BIOGRAPHIES
Alphabetical order by the last name of the Artist
 
Artists E - F
 
- Earls, Jack -
- Edwards, David ''Honeyboy'' -
- Elven Parr's In The Groove -
- Emerson, Billy ''The Kid'' -
- Enlow, Thurman "'Ted'' -
- Estes, Sleepy John -
- Evangelist Gospel Singers Of Alabama -
- Evans, Jimmy -
 
- Fakes, Roger -
- Fay, Hannah -
- Feathers, Charlie -
- Felts, Narvel -
- Five Tinos, The -
- Forbes, Graham -
- Foster, Chuck (Orchestra) -
- Frank, Harmonica -
- Frost, Frank -
- Fowler, Wally -
 
© - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
EARLS, JACK - was born August 23, 1932, in railroad town Woodbury, Tennessee, a rural   community about 50 miles southeast of Nashville. It was, and still is to some extent, Uncle   Dave Macon (1870-1952) territory. In fact, the famous 'Dixie Dewdrop.' banjo picker, singer,   veteran of vaudeville and arguably the first country music star of the WSM Barn Dance (later   known as Grand Ole Opry) was a neighbor of the Earls household and a welcome visitor during Jack's early childhood.
 
During visits, Macon liked to gather everyone to participate in a round of songs. When it   came time for the boy hiding beneath the porch to sing with ''Muleskinner Blues'' and   other songs from his mother. Mrs Earls was her son's singing teacher early on.
 
Some of   Macon's delivery also left a mark on Earl's style. Both Earl's and Macon's vocals have been   described in print as aggressive or even primitive, but how can those terms (especially the   latter) be taken seriously when these men had been singing for a lifetime before their   recording careers began? Macon gathered his songs and cultivated his public persona   during the late 1800s, and Earls' mother grew up in the early 1900s - decades before the introduction of over-the-counter electronic microphones and amplification. One can only   imagine the hair-raising, expressive voices of their 19'h century mentors.
 
Out in the country - years before he settled in Memphis - Earls harvested a variety of   experiences. His father, an army veteran wounded during service, died before Earls could   get to know him. He grew up with two brothers, four half-brothers and one sister on a   farm. When Earls was seven years old, his older brother Richard, who worked in a   Chattanooga cotton mill, took him in for a while. By age 13 he was back home and finished   with school. With his brother Herb, Earls worked at the Uselton farm near Manchester.   During the mid-1940s —breakout years for Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys — the Earls boys, together with two Uselton sons, often performed bluegrass and country songs while   passing a hat outside the Manchester courthouse.
 
When a traveling carnival invaded the outskirts of town, Earls ran away with the troupe to   work as a sideshow ''wild boy.'' Curious customers paid a coin to enter a dimly lit tent and   peer past a partition to observe a dark pit with a shallow pool of water containing a   disheveled wild man and a wild boy wrestling a dozen fake alligators and one real baby   gator. ''My brother Herb told me I'd better not leave with the carnival. but when night   come, I was gone. I left town with the show, and my mom didn't know where I was at, for a longtime'', said Earls. After a week or two of beating up stuffed gators for hamburgers the   wild duo quit the carnival. Relying on handouts and the Salvation Army for food and   shelter, they hitchhiked out to Chattanooga, where an uncle promptly sent Earls home. It   was Richard who picked him up from the farm again, and delivered him to Memphis around   1949.
 
In 1950 he got married and attempted a move to Detroit that didn't take. After Earls   returned to Memphis, he and his wife set up house in a neighborhood where music was a   common pastime for many residents. ''Bill Black lived two streets over from me," said   Earls. Johnny Black, Bill's brother - lived there, Scotty Moore lived around the corner, and   Elvis's house was right behind mine''.
 
Outside of work; he played music infrequently with friends and family. At the end of a late   shift., Earls often took his guitar into the back seat of his car, sang and vented whatever   ideas came to his mind. By the time he and five other guitar pickers entered the studio of   the Memphis Recording Service in the summer of 1955, Earls had several self-written   songs waiting to be heard.
 
The Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue was located a few minutes' walk   from the Earls' home. Just out of high school, Elvis Presley (1935-1977) had gone to the   recording service in 1953 to cut a demonstration disk. He imagined he might attract the   attention of the owner. Sam C. Phillips (1923-2003),. who also ran a little label called Sun   Records from the building. In 1954; Phillips got around to calling him back, and his first   record was released in July (SUN 209 ''That's All Right''/''Blue Moon Of Kentucky'').
 
Presley's success with Sun astonished Earls who didn't care for ''That's All Right'' when he   first heard it. Hank Williams had been gone less than two years, and was still Earls' favorite   singer.
 
Presley's early records inspired controversy, love, and even hate from listeners. However,   as steady sales led to more and better gigs for Presley and his band-mates, guitarist Scotty   Moore and bassist Bill Black, growing numbers of country musicians in the neighborhood -   and soon, from beyond Memphis - cut demo records at the little studio in hopes that   Phillips would produce a release for them on Sun.
 
Phillips, who started the Sun label almost exclusively with blues artists, felt that he helped   Presley deliver something unique to the world. with his particular blend of country, pop and   rock and roll music. Phillips was also enthusiastic about drawing out spontaneous   performances from musicians who could deliver the sound of pure emotion. Presley's   regional success encouraged Phillips to look for other local musicians with a new mixed-up style. Carl Perkins (1932-1998), another bakery employee (Colonial Bakery in Jackson),   arrived with his rockin' honky tonk band in late 1954. Johnny Cash (1932-2003) and the   Tennessee Two made their first Sun recordings during the spring of 1955.
 
By 1955, country musicians found the studio inviting and the locals turned it, as well as   the restaurant next door, into a busy gathering place. Johnny Black, who had known   Presley when they were teenagers in high school, moved back to Memphis from Corpus   Christi after he heard Presley's first Sun record (and recognized his brother's bass playing   on it). Black and Earls both wound up working at the Colonial Bakery in town. Black's   enthusiasm for the new music helped Earls make up his mind to audition for Phillips at the  Memphis Recording Service.
"Johnny Black and I went down there with five or six other guys. and one crippled man   who played mandolin,'' said Earls. They paid ten dollars for two performances to be etched   into the sides of an acetate disk. "One of em was ''A Fool For Lovin' You''. 'I had that song   written by then. Sam wasn't there at the time, but Marion Keisker, the office secretary   said ''I love your voice. Why don't you come back and see Sam''?
 
Earls and Black returned with the record and their guitars in hand, and Phillips liked Earls'   voice and his songs, "He said before we started to cut anything, we needed to lose the   band and put together a new one.
 
He said, 'That band ain't worth a shit', "said Earls, Black   switched from guitar to bass and recruited his friends Danny Wahlquist for drums and take   off guitarist Warren Gregory, who also drove a truck. "Warren used to park his truck and   take naps during his shift." said Earls. "He had a little sign he'd put in the window while he   slept that read. Genius at work''.
 
In 1994, Gregory visited Earls. He told me that he grew up picking country and jazz. but   developed an appetite for the blues. "I used to visit W C. Handy (1873-1958) at his house   in Memphis."said Gregory, although this strains credibility as Handy moved from Memphis   to New York in 1917, "We'd sit on his front porch and play music together'', said Gregory. ''  Back in them early days, all of us rock and rollers didn't have nothing. and we all   supported each other. If anyone needed some help in nightclubs or in the studio - even if   it meant pushing a broom - we helped each other out''.
 
After cashing his royalty check, Earls bought a new Indian Chief motorcycle. "I got it out   there on Poplar Avenue ... They brought it out and showed me how to ride it. I'd ride that   thing for a little while, and then the motor would quit. Man, I rode that thing for hours,   until/got to where t could ride it pretty good. My wife was working at a potato chips   company, and I picked her up and brought her home. Then I wound up buying a Harley   from the same place where Elvis bought his''.
 
The band worked for a while at Sleepy Eyed John's Bon Air Club, and eventually found   steady employ at the Palms club on Summer Avenue. "We worked there for about six   years. Friends used to come and sit in with us all the time. People like Bill Black, Charlie   Feathers, Billy Riley, Bud Deckelman ... The Palms was a bottle club, where you'd bring in   your own bottle and they'd sell ice and setups. We played three or four nights a   week."Earls also visited and sat in with other bands, including Eddie Bond's at his club out   on Highway 51.
 
The studio was an exciting place to visit day or night because "Sam was always wantin to   get something goin' - somethin' new''. Earls and the band continued to record demos of   songs that he wrote without the aid of paper, while driving his bakery truck or during   solitary late nights in his Buick. ''I never wrote anything down ... Back then, I had more   sons than knew what to do with'', he said. ''Sometimes me and Johnny Black used to go to   the studio and record stuff for Sam's wife. She was on the radio''. In 1955. Phillips helped  launch WHER Radio in Memphis. The on-air staff was composed entirely of women,  including Phillips' wife.
 
Around 1963, Jack Earls started playing music at a club called the Wagon Wheel east of   Memphis, in Millington. He and a friend bought the place soon after they started working   there. "It was a bottle club, and I kept it open all night long. When I could see the sun   coming, then I closed the doors! After the bars shut down in Memphis. everyone would   come out to the Wagon Wheel, and we packed the place. Different people used to come   out to my club and sit in with the band. Gene Simmons, Bobby Wood - I bought a blue  Cadillac from Bobby Wood, once. Smokey Joe Baugh played with us. He had that  ''Signifying Monkey'' (on Sun)''. When the work began to feel like a grind, Earls sold the   club and moved to Detroit in 1966. He drove a truck hauling auto parts and concentrated   on helping his wife raise their family.
 
Around 1970, Earls took his guitar to Fortune Records on Third Street in Detroit. Owner   Jack Brown helped Earls cut demos of five songs onto an acetate disk, but a release by the   company was never worked out. Earls started playing in Detroit-area clubs at night. In   1973, he made a deal with Ry-Ho Records in Romulus, based in a storefront at Grant and   Goddard roads.
 
Tennessee-born singer and bandleader Loyd (Lloyd) Howell (1932-2008), who, with bassist   Don Rye (d. 2007), owned the Ry-Ho studio and record label, booked country music talent   shows in Detroit with Ry-Ho Records as sponsor. Ry-Ho recording contracts were given as   prizes to the winners. Howell was the same man who cut a rockin' version of ''Little Froggy   Went A-Courtin''', for the Nashville label (a Starday subsidiary) in 1961, as well as singles   on Fortune with his band the Brite Stars, like ''Don't Hang Around'' and ''Truck Driving  Jack'' (on Fortune subsidiary Hi-Q).
 
