoy os dejamos en La Gran Travesía el capítulo número 008 de la Historia del Rock dedicado a los pioneros del Rock and roll (2ª Parte), con Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, Gene Vincent, Dale Hawkins, Johnny Burnette, Sonny Burgess...etc. Ayúdanos a compartir, si te gusta. Muchas gracias!!Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de La Gran Travesía. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/489260

TONS of NEW tracks this week from Kyle Lacy & The Harlem River Noise, Danny B. Harvey & Annie Marie Lewis with Linda Gail Lewis, Jeremy & The Harlequins, The Margraves, Dusty Dave & The Heart Attacks, The Highjivers, Celine Lee, The Sabrejets, Hillbilly Casino (plus a duet with Dale Watson from a few years back), Jonny Barber & The Rhythm Razors, Mike Penny & His Moonshiers, A.J. & The Rockin' Trio, The Eskimo Brothers, a rocker from the late Sonny Burgess and more!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   Jeremy & The Harlequins- "Little One" The Margraves- "Primitive Beat" Sonny Burgess- "Tiger Rose" Dusty Dave & The Heart Attacks- "Good Rockin' Mama" Kyle Lacy & The Harlem River Noise- "I've Been Shakin'" Danny B. Harvey & Annie Marie Lewis with Linda Gail Lewis- "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" The Highjivers- "Always Talkin' Down" Celine Lee- "Tease It To Jesus" Rosie Flores- "You Tear Me Up" The Sabrejets- "Tennessee Flat Top Bop" Buddy Holly- "Changing All Those Changes" Stray Cats- "Oh Boy" Hillbilly Casino- "Knockin' At Your Door" Hillbilly Casino (with Dale Watson)- "The Ballad Of Psycho Steve" This Train- "Mimes Of The Old West" Jonny Barber & The Rhythm Razors- "Should Coulda Woulda" Mike Penny & His Moonshiners- "Daddy O Rock" A.J. & The Rockin' Trio- "Moonshine Blues" The Eskimo Brothers- "Sex & Cigarettes"   Outro Music Bed: Di Maggio Connection- "A Night In Shanghai"

We play a couple of interview segments from Wanda Jackson and Paul McCartney about Elvis.  Wanda's comes from her I Remember Elvis project and Paul's segment comes from a promo disc that came with Run Devil Run.  We'll hear Elvis covers from both of those projects as well as we continue our Elvis Celebration and remember his music 40 years after his passing.  We also hear NEW tunes from John Lindberg Trio, Celine Lee, Truly Lover Trio, Los Kingdom and rockers from Garry Tallent, The Cochran Brothers, Sonny Burgess, the return of the instru-Mental Breakdown with tunes from Charlie Gracie and Junior Brown and lots more packed into this can't-miss hour!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues"   Elvis Presley- "King Creole" Truly Lover Trio- "Is That The Price That I Gotta Pay" The Cochran Brothers- "Open The Door" Dave Stuckey & The Rhythm Gang- "Nobody's Sweetheart" Gene Vincent- "You Told A F-I-B" Garry Tallent- "I Love 'Em All" Celine Lee- "Don't Let The Screen Door Hit Ya" Wanda Jackson remembers Elvis Wanda Jackson- "Give Me The Right Los Kingdom- "Don't Be Cruel" Sonny Burgess & The Legendary Pacers- "Slow Down" Glen Glenn- "Everybody's Movin'"   instru-Mental Breakdown: Charlie Gracie- "Two Guitar Rag" Junior Brown- "Sugarfoot Rag"   Paul McCartney on Elvis and "All Shook Up" Paul McCartney- "All Shook Up" John Lindberg Trio- "This Is What You Get" Lee Rocker- "Bulletproof"   Outro Music Bed:  Danny B. Harvey- "Cattin' Around"  

We begin our "Favorite Chuck Berry Song Countdown" this week as voted on by you!  We hear #10 through #7 this episode.  This to celebrate Chuck's 90th birthday on October 18th!!  We also get some Berry cover tunes from Sleepy LaBeef, Dave Edmunds, Dion, Jerry Lee Lewis, Go-Getters, Eddie Cochran, Sonny Burgess and Headcat.  Plus, we hear brand new tunes from Royal Hounds and Darrel Higham and rockers from Jeff Daniels, Rockin' Bonnie, The Rockats, Marcel Bontempi, A Man Called Stu and Deke Dickerson!  How's that for a birthday party?! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro music bed: Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues   Royal Hounds- "Train Kept A Rollin'" Jeff Daniels- "Daddy-O-Rock"   #10 Chuck Berry- "Carol" Sleepy LaBeef- "Too Much Monkey Business" Dave Edmunds- "Dear Dad"   Rockin' Bonnie & The Mighty Ropers- "I'm Movin' On" The Rockats- "Go Cat Wild"   #9 Chuck Berry- "Almost Grown" Dion- "Sweet Little Rock & Roller" Jerry Lee Lewis- "Little Queenie"   Marcel Bontempi- "Dig A Hole (Stroll Version)" A Man Called Stu- "Sweethearts Or Strangers"   #8 Chuck Berry- "Roll Over Beethoven" Go-Getters- "Thirty Days" Eddie Cochran- "Sweet Little Sixteen" (live)   Darrel Higham- "I Found A Smile" Deke Dickerson- "Someone Used To Love Me"   #7 Chuck Berry- "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" Sonny Burgess & The Rhythm Rockers- "Around & Around" Headcat- "Let It Rock      

It's our 2nd annual "Cover Charge Included" show where we hear cover tunes all hour!  This time we hear Paul McCartney talking about Gene Vincent's "Blue Jean Bop" before his stellar version of it as well as The Baseballs covering Snow Patrol, JD McPherson covering Alabama, Jerry Lee Lewis covering Elvis, Johnny Cash covering Roy Orbison, Dale Watson covering Johnny Cash, The Bellfuries covering The Beatles, The Beach Boys covering Eddie Cochran, Sonny Burgess covering The Raconteurs and so much more!   Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro music bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues" The Baseballs- "Chasing Cars" Carl Perkins- "I Got A Woman" The Beach Boys- "Summertime Blues" Marty Robbins- "Maybellene" The Bellfuries- "She's A Woman" Jerry Lee Lewis- "Jailhouse Rock" Sonny Burgess & The Legendary Pacers- "Steady As She Goes" The Modern Sounds- "I'm A Hog For You" John Fogerty- "Haunted House" Marcel Bontempi- "Race With The Devil" Johnny Cash- "Down The Line" (with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers) Dale Watson- "I Walk The Line" Blue Cats- "All I Can Do Is Cry" Linda Gail Lewis- "Lovin' Up A Storm" Chris Isaak- "I Want You To Want Me" JD McPherson- "Why Lady Why" The Trashmen- "It's So Easy" Paul McCartney interview snippet Paul McCartney- "Blue Jean Bop" Outro music bed:  Link Wray- "Hound Dog"  

This week we pay tribute to guitarist Scotty Moore who passed away June 28th, 2016.  We'll hear a sampling of some of the hundreds of songs he recorded on/or produced with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sonny Burgess, Lee Rocker, Dale Hawkins, The Mavericks, Linda Gail Lewis, Paul McCartney, Billy Burnette and lots more!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed:  Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues" Elvis Presley- "Heartbreak Hotel" Scotty Moore Trio- "Have Guitar Will Travel" Doug Poindexter & The Starlite Wranglers- "My Kind Of Carryin' On" Sonny Burgess- "Bigger Than Elvis" Lee Rocker- "Shame, Shame, Shame" Jimmy Vivino on Scotty Moore Elvis Presley- "Too Much" Dale Hawkins- "Boy Meets Girl" Jerry Lee Lewis- "Set My Mind At Ease" Charlie Rich- "Midnite Blues" The Mavericks- "I Told You So" Elvis Presley- "King Creole" Thomas Wayne- "You're The One That Done It" Elvis Presley- "One Night" Carl Mann- "Walking The Dog" Linda Gail Lewis- "Nothin' Shakin' But The Leaves" Elvis Presley- "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" Paul McCartney- "That's All Right" Billy Burnette- "Today Is Elvis' Birthday" Carl Perkins & Scotty Moore- "Mystery Train"   Outro music bed:  Scotty Moore- "My Baby Left Me"