Earls purchased a package where he cut two songs with the Ry-Ho studio band (the Brite   Stars), and Howell and Rye pressed 45rpm records of the results. A new Earls original,   ''Mississippi Man'', was chosen to back ''Take Me To That Place'' (which first saw the light of   day on this record). Howell's son Jeff remembered playing electric bass on ''Take Me To   That Place'', along with Phil Cutrell on drums, Frank Childs on lead guitar and his sisters   Vicki Dianne and Pamela Jo singing backup. An unidentified pianist from local country  singer Alice Faye's band played on both sides. Don Rye played bass on ''Mississippi Man'', on   which Earls revealed his affinity for Merle Haggard's songs with his vocal. Compared to his   Sun recordings, Earls' singing on his Ry-Ho disk revealed a more confident and controlled   delivery. The record made it evident that Earls was keeping up with trends in country   music. ''It turned out pretty good'', said Earls. "I ordered several hundred records and sold   them all''.
 
He hired on at Chrysler around the same time, and stuck with the company through his   retirement 30 years later. At night, Earls played country music peppered with 1950s rock   and roll with a band he fronted. Sometimes his oldest son would join him on drums. Native   Michigander and songwriter Marshall Crenshaw played bass with Earls for a while. Detroitbred   country and rockabilly singer Don Rader (19372004) teamed up with Earls in the   clubs as well. "Me and Don Rader used to play at VFWs (Veterans of Foreign Wars] and Eagles, all kinds of different (social] halls'', said Earls. ''We used to have CB coffee breaks.   There was three of us who'd put them together I had the band, and one would take care of   the door and one would take care of the bar. We`d rent a club at 21 Mile Road and Van   Dyke, and it was ... a bunch of CBers having a coffee break, but it was really a beer   break ... We'd rent a hall, get kegs of beer and potato chips, and get someone to watch   the car's. (We would) do it once or twice a month mew. Everybody was CBing then, you know, everybody was on the radio''.
 
One day in 1975, Earls received a phone call from Gary Thompson, then living in Warren.   He knew about Earls from European rockabilly compilation albums of Sun recordings, as   well as the Ry-Ho single, which he discovered in a friend's collection. ''My daughters sister-in-  law was watching Gary Thompson's kids, and had given her one of the Ry-Ho records.   Gary was going through her records... and he found mine. He said. 'Where'd you get this   record? She said. 'That's my sister-in-laws dad. He told her., This guy made recordings on   Sun Records!' ... Then Gary wanted to know if I'd put out more records with him, so I did.   He was putting up the Money and he paid me so much (per song) every time he put out an   album. ''Flip, Flop And Fly'' was the first song we done. I was half-asleep when we cut that,   and so was the band!"
 
After collecting and selling records since the 1960s, Thompson opened a used record shop   in St. Clair Shores in 1972. Upon meeting Earls and Rader in 1975, he was inspired to start   the Olympic Records company and began issuing new recordings by Earls and Rader, which   led to Thompson reissuing rockabilly sides by Michigan-based artists, as well as other hardto-  find 1950s rock and roll music. Earls' first Olympic trial, recorded live in the basement   of Rader's house, yielded a knockout version of Joe Turner's ''Flip, Flop And Fly'' and Piano   Red's ''She Sure Can Rock Me''. "Johnny Clark played that fast guitar'', said Earls. "Lee Sloan was thumping around on an upright bass because he didn't know how to play it''.   Drummer Ace Avery and pianist Tom Stewart rounded out the sound. Although Thompson   advertised the recordings as having a 1950s sound. Clark's fierce guitar style could have   suited any late 1960s garage band. "I was driving for Chrysler, and I had drove all night ...   Don had a little bitty basement and we couldn't get a real good sound, but Gary put it out.
 
Then we cut at Sound Patterns, out on Grand River. Big studio. They put out television   programs and everything out there''. ''She Sure Can Rock Me'' was cut both in Rader's   basement and at Sound Patterns. ''The good cut was done at Sound Patterns'', said Earls.   ''Then we cut down in my basement, when I got my studio together (in 1977). We cut ''Roll   Over Beethoven'' one Sunday morning, and on the same day we cut, ''Call Me Shorty''. ' The   former is the well-known Chuck Berry rock and roll anthem. The latter was a rocker Earls picked up while living in Memphis. ''Everybody did that song'', he said, including Jerry Lee   Lewis' cousin Mickey Gilley, who recorded it for Dot Records in 1958. (Although Gilley   lived in East Texas, evidence of visits to Memphis during the late 1950s was caught on tape   at the Sun studio, where Gilley out a few demos.)
 
His recordings from this period showed that Earls, like a true stylist, conjured new life into   the songs he chose. His singing had matured since his days in Memphis, to a level where he   could sing with perfect control of his voice. And a ghost of Sam Phillips' influence was   evident in Earls' constant efforts to come with new approaches to the old songs he remade.
 
Earls continued his work/music way of life through the 1980s while cultivating his children   as they grew into musicians who followed his example. Around 1987, three of his sons   helped him record Gene Vincent's 1956 hit ''Be-Bop-A Lula'' in his basement studio.   Although he wasn't releasing new recordings, Earls still received occasional offers to   perform overseas. He consistently turned down invitations to perform in Europe, citing   responsibilities to his family and job. With some prodding from Don Rader and fellow Sun   recording artist and Detroit producer Johnny Powers, in 1996 Earls accepted an invitation   to headline at the ''Hemsby Rock And Roll Weekender'' in England. He was overwhelmed by   the reception he received. "They treated me like the second coming of Elvis'', exclaimed a   grateful man who had witnessed the first. Much like Sleepy Eyed John's little bulldog   winning a tug-o-war game by pulling the rag free and landing upsite-down on his back.   Earls was astonished when the audience called for several encores. ''I guess I'm in demand   now, overseas'', he said. ''I get two or three offers a year. I'll keep doing it as long as I can   give it everything I got''.
 
In 1999, guitarist Marv Weyer, a Pontiac native who worked a long career from the late   1950s with Tamla and Hi-Q recording artists Nick & The Jaguars, to Barbara Mandrell in   California and Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s, to Eddie Jackson and Swannee Caldwell in   Detroit, asked Earls to contribute a song to an album he was producing. Like a seasoned   blues singer, Earls came up with an idea for ''I Started Rockin' A Long Time Ago'', and then   assembled the lyrics while in front of the microphone, started rockin' down in Memphis,  Tennessee Yeah,
 
I started rockin' down in Memphis. Tennessee, Yeah,
I started rockin' down in Memphis, Tennessee-born
And old Sam Phillips seen a little song in me
He said, 'Son, you're lookin' fine,
Sign it right there on the dotted line
Come on baby, let's make some history'
 
The band included all the members of the Big Barn Combo, a rockabilly quartet that I sang   for, plus Marv Weyer on lead guitar. We had figured out a method of using one microphone   to record Weyer's tunes, and we used the same setup with Earls. He sat on a stool in front   of the mike with my old flattop guitar. and the gates to Memphis country rock and roll   heaven opened wide. In person. Earls communicated the overall feeling he wanted to the   band by using his voice and moving his body, resulting in a punchy, yet loose performance,   filling the room with crackling energy and echoes of my favorite Sun records of 1954 to   1957. Earls really had started rockin' a long time ago, and he made us feel it in our bones.   It was the most exciting recording session I'd witnessed. It also resulted in one of the best   performances on Weyer's album. We recorded a warm-up performance of ''Rock Bop''   (a.k.a. ''Let's Bop'') to check recording levels, placement of musicians in the room, etc.   Earls took both tracks overseas, and sold them on a Stompertime 45rpm extended-play  record at his European concerts.
 
His recordings with Sweden's Sleazy Rustic Boys appeared on subsequent releases for   Eviken Records (a 45rpm single, and an album/compact disc). Songs included new originals   like ''My Little Mama'' and ''Tribute To Carl Perkins'', to old originals like ''Game Of Love''   and ''Comin' Back Home'', and surprising remakes. like a vocal of Bill Doggett's ''Honky   Tonk''.
 
Since the release of his Sun recordings during the 1970s and 1 980s, the influence of Earls'   music has been felt across a worldwide spectrum of fans of vintage Sun Records. Among   more recent examples found stateside, the Gravediggers, a psychobilly band from   California, cut a break-teeth version of ''Let's Bop'' (future Fly-Rite Boy Wally Hersom   played on it) in 1985; California roots band the Paladins injected some blues into ''Slow   Down'' on a 1986 album, In 2000, the Big Barn Combo remade ''Sign On The Dotted Line''  for an album, and backed Earls at the Rockabilly Rebel Weekender in Indianapolis, his first   festival booking in the U.S. Better-publicized tributes followed in 2005, when Stray Cats   guitarist/crooner Brian Setzer cut an instrumental arrangement of ''Slow Down''. and then   a vocal of the same song for a live album released in 2007.
 
With a supportive family who cherish his music yet keep him grounded, Earls keeps   himself busy. As a result of his early schooling in song, and forsaking the grind of a fulltime   singing career, he mastered and preserved his soulful voice - a captivating, uniquely   American voice that breathes new life into echoes from the previous two centuries.
 
At the time they were recorded, most of his Sun efforts weren't ready for public release.   Now we can listen to this collection and catch sparks of excitement in Jack Earls' early   experiences from within the thick of Memphis rock and roll; we can witness his later   studio trials, cheer on his dogged tug on the rag of destiny, and celebrate his many rounds   of play. Now, let's bop this one!
 
Jack Earls still lives in suburban Detroit, repairs old vehicles and lawn mowers to resell, and writes rock and roll songs.
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
EDWARDS, DAVID ''HONEYBOY''  - David Edwards was born on June 28, 1915, in Shaw,   Mississippi, is one of the few remaining original practitioners of the acoustic Delta blues   style. His father, a farmer, played guitar and violin at dances and in clubs, but Edwards   seems to have received his first music lessons from a brother-in-law, James Davis. He drew   from many local influences - notably Charley Patton and the Mississippi Sheiks, whom he   often watched - and he worked the streets and juke joints with Tommy McClennan, Big Joe  Williams, Yank Rachell, Walter Horton, and others.
 
Like Johnny Shines, after his rediscovery, Edwards spent much of his time being   interviewed about his brief acquaintance with Robert Johnson, with whom he played in   the Greenwood area, and was with on the night that Robert Johnson was poisoned.
 
He first recorded in 1942 when he cut some fifteen sides for Alan Lomax and the Library   of Congress: these recordings reveal a raw, exciting singer and guitarist. A lifelong rambler   and busker, Edwards turned up next in Houston in 1951 where he made his first   commercial recordings (billed as "Mr. Honey") for The American Record Company, alongside   pianist Thunder Smith. The following year - as we know - he was in Memphis where he cut   "Sweet Home Chicago", which he re-recorded in Chicago a year later for Chess Records  (although neither version was released at the time). By the mid-1950s he'd settled in  Chicago where he quickly assimilated into the local scene, playing street corners and small   clubs, and he recorded again for Chess Records in 1964.
 
During the sixties and seventies, still in Chicago, he worked with men like Walter Horton,   Johnny Temple, Kansas City Red, Floyd Jones, and others, making occasional forays to The   South - and in the 1970s and 1980s he graduated to the major Festivals, touring Europe   and Japan, and resuming a sporadic recording career. Despite his advanced age he   continues to perform regularly worldwide, still playing authentic solo country blues, a   living testament to the music's vitality. And whilst age has diminished his his attack, his   voice was still strong and his playing accurate and forceful.
 
On July 17, 2011, his manager Michael Frank announced that Edwards would be retiring   due to ongoing health issues.   On August 29, 2011, Edwards died at his home, of congestive heart failure, at around 3   a.m. According to events listings on the Metromix Chicago website, Edwards had been   scheduled to perform at noon that day, at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium  Park. (CE)
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©

ELVEN PARR'S IN THE GROOVE BOYS - Although born in Osceola, Arkansas on July 26, 1925, L.V. ''Elven'' Parr eventually moved to Seattle, and was interviewed there late in life by Mark Dalton and Mike Lynch. ''My dad ran a cotton gin for many years'', Parr said in 1996. ''He played piano, and I was exposed to all kinds of music growing up. I didn't listen to that much blues when I was a child''. 

''I sang in the church choir, and was in a gospel quartet as a teenager. I got into some trouble with the law as a young man, and I really picked up on the guitar while I was in prison. I didn't have much to do but practice, and I had music books and teachers there too.  I had a few guys I could play guitar with, who would show me different things playing, and I began to like it when I was playing with them''. 

''Guys would teach me this and that and I was very into listening. I started playing professionally in 1950. We had a band in Osceola called the In The Groove and we were on the radio every day at 3:00 p.m. on KOSE. We had guitar, piano, and drums. We did our own show and also backed up special guests. I started going to Memphis regularly. I had a hotel gig there, and would go out on the road with various bands and singers that needed a guitar player. The hotel owned by a guy named Sunbeam Mitchell, who was also a music promoter. During this period I played with Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, Johnny Ace, and Percy Mayfield. There were so many guys I played with.. I was working all the time back then''.
 
Singer and pianist, Eddie Snow told Brian Baumgarter that he encountered the In The Groove Boys in 1949 in Osceola,  Arkansas, whose chief claim to   fame would appear to be that their other frontline vocalist was one Albert Nelson - who of   course went on to become Albert King. Snow fronted Parr's Boys for some ten years, playing   in clubs and juke joints such as M.C. Reeder's T-99, and he also organised their radio  broadcasts on Osceola's KOSE radio station, and their stints backing B.B. King on WDIA. 
 
By all accounts Snow's two hot live numbers were "Box Car Shortly's Blues" and "Pistol   Pete's Boogie", although it seems odd that he recorded neither title for Sun Records. Eddie Snow had first attracted Sam Phillips' attention when he played the latter several acetate dubs they'd cut in Chicago: the Boys were duly invited along to 706 Union Avenue where they recorded (at least) two sessions in 1952 and 1954, although nothing was released at   the time. By then, both Parr and Snow had moved to Cairo, Illinois with the group. Parr was logged among Billy The Kid Emerson's backing group for a Sun session in 1954, the year that Fenton Robinson replaced him in the group for a time. Robinson had been mentored by L.V., a fact that Robinson confirmed.
 
After several years in Cairo, Parr moved on again. ''I came out to Seattle in 1959'', he said. ''I got into trouble with the law again, and was basically paroled to my dad, who was living out here by then. I played all over the Northwest when I got here. Things were jumping. I played with all the local guys, most everyone in town at one time or another. Jimi Hendrix used to come around. He was just a kid then. He'd ask me to show him this and that''. And this too, apparently, is true. Reports from Seattle have Parr playing a wide range of music: blues, swing, standards, and even a little reggae. 
 
By the time Dalton and Lynch interviewed him, he was living in the First Hill Care Center in Seattle, where he died on May 15, 1997. A belated obituary in the Seattle Post Intelligencer hinted at a lonely existence for many of his years in the Northwest: ''When Parr - who suffered through years of homelessness and low-income living - died at 71 from complications of diabetes last May, his obituary was a solitary song drifting into anonymous night''. (CE)
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
EMERSON, BILLY ''THE KID'' - William Robert Emerson was born on 21 December 1925 in   Tarpon Springs on Florida's gulf coast. During the early 1930s, his mother encouraged him to   sing in church and he says he can barely recall a time when he wasn't singing. But, he  underlined to researcher Jim O'Neal: "My mother never sang any blues, never sang any   around me. The only way I could hear a blues was from extra gang guys railroad repair   workers - or somebody come round singing a Bessie Smith song'', he said. ''A lady had an old   graphaphone and she had a lot of blues records - Doctor Clayton, Memphis Minnie, Tampa   Red, Hutterbeans and Susie''.
 
Billy told, matter of factly that "my family always were musicians'', and that his father   played piano: "I got into music through him and through my uncle, John Hannon (or   Hannah), who was a church pianist but used to play a little boogie-woogie''.   Then he   started listening to his next door neighbour, a man named 'Shine' who had played with the   minstrel shows: "I used to watch Shine play the blues all the time when I was young. This   was in the 1940s. Shine knew all the old classic blues''. It seems that these informal   lessons took the place of the more formal lessons Billy's mother planned for him, but   which he had no patience for at that time. The official lessons cost a quarter, but 'a   quarter was hard to come by because it was during the Depression''.
 
The process of thinking back to the 1930s and 1940s animated his conversation. He   emphasised: "What inspired me, mostly, was the blues. And I was born right into the   boogie era and the swing-jazz. Lunceford and Chick Webb and those guys. Louis Jordan,   too, I was influenced by him and I liked his performing style a lot''. On the same theme,   Billy told Jim O'Neal: "When I was a kid, the blues singer that / really liked better than   anybody else was Buddy Johnson, Buddy and Ella Johnson. They were the most   unbelievable group that I've ever known in the field. He had his own style of doing them,  and Ella had her own style of singing too. I was about 14 and I heard their song called ''This   Life Just Ain't Worth Living Without The One You Love'' and I say. You know what? If I ever   get to be a singer I want to sing the blues like that''.
 
Emerson's planned career as a blues singer was put on hold in April 1943 when he found   himself in the Navy helping the war effort. He served for three years, shore-based within   the U.S.A. The good side of this time was that there was always a piano somewhere on the   naval bases: ''...so I learned how to play fairly well while I was in the service''.
 
When he got out the service in 1946, Emerson took the opportunity to finish High School   in Clearwater and to sing with a band led by Mickey Maxwell. Then he joined what he   called ''a little old four or five piece band '' back home in Tarpon Springs. He told me:   ''That was when I really took up the piano. My first jobs were when I was still going school,   in 1946. They were with a jazz trumpeter back home, the Billy Battles Band''. Although   Emerson was not very experienced, this was nevertheless a serious band; Billy Battles had   played trumpet with Lucky Millinder's band, drummer Solomon Hall had worked with   Lionel Hampton's band, and the other members, George Battles, Willie Lyons, James   Thomas and Henry Mathis, all had to teach Billy.
 
Music was not the young Emerson's only talent though. The years 1948 to 1951 found him   in college at Florida A&M on a football and sports scholarship. According to Billy, he was   "quite an athlete in those days.'
 
Nevertheless he continued his musical education, playing with the George Cooper Band in   St Petersburg at the High Stepper club, singing with Manzy Harris and with Charlie   Brantley, whose band recorded on King Records. The St Petersburg area produced many   top class musicians, some of whom like Oscar Dennard and Frank Foster went on to play   with nationally known big bands. Billy remembered: "I saw all the bands, Louis Jordan. Roy   Milton. I saw Wynonie Harris and Roy Brown. I was singing those Wynonie Harris songs in St Petersburg. I was hollerin', People used to say on a clear night you could hear me clear   across the bay in Tampa''.
 
For a while, Billy had his own band in St Petersburg at the Corral Drive In. He told Jim   O'Neal, "The man bought us uniforms and he bought us these pistols and cowboy hats and   everything so we could look like the waitresses – this was a white place, you know. When   we'd get off at night, we'd still he dressed up in these uniforms, and everybody'd holler   'Here comes Billy The Kid'. And the name just stuck''.
 
By the early 1950s, Billy considered himself a professional musician, but he knew he was   still learning a lot, particularly from a pianist who later joined the Lionel Hampton band:   "Dwike Mitcheli taught me practically the style that I play. I/ used to go over to his house   all the time, every day in the summer of 1952. I did learn a few things from Oscar   Dennard, too. You know, those two lived only 20 miles apart. We were all in the same   Baptist Union together.
 
The same year. Emerson found himself back in the forces helping with the Korean war   effort. He was in the Air Force for a year, stationed mainly in Mississippi. He continued to   look for opportunities to play music and it was there that he met a very different   character who would have a significant influence on his musical direction. He told me, "On   November 25. 1952. This was when I met Ike Turner. I was stationed in Greenville,   Mississippi and Ike Turner was from Clarksdale and would let me sit in with him and Little   Milton and I started to play with Ike's Kings Of Rhythm band when they were in Greenville''. Emerson was discharged in September 1953. He went back to Florida, "and   soon after that Ike's band came on a tour down there. They were at Sarasota one time and   Ike got sick so I took over in the band and Ike asked me to join the Kings full-time. I went   up to Clearwater and joined them there''. He elaborated on this to Jim O'Neal, confirming   that Ike was playing down around Bradenton, Florida for promoter Buddy May. Not only   was Ike sick but his wife and pianist, Bonnie, had left him. Apparently, Turner told Buddy   May that Emerson was based in Florida and to get him to finish out the engagement. Billy   recalled. ''I was playing guitar at the time. The band was Jesse Knight, Willie Sims, and   Johnny O'Neal. I brought the band back to Mississippi where Ike was. Ike was still sick and   so I stayed on and played with therm. The man who was really responsible for me   becoming a professional singer was Ike Turner. Ike was truly the one that showed me  technique in singing, and he taught me how to deliver. Not only how to, but how not to.   He taught me to project myself instead of projecting Fats Domino or Roy Brown.
 
Although Billy Emerson spent a lot of time in Mississippi and Memphis through the latter part   of 1953 and the first half of 1954, and would return for periods during the next few years,   he never became an integral part of the local music scene there. He has described playing   not only with the Turner band but also with other musicians including Dennis Binder and Earl   Hooker, and he told that he played at least one show on Beale Street: ''Il didn't play too  much in Memphis, you know. When it did, I played the big Hippodrome on Beale, a dance   hall". He also told that he was in Memphis as a stepping stone; he knew he could get himself   on records there, but he didn't see it as his real base. In the summer of 1954, he travelled to   Chicago with Dennis Binder, Bob Prindell and Bobby Fields, staying briefly and returning   south to collect singer Billy Gayles. Then, "We went to Cairo, Illinois and picked up Charles  Smitty Smith, Luther Taylor, and Bennie Moore there. We had a band at the Club Playtime in  Cairo, and we put that band together and we came to Chicago with it''.
 