This week's broadcast of Radio CALS features a conversation between Lisa Donovan, assistant director for youth services at CALS, and Bobby Roberts, former director of CALS, regarding the Child Nutrition Program created by Roberts prior to his retirement; an interview with Carol-Ann Blow, who attended Catholic schools in Little Rock during desegregation and was the first African-American student to attend Mount St. Mary Academy; information about and music by Sonny Burgess, who will perform with his band, the Legendary Pacers, for the Arkansas Sounds monthly concert series tonight (Friday, May 20) at 7 p.m. at the CALS Ron Robinson Theater; Bizarre Arkansas, with a story about Gerald L.K. Smith; Chewing the Fat with Rex Nelson & Paul Austin; an interview of Bobby Crafford, drummer for Sonny Burgess & the Legendary Pacers, who talks about highlights of the band's history; an interview with Mike Polston, co-author of To Can the Kaiser: Arkansas and the Great War; and selections from a CALS Con discussion of Studio Ghibli.

On this, the 201st anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, hear a new version of the classic "Battle of New Orleans", written by Stone County native Jimmy Driftwood; selections from the October 2015 Legacies & Lunch concert featuring Stephanie Smittle and Kit and Kaboodle; we remember the life of the late Senator Dale Bumpers with a reading from the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and an excerpt from a 2004 interview by Jack Hill; another installment of "Chewing the Fat with Rex & Paul"; Marvin Schwartz discusses his book "We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers", a history of both the legendary Arkansas band and the Newport community in which they grew up and were influenced; a portion of an oral history interview with Bob Boyd, noted local musician and former owner of Boyd's Music.

JD McPherson is our guest this hour as we talk about his new project Let The Good Times Roll, Conan O'Brien, confused lyrics for ZZ Top (and his love of the band), opening for Robert Plant, writing with The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, VeeJay 45, etc.  We also hear brand new singles from Chris Isaak and the Legendary Shack Shakers, a request from JD for Sonny Burgess and much more on this week's Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Legendary Shack Shakers- "Mud" Buddy Holly- "Rock Me My Baby" JD McPherson interview: JD McPherson- "Everybody's Talking 'Bout The All American Segment 1 JD McPherson- "North Side Gal" Segment 2 JD McPherson- "It's All Over But The Shouting" Segment 3 JD McPherson- "Let The Good Times Roll" Segment 4 JD McPherson- "Head Over Heels" Segment 5 JD McPherson- "Bridgebuilder" Segment 6 JD McPherson- "It Shook Me Up" Segment 7 JD McPherson- "I Wish You Would" Segment 8 Sonny Burgess- "We Wanna Boogie Chris Isaak- "Please Don't Call"