By November 1955. the time of the last Sun session, Sam Phillips had noted in his logs that   Emerson had left his Cairo address. and he listed instead three Chicago addresses as   contact points, first one on Prairie, then on 55th Place, and finally Ellis Street. He may or   may not have known that on 22 November that same month, while he was still under   contract to Sun. Billy had already made a session in Chicago for Vee-Jay Records. This was   to be the start of some pretty convoluted recording wrangles surrounding Emerson over   the coming years.
 
According to Billy, he had been in Chicago in the early summer of 1955, working at a club   at 55' and Prairie, owned by Frank Taylor, and When It Rains had been out for some time.   He said: "I went by VJ which was on 45th and Cottage at that time, and t asked Calvin   Carter there 'Can I look at some of your 'Billboards' to check what if was doing? He saw   'When It Rains' listed in Dallas and New Orleans and so on Carter said 'Man that record's   been out a long time and everybodys looking for the guy who recorded it'. Say. 'there's a reward out for Billy The Kid'''. Emerson went out on tour for the summer but remembered this exchange after his last, apparently acrimonious, dealings with Sam Phillips in   November. ''By December 1955 my contract with Sam was out. I called up Ewart Abner at   Vee-Jay and said 'If you give me S1000 I'll sign with you'. So they brought me in and   recorded me''.
 
After recording for several smaller labels, he formed his own Tarpon Records in 1966,   releasing Denise LaSalle's debut single as well as his own records. He also continued to   play in clubs and on European blues tours. In 2005 he was reported as having a church in   Oak Park, Illinois, as Reverence William R. Emerson. Emerson was inducted in the   Rockabilly Hall of Fame. (MH)
 
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ENLOW, THURMAN ''TED'' - was born on October 4, 1927 in West Memphis, Arkansas but grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi. He was in the Air Force from 1946 until 1949, and moved to Nettleton, Mississippi with Shirley Kelleberg, whom he married that year. From there, they went to Memphis. He started playing with Hugh Jeffries and it was there that he met Johnny Bernero. Jeffries was missing a drummer one night and got Bernero's name off the AFM list. The combo played a lot of dates around Memphis until Enlow's day job took him out of town in 1957. 
 
Ted Enlow returned to Memphis in 1960 and left again as a solo performer in 1962. He played cocktail lounges across the States before settling in Indianapolis. He returned to Memphis again in 1984 after learning that he had cancer.
 
His vocal style was light years away from the current trend in 1956 but it is easy to see why Bernero and his other fellow musicians rated him so highly. Johnny Bernero and Thurman Enlow were a class act, caught out of time. Their contribution to Memphis music is largely under-rated but the western swing-influenced style that they played has survived to sound better and better with the passing years.
 
In the early 1960s, Thurman Enlow left Memphis. ''I worked all over the country from September 1962 until 1972, working in nightclubs. Then, in 1971, I got a job in a music store in Indianapolis. I finally came home a year or so back (1985). My sister lives here. We're the only ones left from our family. And in May 1983 they told me I had cancer and only had six or eight months to live. Right now the cancer has gone out of my bones but it's still in my prostate'', he said.   Thurman Enlow died in Memphis on December 26, 1986.
 
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ESTES, SLEEPY JOHN - John Adam Estes was born (or so he claimed) shortly after the turn of  the century in the countryside near Ripley, Tennessee. However, it seems likely that he was  older - 1899 is a more probably date - although his farming background is not in question. On his application for Social Security, he gave his birthday as January 25, 1900 but on his World War I draft card it was given as January 28, 1900. Later in life, he'd often quote 1904 as his year of birth.
 
Aged six, he   lost the sight in his right eye as the result of an accident in his youth with playing bassball, and then like many  others he turned to music to escape the back-breaking drudgery of sharecropping, built cigar box guitars and played at house parties. His nickname stemmed from a blood pressure disorder that led to fits of narcolepsy. He would literally fall asleep on his feet.
 
In 1915, the family moved to Brownsville, Tennessee, where he met mandolist James Yank Rachell.   John Estes migrated to Memphis in search of a living, where worked with various partners -   notably mandolin-player Yank Rachell and harmonica/jugblower Hammie Nixon - on the   fringes of the jug-band circuit. His exceptional talent came to the attentions of Victor   Records and in September 1929 their regional scout Ralph Peer recorded him in Memphis. 
 
Together with his son-in-law, harmonica player Hammie Nixon, Estes moved to Chicago in 1931, but didn't record again until 1935. Two standards emerged from those 1935 Decca sessions, ''Drop Down Mama'' and ''Some Day Baby Blues'' (aka ''Worried Life Blues'', a song usually credited to Big Maceo Merriweather, who recorded it in 1941). 
 
His   recording career was abruptly terminated by the Depression, and he left Chicago, but he continued hoboing   around the South, jumping trains and playing on street corners for loose change. He next   recorded for Decca Records in 1935 - where he first cut all those marvellous songs about  characters in Brownsville - after which his success was more or less assured, and he   continued recording regularly for Decca and Bluebird until 1941, many of his richly lyrical   songs passing into the repertoire of other bluesmen.
 
We tent to focus upon the recording sessions because they're precisely documented and left tangible assets, but they were only a sidebar to Estes life. World War II shellac restrictions curtailed blues recordings, and put Estes' recording career on hold while wartime gasoline rationing curtailed his travel. He returned to sharecropping in Brownsville, although he recorded some unreleased sides for Ora-Nelle Records in Chicago around 1947.
 
Post-war he continued traveling and playing until the loss of his sight in his left eye in   1949 - thus rendering him totally blind - laid him low, but he eventually picked up and   began working again in Memphis, where he naturally drew the attentions of Sam Phillips.  Both Estes and his long-term sidekick Nixon claim that they had to pay Phillips' to record   them, but Sam's files indicate that the harmonica player on Estes' session was Lee Crisp, so  their recollection may well be faulty. Marion Keisker noted that he was living in Lucy, Tennessee, near the Memphis suburb of Millington. ''He Phillips heard about us. We used to play in Handy Park'' Estes told Jim O'Neal in 1974. He remembered Howlin' Wolf coming by the studio, otherwise, his memories of the two sessions were scant. (Estes was at Sun on April 5 and 24, 1952, and Wolf recorded between those dates, so it's entirely possible that Wolf came by the studio). Keisker noted that Peacock Records was interested in Estes, and that dubs were sent to Chess as well, but no leases resulted.
 
After the session for Sam Phillips, Estes didn't record again until 1960, because  Estes had faded from the blues scene by the mid-1950s and many believed that he'd died   in obscurity. In 1960 Estes cut an unissued session in Chicago for Bea & Baby. The following year, filmmaker David Blumenthal discovered Estes in Brownsville, believing that he hadn't recorded since the War. Blumenthal introduced Estes to Bob Koester at Delmark Records in Chicago, and Sleepy John Estes recorded prolifically for Delmark until 1968. Estes and Hammie Nixon, occasionally with Yank Rachell, literally toured the world. Back home, Estes regularly played blues festivals in Memphis and starred on the Memphis Blues Caravan between 1971 and 1974.
 
A vivid colorist of Brownsville, he sang with no concession to accessibility. The people John Estes saw with his failing eyes now live forever in his songs. He sang with riveting intensity, often slurring off at the end of a line just when you thought you were getting the picture. Sleepy John Estes died back in Brownsville, Tennessee on June 7, 1977. Journalist Ray Harmon wrote, ''John's music is that of an extraordinary man caught in a mundane world, but captivated by the very things that make this world mundane. Populated by those people who happened by in his daily life, John's songs reach out to the very population he chronicles in verse''. (CE)
 
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EVANGELIST GOSPEL SINGERS OF ALABAMA  - The group were based not in Memphis but Alabama and appeared regularly on radio WJLD, based on the edge of Birmingham, in the early 1950s, the possible connection is that WJLD's station director was Jim Connolly, Sam Phillips' brother in law. Connolly was the man who gave Phillips his first job in radio and the two kept in close contact. Connolly was shown in the 1942 Directory of Broadcasting Stations of the United States as program director of WMSD in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
 
He moved to Birmingham where he was known for playing black music on other stations before he became program director at WJLD in Bessemer. During the early 1950s he connected several musicians with Sam Phillips, including country singer Hardrock Gunter. 
 
When Connolly joined WJLD, the Birmingham area had a strong gospel music tradition and two of the foremost professional quarters of the 1930s, the Kings Of Harmony and the Famous Blue Jay Singers had been based there. At WJLD, one of the leading gospel singers was Willie McInstry who was first on the station with the Kelley Choral Singers and then the Evangelist Gospel Singers.
 
At the time of their Chess recordings, possibly in two sessions in June/July 1951 and in August/September 1951, the Evangelist Gospel Singers comprised; Willie McInstry, lead tenor; Leroy Terry, lead tenor and pianist; Willie Banks, baritone; John Davis, bass and possible one other singer. Leading gospel researcher Doug Seroff learned from a man who sang later with McInstry that the Evangelist Singers went on a successful tour in the North around the time of the Chess recordings and that afterwards they all relocated to Cincinnati apart from Willie McInstry who returned to Birmingham to re-form the group there. It is not clear whether the tour indicates that the group recorded in Chicago or that they were encouraged to tour having already made the recordings with Sam Phillips. McInstry remained a mainstay of WJLD, recording ''My God Is Real'' with the new line-up of Evangelist Singers and again in 1962 for Von Records, forming the WJLD Singers in the 1960s and taking the disc jockey duties both on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. In secular mode he was known as ''Friend Bill on the Hill', helping break a number of rhythm and blues hits down the years, and in the 1970s Deacon McInstry became the first president of the Gospel Announcers Guild. (MH)
 
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EVANS, JIMMY - Born James G. Evans on November 23, 1938, Marianna, Arkansas. Jimmy Evans was   born into a musical family where every member played an instrument. He would develop   into a multi-instrumentalist who played guitar, bass, piano, drums and steel guitar. Thanks to   one of his aunts, he got the chance to audition for Sun Records. Sam Phillips used him   occasionally as a session man and demo singer, but did not record him as a vocalist. Jimmy's sole vocal contribution to a Sun recording is the harmony vocal on "Mad At You" by Mack   Self , recorded in 1957 and released in 1959. 
 
At Sun Records he met Conway Twitty, another   rockabilly singer who tried in vain to get a record released on the famous yellow label. Evans   joined Twitty's band as a bass player and stayed with him when Conway moved to Mercury in   1957. The B-side of one of Twitty's Mercury recordings, "Why Can't I Get Through To You"   (71384) was written by Jimmy Evans.
 
In 1959, guitarist Jimmy Ray Paulman, who had also played in Conway Twitty's band,   persuaded him to join him in Ronnie Hawkins' band, the Hawks. Evans moved to Canada and toured with Ronnie for about nine months. He played bass on three 1959 sessions by Ronnie   Hawkins. His replacement in the Hawks was Robbie Robertson.
 
Back in the USA, Jimmy was still looking for his own record deal. In 1962, he finally got the   chance to record a song he had written several years earlier, called "The Joint's Really   Jumpin'". At the advice of Gene Simmons, he took it to Clearmont Records in Memphis, one   of the labels owned by Marshall Erwin Ellis. Gene's brother Carl Simmons played lead guitar   on the session, Jimmy Wilson was the pianist, Jimmy Van Eaton the drummer and Jesse   Carter played bass, while Evans accompanied his own vocals on rhythm guitar. The result   was a fine piece of rock and roll that you would associate with 1957 rather than 1962. The   track has been heavily reissued in the CD era, but sales at the time were minimal. For some   reason unknown, "The Joint's Really Jumpin'" also came out on the Caveman label from Wolf   Lake, IL, with the same catalogue number as the Clearmont single (502). This was followed   by another rock and roll styled recording, "Messy Bassy" (Shimmy 1054), recorded at the   Fernwood studio, which didn't sell either. In 1987, Dutchman Cees Klop included it on the LP   "Memphis, Rock and Roll Capital Of the World, Vol. 5" (White Label LP 8918), along with four   other tracks by Jimmy, among which "Dudley Do-Rite", the opening track of the album.   "Dudley Do-Rite" (described elsewhere on the Web as "odd but appealing") had been   recorded for Shelby Smith's Rebel label.
 
Between 1965 and 1980, Jimmy released a few country singles, sometimes using the name   Jimmy Dale Evans, and for the single "Nashville Woman"/"45 Until" (Rivertown 103) the   pseudonym Lattie Lane.
 
In 1982, Jimmy wrote and recorded the extraordinary 1950's throwback "Pink Cadillac"   (Twin TR 11982). An amazing record for its time. It is currently available on the CD "Memphis   Rockabillies, Hillbillies & Honky Tonkers, Vol. 5" (Stomper Time STCD 21), which came out in   2006. The CD also includes - along with seven other tracks by Jimmy - an alternative version   of "Pink Cadillac", featuring harmony vocals by two members of the Beach Boys, who  happened to be in the studio at the time Jimmy recorded his masterpiece. Evans plays all   instruments on "Pink Cadillac", except drums.
 
In 1994, Bert Rookhuizen of Rockhouse Records in the Netherlands, released a 16-track CD   by Jimmy, called "The Joint's Really Jumpin'" (Rockhouse 9409). The 1960s recordings were   complemented by "Pink Cadillac" and titles recorded at American Sound Studios in Memphis   in 1994. A CD with new country and rockabilly material, "Arkansas' Been Rockin'" appeared in   2004 (JAG Records 009). The title track relates his experiences at Sun in the fifties. In 2000,   Evans was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and sadly Jimmy Evans died on August 3,   2011 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
 
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FAKES, ROGER - He was part of a group called the Spinners that sung on some Bill Justis cuts   on Sun Records. Its not hard to tell that rock and roll wasn't Fakes' first love. Harry Belafonte   was his idol. The years have been kind of Roger Fakes. He didn't belong among the tortured souls who made so many of the recordings at Sun.  

He didn't see music as his one chance for deliverance from a bleakly predictable future on the farm or in the factory. He wasn't prone to crippling bouts of alcoholism or depression. Life held more. ''Sam Phillips had the unique ability to put people at their ease and get the best out of them'', Roger said in 1986. ''I respect him a lot for that''.  

Born on December 1, 1938 as Roger Edmonds Fakes in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1938, Fakes moved to Memphis with his family   at the age of 11. In July 4, 1956 he was photographed at an Independence Day benefit in Memphis when he   won the door prize: a ring donated by the show's star, Elvis Presley.  

Roger Fakes' singing   career got off the ground when he appeared on Top Ten Dance Party, a television show   hosted by his Memphis State University fraternity brother, Wink Martindale. He soon gave up   on music. "I didn't want to stay in it if I couldn't be as successful as possible", he said in 1986. "I looked   at where I wanted to be in the long term, and music didn't fit in with my goals".  

Roger Fakes became vice-president of a company that sells and services washing machines.   "I've no regrets", he said. "I play the Hammond organ at home and sing at church. That's as   close as I want to be to the music business". Roger Edmonds Fakes, age 79, died peacefully at his home in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 16, 2018.
 

THE STORY ABOUT ROGER FAKES - With just a little lack of luck, Roger Fakes (pronounced FAYkiss)   would not even have been at Elvis Presley's concert of July 4, 1956, in Russwood Park   in Memphis. Living at 219 Rose Road, Memphis, Tennessee, with just a little luck, he was   there and today he still has the diamond-laden ring he won from Elvis as an attendance   prize!  

"I was dating a girl named Eleanor McGinnis at the time", Fakes recalls. "We were dating   fairly steady and we were going somewhere that night. It was the 4th of July. I don't recall   we had any place specific picket out. 
 
But a friend of Eleanor's Lynn Williams, had a bunch of   tickets to Elvis' concert. It was a charity event and Lynn's uncle, Jim Robinson, was a  charitable type person and had bought a block of tickets".
 
"A big group of us all went together. The seats we had were not exceptionally good. Elvis   sang on a stage out at about the picher's mound at Russwood. The place was packed. I had   no idea Elvis would be giving away a ring as an attendance prize during the concert".
 
When they announced it was time to draw for the main prize - Elvis' own diamond-studded   ring with the initials EP - one of the crowd poked the 17-year-old Fakes in the ribs and said,   "Better get out your ticket stub. You might win something". Roger Fakes retrieved the stub   from his shirt pocket and was amazed as Dewey Phillips began reading the lucky number 9-7-  3-6. Fakes held his breath. The rest of the numbers matched. He had won Elvis' ring.
 
"I went down on the stage and Elvis took the ring off his finger and gave it to me". "We   chatted for awhile and I told him I was a musician, too. And then I went back to my seat".   Fakes was attending East High School, the same school as actress Cybill Shepherd, who later   dated Elvis Presley.
 
"When I got to Memphis State, I wore the ring a lot", said Fakes. "I was a member of the   Epsilon Phichapter of Kappa Sigma fraternity. Wink Martindale was a fraternity brother of   mine, though he had graduated earlier. I would wear the ring and when people asked me   about it, I would either tell them the EP stood for Elvis Presley, or Epsilon Phi, depending on   the situation. It was kind of fun".
 
After a few years, the novelty of heaving Elvis' ring wore off and the ring went into   safekeeping. Now and then people still ask Fakes if he has the ring. He does. Some, including   his brother-in-law, Scott Fisher, who sometimes does Elvis impersonations for the fun of it at   private parties, have asked to borrow the ring. No doing! It it for sale?
 
"At the right price, yes", said Fakes. "The problem is, I don't have a fair way of evaluating   what it's worth. It's a nice ring. Heavy. Gold. It's got 17 nice little diamonds in it that form   the letters EP. In and of itself, it's not that valuable. The fact it was once Elvis' $600 ring   (1956 price) makes it valuable".
 
Roger Fakes had actually met Elvis before the concert. "We used to hang out at the old   Toddle House drive-in on Poplar Avenue", he recalls. "One night Elvis came in there on his   motorcycle. He was just becoming famous then. He didn't seem to be really taken with   himself. He got off his bike and visited with people. He seemed to be the most unassuming   guy in all the world".
 
Fact is, Elvis played a dance at the old Chisca Hotel one night and Fakes, a guitarist, sat in   with him on stage. "We used to sit in a lot in those days. Not anymore", said Fakes. Roger   Fakes just about appeared on Sun Records. He was part of a group called the Spinners that   sung on some Bill Justis cuts, included a vocal on "Midnight Man", on the flip-side of the Bill   Justis Sun hit, "Raunchy". In June 1957, Fakes, became a session guitarist at Sun Studio, and   Elvis by now at RCA, would come in to visit and chat. Fakes most memorable achievement at   Sun Records was a recording session at Sun with Sid Manker on guitar, Jimmy Wilson on   piano, Billy Riley on bass, and J.M. Van Eaton on drums. Fakes' "Somehow We'll Find A Way"   (Sun Unissued SUN BOX 106) are released in 1997 by Bear Family Records. Its not hard to tell   that rock and roll wasn't Fakes' first love. Harry Belafonte was his idol. Born in Little Rock,  Arkansas in 1938, Fakes moved to Memphis with his family at age 11.
 
Roger Fakes' singing career got off the ground when he appeared on Top Ten dance Party, a   television show hosted by the Memphis State University fraternity brother, Wink Martindale.   He soon gave up on music, though, "I didn't want to stay in it if I couldn't be as successful as   possible", he said in 1986. "I looked at where I wanted to be in the long term, and music   didn't fit in with my goals".
 
Roger Fake became vice-president of a company that sells and services washing machines.   "I've no regrets", he said. "I play the Hammond organ at home and sing at church. That's as   close as I want to be to the music business".
 
Looking back, on July 4, 1956, on Independence Day, he says, "At that time, the ring fit my   ring finger. Now, it's too small for my ring finger; too loose for my little finger".
 
Elvis Presley spent the remainder of July enjoying a well-deserved vacation. Much of the   time, he relaxed in and around Biloxi, Mississippi. He renewed his romance with June   Juanico, whom he had met when he performed in Biloxi in June 1955.
 
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FAY, HANNAH - Hannah Fay Harger got to tell her story. "I was just a kid. I started singing   when I was about 11 with my brother Buddy's band. He played steel guitar. I remember when   I was quite young we all made a trip to Nashville and appeared at the Corral, a western   apparel store that was owned by Hank Williams and his wife. I still have an old newspaper   clipping about that. I made my records when I was no more than 16. By 1960, that chapter   of my life was over. I got married and I stopped singing. My whole life changed''.
 
''I put Hannah   Fay away somewhere in an album. That was the end of I. I became a housewife and a   mother. I have two sons and seven grandchildren. When anybody refers to me as Hannah Fay,   I know they knew me from before 1960.
 