Nashville Boogie Vintage Weekender is the theme this week.  All the artists heard on the show will be performing at the event, April 30-May 3rd!  You'll hear classic and modern artists like Maddox Brothers & Rose, Johnny Powers, Sonny Burgess, Collins Kids, modern rockers like Nikki Hill, The BellFuries, The Paladins, Danny B. Harvey, Planet Rockers, Big Sandy and so much more!! Jason Galaz from Nashville Boogie and Muddy Roots will be joining us in the program as well.  Don't miss it!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey   Nikki Hill- "I've Got A Man" Big Sandy & His Fly Rite Boys- "Love Debut" Johnny Powers- "Long Blond Hair" Sonny Burgess- "We Wanna Boogie" The BellFuries- "Gonna Make It Alone" Chris Casello Trio- "Big Big Hole" Danny B. Harvey- "Get So Excited" The Paladins- "Tore Up" James Intveld- "Doin' Time For Being Young" Hillbilly Casino- "Come On Camille"   Jason Galaz interview Segment 1 Rosie Flores- "Too Much" Segment 2 Maddox Brothers & Rose- "Love Is Strange" Segment 3 Collins Kids- "Hop Skip & Jump" Woody Pines- "Nashville Boogie   Pearls Mahone- "Oklahoma Hills" Planet Rockers- "Long Gone Daddy" Rhythm Shakers- "Home Wrecker" Molly Sue Gonzalez- "Save Me"

On the show today, Sonny Burgess (celebrating a birthday today), Dick Dale, Deke Dickerson, Wanda Jackson, Bo Diddley, Molly Sue Gonzalez & The Mean, Mean Men and much more! Intro music bed- Link Wray- "Jack The Ripper" Voice over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey   Dick Dale- "Ring Of Fire" Eddie Cochran- "C'mon Everybody"   Music bed- The Ventures- "Rebel Rouser"   Molly Sue Gonzalez & The Mean, Mean Men- "Bad Example" Bo Diddley- "You Don't Love Me" Buddy & Julie Miller- "Gasoline & Matches"   Music bed- The Rockats- "Kitten With A Whip"   Buddy Holly- "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" Imelda May- "Wild Woman" The Fabulous Thunderbirds- "Can't Tear It Up Enuff"   Clarence Clemons- "Peter Gunn Theme" Sonny Burgess- "Itchy"   Music bed- Joel Paterson- "Twin Guitar Shuffle" Dr. Rubins Pomade   Billy Lee Riley- "Pearly Lee" Deke Dickerson- "Little Innocent" Dale Hawkins- "Little Pig"   Music bed- Marco Di Maggio- "Silver Moon"   Ike Turner & His Kings Of Rhythm (feat. Jackie Brenston) You've Got To Lose Robert Gordon :60 Album spot- I'm Coming Home Everly Brothers- "High Heel Sneakers" Tammy Lynne & Myles High- "Good Rockin' Tonight"   Stray Cats- "Double Talkin' Baby" Wanda Jackson- "Funnel Of Love"   Music bed- Glen Campbell- "12 String Special"   Roy Orbison- "Rockhouse" Roy Orbison- "You're My Baby"   Outro music bed- Eddie Angel- "Roughshod"  

Viva Las Vegas is happening this weekend, April 17-20th.  Stay tuned next week for a special edition of the Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour as we will focus on interviews and music with artists appearing at the event.   Artists on the show next week include Lloyd Price, Imelda May, Robert Gordon, Kim Lenz & The Jaquars, Los Straitjackets, The Rockats, The Trashmen, The Reach Around Rodeo Clowns, Crazy Cavan & The Rhythm Rockers, Sonny Burgess and more!!

Larry gets lost in a convention of Elvis impersonators at an Indian casino and, not surprisingly, has the time of life.  Is Larry losing the battle of the wills? Find out in this week's HAMPER UPDATE! And what do goofy guards in South Africa have to do with Sonny Burgess and the Legendary Pacers? Listen in and find out! Nominum quid geminus!? Quote of the week: "She knew I was, what's the word...lying."

The Preacher meets Sonny Burgess and Bobby Crafford from the Pacers

New The Masterminds, Arooj Aftab, Kamasi Washington, Eddie VEdder, Spoon + The Wailin Jennys, Etta James, The Waterboys, Thievery Corp, Chambers Bros, Beyonce, Sonny Burgess... Birthdays for Peter Tork, Tim Buckley, Peter Gabriel