I was 'Little Hannah Fay'. I was tiny. Five-foot-one, I barely weighed 100 pounds, and I had   an 18-inch waist. It seems all I did was sing back then. I was on television and radio all the   time. I was part of the Lou Millet show - the featured singer. We were on the radio for a   while (WJBO and WIBR) before TV got here. Then we were on TV all through the early 1950s   - WAFB in Baton Rouge. I remember I celebrated my 14th birthday on TV. I sang on Lou's  record "Hummingbird". That's me humming when I was 13 years old.
 
I did a lot of live shows with Lou Millet. One time Little Jimmy Dickens walked on stage. He   told me he liked standing next to me because I was shorter than him. I remember Lou and I   appeared on the same stage as Elvis when he came through town early on. It was in a little   club called the Town and Country. Elvis wasn't well known then at all or he certainly   wouldn't have been appearing at a club like that. I remember he had just gotten his first   Cadillac and someone had burned a hole in the back seat. He wasn't too happy about that! I   must have been really young at the time, barely 14. He made no impression on me   whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I got up go to the rest room while he was singing and   somebody made a comment about that".
 
Hanah continues: "I loved to sing, but I never had any real ambition for a career. My mother -   her name was Gussie - had enough ambition for both of us. She had a beautiful voice but she   never did anything with it. She really lived through me. She had five sons and then she hah   me. I was her only daughter. She loved to dress me up and take me out there. Back then,  country music was played in gymnasiums and bars. I was underage so she went everywhere   with me. She lived to dress me up and put me on stage. She made me beautiful hand-made   costumes. I just did what they asked me to and never paid too much attention to what was   going on around me. That's probably why a lot of the details are really fuzzy to me today. I   didn't even remember I had recorded that blues tune "24 Hours Every Day" until you played   it for me over the phone. Then it came back. It made me think of how my mother used to try  to get me to be more animated when I sang. 'Move around' she'd say, but it never felt natural   to me. I was too shy. I used to like ballads better. I was never the kind of performer who   danced all over the stage. I guess that would have limited how successful I might have been.   When I was on TV, the song I used to get the most requests for was "Hearts Made Of Stone".   Every day, requests would come into the station. I sang it because it was requested, but  what I really wanted to sing was country. I'd choose of Kitty Wells song one day over "Hearts   Made Of Stone". That was a real stretch for me. But they loved it".
 
"My record of "Searching" was used as the demo to get the song to Kitty Wells. It was written   by Pee Wee Maddux. Her record of it came out first and then they released mine about six   weeks later. I think they gave her the song in Meridian, Mississippi when we were all there. I   remember getting home from the trip and it wasn't long before I heard Kitty Wells singing   "Searching" on the radio. My record did finally come out, but by then the song was a hit by  an established star. I remember hearing the adults talking - they were saying that they did   not do me right. They just used my cut to sell the song to Kitty Wells.
 
The only song of mine that Pee Wee didn't write was "You're Easy To Remember". It was   written by a man here in Baton Rouge named Benny Fruge - he was a piano player. I just in   love with that song. All those records were cut in a studio in Long Beach near Gulfport. I   really have very few memories of what went on. They just put me up there and told me to   sing. I was just not in charge of my own affairs back then. Everything was being arranged all  around me".
 
How did Hannah Fay come to the attention of Pee Wee Maddux? According to Hannah's   brother, a pretty fair steel guitar player who toured with Marty Robbins, the contact was   likely made through singer/bandleader Lou Millet.
 
"I was in Marty's first road band back when I was still in high school, during the summer of   1954. It was that summer with Marty Robbins that convinced me I'd better have a day job.   I'll tell you what, sitting in the middle seat of a stretch Cadillac for three months, between   the comedian and Tommy Perkins was not fun. Perkins must have weighed three hundred   pounds. I turned seventeen on the road that summer.
The band was actually fronted by Lou Millet. He was the opening act on Marty's shows. He   would be followed by Wayne Raney, Goldie Hill, Tibby Edwards, and then Marty. We were the   stage band; we played for all four acts. We were actually working for Don Law, who was   producing out of Nashville. When we got back to Nashville, I quit the band. Lou and I had   some words and I went back home. I never played for him again. Hannah did, however''.
 
''She   began singing with Louis and she was quite a draw back in Baton Rouge. Louis had a lot of   connections. I know he was hooked up with J.D. Miller, who had a studio down in Crowley. In   fact, I cut some sessions with Lou Millet in that studio''.
 
''I wouldn't be surprised if he also had   a connection to Pee Wee Maddux, which is how Hannah got to record for him. Her first   session was a real surprise to me. It just came out of the blue. I know there were two   separate sessions. Ernie Harvey was the steel player. He played a double neck Fender standup steel. He was a great session guy, very talented, with very good tone. I think Jack   Young blood played the fiddle on Hannah's records".
 
Hannah Fay recalls: "I remember going to Memphis. I was still in high school. In fact, I took   some friends of mine with me, some classmates. I remember the name Sam Phillips,   although I don't recall meeting him. I was sixteen years old when I made those records at   Sun.
 
I can't recall much about the session but I do remember there was talk about how they were   going to turn me into a star. A female Elvis' I certainly remember that phrase. But I came   home and never heard anything more about it".
 
Hannah's brother Buddy recalls: "Hannah came back all enthusiastic and then nothing   happened. Its like it just went away. Something big went wrong. Maybe it was the politics in   Memphis. Maybe it had to do with something at our end. I do know that however strong my   mother was in dealing with Hannah, she was not that assertive in dealing with the outside   world. She would never have picked up a phone and called someone like Pee Wee Maddux or   Sam Phillips and said called? My mother would never have done anything like that.
 
There's also a possibility that it was my mother who shut it down. I can't rule that out. As   much as she wanted to see Hannah up there singing locally, I'm not sure that a major record   deal was something she coveted or would have wanted for Hannah. What she really wanted   was Hannah singing around Baton Rouge so she could go and live it for herself. Nut having   Hannah hit the road or become another Elvis and leave mama at home? Ain't no way. If   getting famous meant leaving mama behind, it wouldn't be something she wanted. I'm not  saying that's what happened. We'll probably never know. But thinking about it now, it seems   possible that our mother shut it down if she thought it might take Hannah away".
 
In any case, Hannah's career wound down after the abortive trip to Memphis. "I graduated   from high school in 1958. After that I went to Louisiana State University and started dating   my husband, who did not like me to sing. I continued to sing here a bit in Louisiana. I left   him once to go sing at Keesler Air Force Base. I recall appearing with Jimmy Clanton. We   sang together a time or two, but that was the last of it. I just stopped singing. Sometimes I  feel like I wasted it by not pursuing my career. The truth is, I just didn't see much future in   singing in high school gymnasiums and bar rooms. I wanted a life. Plus I knew that not too   many people make it in this business. It's a hard life, a struggle. I didn't want that and I also   didn't really think I had what it took. I didn't have a fire burning in me to be a star".
 
Hannah's brother confirms this. "I think Hannah was ready to get out of the business. It was   time to move on". Despite 42 years of rewarding family life, quitting a career in music is   rarely regret-free.
 
"I can't tell you how it felt to find out that someone was trying to find me after all of these   years. I was just speechless. My cousin read me the newspaper article over the telephone   and I was almost in shock. The strange thing is in the past year or so I've wanted to reach   back and try to find that part of myself again. After so many years I just wanted to recapture   some of that. But I've hit dead ends wherever I went. All the TV shows I did are gone - there  was no videotape back then. I don't even have my records. I thought about going back to   Mississippi to find copies of them. I think my brother bought a box of one of them at one   point and those are the only copies I ever saw. They were not distributed very well. I doubt   if they ever got out of Mississippi".
 
"We had a family reunion yesterday right before you found me. It's the most amazing thing.   They asked us all to make picture boards about ourselves. I got out my scrapbook and took   out all those old pictures and put them on my picture board. On the bottom of it I wrote   "Little Hannah Fay". I put it all out there for my family to see. Some of them had no idea   about any of it. I can't believe you cared enough to look for me. I thought this part of my life   was completely over. I sometimes wondered if I had imagined it. It was a very long time ago".
 
From an interview by Hank Davis
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
FEATHERS, CHARLIE - The Robert Johnson of rockabilly and a prince in his own cotton patch,   Feathers has enormous respect for the sound that Sam Phillips achieved in his old studio (in   fact, he even goes so far to take credit for the sound). In an interview he once said that   going from Sun to Meteor and King was like going from a Cadillac to a Chevrolet. Feathers   had a sound in his head and Sam Phillips stood the greatest chance of capturing it.
 
The   stunning quality of "Peepin' Eyes", "I've Been Deceived" and "Defrost Your Heart" attest to the   special magic of Charlie Feathers at 706 Union. It was a chemistry that he rarely, if ever   recaptured.
 
Feathers' hillbilly credentials were certainly come by honestle. Charlie Feathers was born   Charles Arthur Lindberg, June 12, 1932, just outside Blackjack, nearly Holly Springs,   Mississippi, in that stretch of country between Stayden and Hudsonvilly. His family were   sharecroppers and their culture was a predictable mishmash of the usual elements -   church, Grand Ole Opry and, in Charlie's case, occasional forays in the direction of the   local Rossville Colored Picnic. He had a predilection for black music, the raw sounds of the   delta country and, like Hank Williams and so many other good old boys he learn the  rudiments of guitar from a blues man, in his case, Junior Kimbrough who remained a   lifelong friend. Before coming to Memphis, Charlie Feathers had left Mississippi on his   seventeen, working on a pipeline from Cairo, Illinois, all the way down to Texas, playing   juke joints as he went.
 
Eventually he fetched up and then moved to Memphis in 1950 and promptly got married, and   worked in a box factory before he contracted spinal meningitis and spent the greater part of   a year in hospital.
 
"I felt OK but they kept me in hospital the longest time. I had a guitar in there and that's   when I started to write a few songs. I was just drawing on the music I had heard growing   up. Down there you could walk through the streets or down the road on a weekend night   and you'd walk upon a coloured group or a guy with a guitar. That's the music I was   familiar with. I also liked bluegrass. Bill Monroe came to town once while he was traveling   with a tent. I loved his music but I couldn't play bluegrass".
 
From the point when Charlie Feathers left hospital, the story becomes a little confused.   He claims that he worked for Sam Phillips as far back as 1950 hauling portable tape   recorders. Phillips does not share that recollection. One fact is certain, though, Feathers   had been hanging around 706 Union a long time when he was finally paired with Bill   Cantrell and Quinton Claunch. However, according to Feathers, he was not merely present   at the creation of rock and roll, he was an integral part of it.
 
"Even though I was doing rockabilly, Sam had Elvis recording it. For a while it looked as   though rockabilly was selling and then it slacked off a little and Sam said that he wanted to   record me doing country. I always liked country music but I couldn't feel it like I could feel   rock and roll. I think I was worth more to Sam to arrange the music. I could hear people. I   worked with Johnny Cash before we recorded him. We got this slapback. People think it's   the bass but it's the tape delay. People in Nashville couldn't compete with the sound. There ain't a sound today can compete with it when it's done right. I could probably have   done better elsewhere but those places didn't have the Sun sound".
 
According to Feathers, he hung out with Elvis Presley in a local park and awakened him to   the possibility of goosing up country music, showing him guitar runs and vocal inflection.   Then he cut a demo of "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" with Scotty Moore - Moore has no   knowledge of it - and joined Presley in the Sun Studio during July 1954 to record the   finished product and kick start a career. If you believe Feathers he did the same thing for   Presley's waxing of "Good Rockin' Tonight" and then sometime in 1955 he wheeled our boy   into a West Helena radio station to cut "some tough goddamn stuff". Perhaps Feathers   really did remember a long lost session in West Helena.
 
Everybody agrees that Feathers recorded a lot of material at 706 Union Avenue that was   never released. Evidence shows that most of it was probably recorded-over. Feathers   claims that Sam Phillips planned a third single and even went as far circulating dubs but   there are no notes in the files to corroborate this assertion.
 
Stan Kesler used Feathers to make demos of at least two songs, "I Forgot To Remember To   Forget" and "We're Getting Closer To Being Apart". Once again, though Feathers' version is   at variance with everyone else's account.
 
"Some boys around here had "Daydreamin" and Sam didn't think too much of the song so   they took it to Meteor Records. The next time they come by they had "I've Been Deceived"   and Sam wanted me to record it. I went out to their house and listened to the song and   Stan Kesler dropped by. He had a song called "You Believe Everyone But Me" and asked me   if I would get Elvis to do it. I said that the song didn't do much for me and later that night   he said he had a song called "I Forgot To Remember To Forget". I liked that idea. The title.   Next morning, I got up real early and went out to Kesler's house and we finished the song.   We put it on tape and I took it down. Sam didn't like it but Elvis did. He wasn't singing it   right at first. They cut it about fifteen times and couldn't get the bridge right. We went   out for lunch and while we were driving around I was explaining to him in the car hot it   should be done. After we come back, we cut it one time and that was it", recalled Charlie   Feathers.
 
Stan Kesler recalled he wrote the song in its entirely and only gave Feathers 50% because   he sang the demo. He also remembered playing the song to Elvis Presley on a quarter track   tape machine. Phillips did not have a quarter track machine so Kesler had to bring up his   own tape deck and set it up in the lobby to play the demo.
 
The end of Feathers' association with Sun is clouded in even more mystery. He appears to   have cut a demo session early in 1956 to preview his new rockabilly material for Phillips.   In the fall of 1958 Feathers left Sun Records, he was determined to pursue his antic   disposition with archetypal rockabilly like "Tongue Tied Jill" (Meteor 5032), a song so   unhinged that Sam Phillips missed the humor and took offense. Immediately after this sole   flirtation with Lester Bihari's Memphis-based label, Feathers looked elsewhere. Between June 1956 and January 1957 he recorded in Cincinnati and Nashville for Syd Nathan's King   label. In the process he was able to bring his amusing and unintentionally liberated "Bottle   To The Baby" to fruition and cut timeless classics like "One Hand Loose" (King 4997) where   he could finally indulge all his stuttering, whooping trademarks with manic glee.
"Me and Jody Chastain and Jerry Huffman wrote "Tongue Tied Jill" and some other    material. We took the demo to Sam but he thought "Tongue Tied Jill" was making fun of    the afflicted. My contract was up about that time and he hadn't mailed me a renewal    notice or anything so I went to King.  The place I had cut the demo of "Tongue Tied Jill"    asked if they could have it. I thought 'Why not?'. After Sam didn't like it, I thought the song     might not be any good but it broke real big here. We cut it on one mike. Because we were  at King, we didn't even get a contract for it", recalled Feathers.
 
Charlie Feathers' career after he left Sun had been fairly well documented. He was racing   cars and playing the local honky tonks for many years before he started a late blooming   career as a perpetuator of his own mythology. Most of his shows had a stunning intensity   that often nonplussed the local bar crawlers who had come to the cool dark place for a   little slow dancing and a night of serious drinking.
 
"You gotta feel the people when you get out", asserted Feathers. "If you know ahead of   time what you're gonna play then you're giving the people second hand stuff. It'd be like   turning a jukebox on. You'd know what you're about to get. A show shouldn't be that way.   The talent comes out when e person don't know what he's gonna do. He just does it. A   musician plays his best when he doesn't know what he's playing".
 
In 1985 British television viewers were able to get a look at Charlie Feathers resplendent   in a Hawaiian sport shirt and lank greasy hair. Sitting in his garden, he played a tortuous   version of "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" with such agonized intensity that his voice alone could   have stripped paint off the wall. The truth is that when Charlie Feathers settles down to   play, the bullshit comes to an abrupt halt. The man is a genuine original with an awesome talent.
 
Feathers ploughed his own furrow over five decades of recording, seldom leaving Memphis   and evolving in the most natural way. Unwavering and genuine courtesy was the real   measure of a man who was frequently misunderstood. An illiterate field hand who had in   all innocence sung about "darkies creeping through the trees" on "Jungle Fever" (Kay   Records 1001) in 1958, he was still genially asking after "nigras" on a visit to cosmopolitan London in 1977. There was no disrespect implied. He was simply using the only word he   knew for black people. And on the very same evening the stood up and brought Mississippi   into a London room with an eerie, heartfelt testament to the blues as he treated us to a   rendition of "That's All Right" which totally eclipsed Crudup and Presley.
 
Unflinching and unique Charlie Feathers worked through everything life threw at him.   Diabetes, loss of a lung, even being confined to a wheelchair didn't end his passion for   performing. When he died of a stroke on August 29, 1998, he left a formidable artistic   legacy for his coterie of devotees. But for one serendipitous moment Feathers finally went   global in 2003 when another maverick, Quentin Tarantino, included ''The Certain Female'' on the soundtrack to ''Kill Bill 1'' and in 2004 "Can't Hardly Stand It"   on the soundtrack to "Kill Bill 2".
 
THE ELVIS CONTROVERSY - Peter Guralnick’s book ''Lost Highway'' first alerted fans to Feathers’s more   sensational claims about rockabilly music and his alleged role in Presley’s success. Feathers told Guralnick   he arranged all of Presley’s Sun material and gave Jerry Lee Lewis the idea for his "pumpin' piano" sound.   They are among many claims Feathers made throughout his lifetime which are difficult to disprove or   believe, though testimony exists on both sides.
 
Stan Kesler, who played on dozens of Sun sessions, told Contemporary Musicians, "I never saw him work in   the studio with Elvis at all. I really don’t think that's true, to tell you the truth''. He grudgingly allowed, "He   might’ve worked with him when I wasn't looking''. Presley's 1950-1960s drummer D.J. Fontana was asked   by Contemporary Musicians if Elvis ever talked about Feathers during their many long hours on the road   together. "He never mentioned him one time, at no time'', later adding, "If his name had come up I would've  remembered it because I was familiar with him and a lot of other guys. I never heard Elvis say anything   about learning from anybody. He just sang what he felt like singing and that was the end of it''. In Craig   Morrison’s book ''Go Cat Go! Rockabilly Music and Its Makers'', Presley sideman Scotty Moore stated that   Feathers was constantly in and out of the studio but was not a factor on Presley's sessions.
 
Both Jimmy M. Van Eaton and Roland Janes arrived at Sun after Charlie Feathers left, but played on all of   Jerry Lee Lewis’s most important sessions. As with all of Feathers's associates contacted by Contemporary   Musicians, they admire Feathers's talent and believe he knew what rockabilly was all about, but are hesitant   to believe his claims, including former Sun rockabilly artist Sonny Burgess. It’s important to note that author   Guralnick himself barely referred to Feathers in his exhaustively researched, best-selling biographies on the   life of Elvis Presley.
 
Yet Feathers’s wife Rosemary has related clear memories of the early days to her daughter, Wanda Vanzant.   "We were living on Pauline Street here in Memphis and Elvis would come by in an old black pick-up truck   and pick my dad up and they would go to the studio and stay all day'', Wanda Vanzant told Contemporary   Musicians. "We did not have a car and my mother had to catch the bus to go to her job downtown and she   would always catch the bus back and get off in front of the studio at 9:00 p.m. just about every night, and she  and my dad would walk home together. Sometimes she would have to wait on him to finish whatever they   were doing in the studio. Sometimes when (Elvis) would pick my dad up they would go to the fan club   house. Shirley, president of my dad’s fan club, has told me that Elvis had a little crush on a girl that was  living across from them''.
 
Further, in the liner notes for Norton's ''Uh Huh Honey'' CD, no less a figure than country legend Johnny   Cash recalls Charley Feathers running the board during Elvis Presley's "Baby Let's Play House" session.   More controversially, in ''Rockabilly - A Forty Year Journey'' author Billy Poore claims that he has heard   Feathers's private collection of Sun session tapes featuring the distinct voices of Charley Feathers, Elvis   Presley, and Sam Phillips working together. In a stranger twist, Wanda Vanzant reports that no Sun studio   tapes exist in her late father’s archives. With so many conflicting stories, it’s unlikely that there will be a   definitive explanation of what Feathers did or didn’t do at the Sun studio.
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
FELTS, NARVEL - Composer, rockabilly and rock and roll singer. Born on November 11, 1938 on a farm in   Keiser, Arkansas, Narvel Felts was thirteen years old who still lived in Arkansas and he traded an BB gun for   a beat up Gene Autry guitar that was held together with a Prince Albert tobacco can and some bailing wire. A   year later, Felts was fourteen, he moved to Missouri and pickin' cotton and ordered a new guitar from Sears   & Roebuck for $15.98. The teenaged Albert Narvel Felts had moved with his parents to Powe, Missouri in 1953 and he went to school in Bernie. 
 
In 1956, when he was seventeen he entered the high school  talent contest at Bernie, Missouri, and sing "Baby, Let's Play House" and when they wanted an encore there   was a new song by Carl Perkins, called "Blue Suede Shoes".
 
Narvel Felts played at the KDEX radio in   Dexter, Missouri on the Saturday afternoon radio shows, and played gigs at night in the Fourway Inn   nightclub in Dudley, Missouri.  A music store owner, Calvin Richardson, had become Narvel's manager, and in 1956, Narvel Felts performed   in Jerry Mercer's band a lot of the local clubs in southeast Missouri, north-east Arkansas and some gigs in   Illinois and played a package show in mid-1956 with Roy Orbison. During December of 1956, Felts worked   with Jerry Mercer and played with Roy Orbison and Eddie Bond at Dexter, Missouri and within a couple of   weeks, Calvin Richardon arranged an audition with Sun Records in Memphis and formed the band called   Narvel Felts and The Rockers. The rockets were Leon Barnett on lead guitar; J.W. Grubbs on bass; Bob   Taylor on drums, and Jerry Tuttle who doubled on steel guitar and saxophone.
 
Before Sun could get anything organized, a man with connections to Mercury heard the Rockets playing in   St. Louis and a partner who booked Narvel into theaters and in March 1957 Narvel Felts was playing the Fox   Theatre in St. Louis and then he auditioned for Mercury Records. Narvel saw several releases on Mercury   but real success did not come until 1959 when he signed with Hi Records.   In 1958 Narvel Felts did recorded at RCA Studio B in Nashville in October 1957 featuring Jerry Tuttle on   saxophone. In late 1958 Conway Twitty recommended Felts for the club circuit in Canada and on January 5,   1959 Felts opened with Conway Twitty the Flamingo Club in Hamilton, Ontario, and played Pop Warner's in   Malden, Missouri on the Saturday nights.
 
In 1960, Felts signed with Pink Records in New York, and it was the second Pink release that started it all for   Felts, the rhythm and blues ballad ''Honey Love'', that became a minor seller in both the country and pop   markets. Big enough to lead Felts to record again for Mercury, MGM, RCA and he signed for a series of   sessions for Roland Janes featured on the Bear Family release Memphis Days. His big national hits came   along in the seventies when "Drift Away" was recorded by Cinnamon in 1973. It was Felts' thirtieth single.
 
A string of hits followed ''Drift Away'' and when his contract was picked up by ABC Dot, Narvel scored even   better, his 1975 single ''Reconsider Me'' placing at number 2 on the country charts. Narvel Felts pioneering   contribution to the genre has been recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Back in 1962 he had married   to the former Loretta Stan field. Two children resulted from the marriage, but Felts lost his only son, Narvel   Jr. (known as Bub) in 1995. At one time, Bub played drums for his father. One of his albums is dedicated to  his son.
 
For a time the hits kept on coming but the last top 20 country hit, ''Everlasting Love'', came in 1979, the last   chart entry in 1988. Narvel Felts continued to play shows both a home and in Europe and he has become a   member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. He currently resides in Malden, Missouri. where he continues to   perform on occasion.
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
FIVE TINOS, THE – A Memphis group, the Five Tinos comprised local college students. There were Luchrie   Jordan, Haywood Hebron, Marvin Walker, Melvin Walker, and Melvin Jones. They probably went to Booker   T. Washington High School in south Memphis. The two Walker brothers had a younger brother, William,   who later joined another Memphis group, The Four kings aka the Four canes (who sang on WLOK, and   whose ranks included future soul star, Don Bryant).
 
Than on May 26, 1955,  Doo wop on Sun? The Five Tinos must have appeared very special to Sam Phillips.  The five vocalists were backed by a tight little studio rhythm and blues group featuring Phineas Newborns Jr. and Sr. on guitar and drums, respectively.  The band also featured twin saxes played by Jewell Briscoe and Moses Reed. This was a larger and more expensive production than Phillips was used to bankrolling. Recorded that day ''Don't Do That'' backed with ''Sitting By My Window'' (Sun 222) was released on June 21, 1955.  "Don't Do That" features a cutesy, ersatz sexy vocal, mambo rhythm and double length honking sax solo (if you're going to pay them, get them to work!). If this record had appeared as the follow-up to the Turbans' "When You Dance", on the New York Herald label, not an eyebrow would have been raised. In short, this was neither typical Memphis, nor typical Sun fare. Its appearance in the fall of 1955 came at a transitional time in Sun's country and western was evolving, and the presence of sideburned hybrid music was becoming a greater factor with each passing day.  In its depiction of idealized love, ''Sitting By My Window'' was conventional doo-wop, but if it had been on a conventional doo-wop label, it would be viewed as a lesser entry.  On Sun, it's an anomaly.
 
Some reckon that they're the same group as the Teenos with ''Love Only One'' b/w ''Alrightee'' on Dub   Records in 1958 (Dub 2839) and the Esquires with ''Only The Angels Know'' b/w ''One Word For This'' on   the Nashville-based Hi-Po Records in 1957 (Hi-Po 1003). The composer credit on the Hi-Po single reads   only The Esquires, placing us no further ahead, although some of the Tinos were reckoned to have gone to   Nashville's Fisk University. The Teenos record was issued several years later, making it less likely that it's   our guys. Some went to Chicago, some stayed in Memphis. Haywood Hebron died in 2005; the fate of the   others is unknown. (CE)
 
 © - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©
FORBES, GRAHAM – Born in Brooklyn, New York circa 1917 and a native of Pleasantville, New York, was   the most striking example of talented jazz pianist have known who never got the recognition their playing   deserved would be Graham Forbes.
 
Like Pee Wee Russell he retarded the development of his career through   his chronic alcoholism In 1937, he was about 17 years old and already an alcoholic, as were his father and   mother.
 
Graham lived in Thornwood, New York, and could play any tune he'd heard once in all 12 keyboard   keys with equal falicity and in highly modern voicing.  In 1937-1938 Graham played piano with Bunny Berigan's big band and, and Graham left Bunny to go on the   road with Charlie Barnet and he also blew stints with Artie Shaw, Jack Teagarden and Woody Herma, each   time crewing up the gig with booze.   These leaders all loved his playing, since his total freedom of keys, then   unusual, and his flawless ears for creamy harmony made him the ideal accompanist with singers.
 
After World War II Graham went in The Copacabana, then New York's top night club, in the show band,   where Frank Sinatra heard Forbes and hired him as accompanist/arranger/conductor on his early television   show. Again he screwed up with booze, when they were in Las Vegas, and Frank had to fire him. Then   Graham Forbes became the number one pianist in the Meyer Davis office, getting plum gigs, until he drank   himself out of this cushy slot.
 
There's a hell of a book to be mined out of Graham's tragic life. He was a big influence on Horace Silver's   decision to switch from alto sax to piano and at Graham's funeral, Horace was a pall-bearer. At the end of the   1930s, Graham Forbes starting with his giving up his studies at Columbia University to join Bunny Berigan,   whom he recorded on March 15 and 16, 1938. Other than some rinka-tinka piano work behind the vocal to   Rinka Tinka Man (Victor 25820), the six rather tired songs for Victor contain no piano playing worth mentioning. He was with Berigan only briefly.
 
Graham stay with Charlie Barnett was also short lived, apparently, though he is reported to be on the Barnett   session for RCA Thesaurus Transcriptions on May 16, 1938 when 20 titles were recorded. Ten of the 15   instrumentals on First Time Records FTR-1504 are from this date, with the pianist getting a half-chorus here   and a few notes there. On ''Blue Turning Grey Over You'', Chatterbox and Rock it for Me he has short solos,   but these are of minor interest.
 
In June of 1942 Forbes was playing at Club 18 and in October he was the soloist at the Casa Allegra,   Wednesday, Fridays, and Saturdays. During this period he was a frequent sitter-in at Nick's and may even   have been working there early in 1943.
 
After the was Graham Forbes was with the CBS staff orchestra under Mark Warnow, then with Ernie Hoist at   the Stork Club and at the Copacabana for several years with Mike Durso. He went on a coast-to-coast tour   with Martin and Lewis, which led to accompanying work with many well known singers, including Lisa   Kirk, Julie Wilson, Hildegarde, Getrude Nielsen and Vic Damone. He led at Stork Club, worked for Mayer   Davis, and did six trips to Europe on the SS America.
 
On the December 14, 1949, Frank Sinatra began recording for CBS a radio show to be broadcast on Sunday   afternoons. The accompaniment was by Graham Forbes, piano, Tony Gattuso, guitar, Trigger Alpert, bass,   and Johnny Blowers, drums. Of this first session Blowers said, ''This was swinging, relaxed and fun date''.   He also indicated that the series lasted for three or four months. Blowers twice calls the show ''Meet Frank   Sinatra'' but no other reference to such a show title has been traced. Blowers says it was broadcast alongside Sinatra's Light Up Time.
 
On Labor Day weekend in 1950 Forbes was with Frank Sinatra when he played theatres in Hartford,   Connecticut, and Atlanta City, the other musicians being Blowers, Matty Galizo, guitar, and Frank Carrol,   bass. Towards the end of May Sinatra traveled to the West Coast, possibly, with Forbes accompanying or following him.
 
From November 1953 to 1955 Sinatra was on ''To Be Perfectly Frank'', a weekly radio show for NBS, and he   is accompanied by a quintet (clarinet, piano, guitar, bass, and drums) which, on one of the early shows, is   given a personnel of ''Tony, Mike, Sunny, Johnny and Graham'' without mentioning the instruments that they   play. Possibly Johnny is Blowers, Graham is Forbes and Tony is Gattuso. And there was a clarinetist called   Sunny Salad around that time.
 
It has been suggested that Forbes is on some of the Sinatra titles on a CD entitled ''After Hours'' on Artistry   3001, taken from the broadcast, though the CD itself credits only Bill Miller as pianist. And of course,   Graham Forbes and the trio, Graham Forbes, piano; Bill Halfacre, bass; Buddy Jett, drums, August 1960 LP,   Phillips International PLP 1955 called ''The Martini Set - Graham Forbes And The Trio'', all tracks recorded by Sun Records owner, Sam Phillips.
 
This leaves many gaps in the Graham Forbes story, though one suspects that if information is found to fill   them it will be of limited jazz interest. Forbes was no doubt technically as good a pianist as we suggested,   but we are unlikely now to discover his true value as a jazz player. Graham Forbes died of a heart attack in   Westbury, Long Island, New York on May 22, 1984 at the age of 66.
 
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FOSTER, CHUCK (ORCHESTRA) – His big break came a few years after he took over the leadership of a 10-piece  band in California. He was a logical choice to be the new front man, since, besides playing saxophone and  clarinet, he was handsome, sang a little, and could m.c. a floor show. In 1939, Foster and his orchestra were hired for two weeks at the Biltmore Bowl, a hotel in Los Angeles, but   wound up staying there seven months. 
 
They went back in 1940 and 1941, for a total of 18 months time!   During that period, they make lots of network radio broadcasts. In between engagements at the Biltmore, Chuck Foster and his musicians appeared at the Mark Hopkins   Hotel in San Francisco, the Chase in St. Louis, the Baker in Dallas, all again with network lines for radio   broadcasts to the rest of the United States. That's how he and his band became nationally-known.
 
Besides his own abilities, what helped ''music in the Foster fashion'' to remain popular into 1970s was the   fact that he had loyal, talented musicians working for him. Most of the personnel in his band stuck around a   long time, including Don Crawford; trombonist Dick Arant; lead also saxophonist Bill Gee; tenor saxophonist Wayne Harden; another saxophonist, Jimmy Castle (who also sang); pianist Hal Pruden; bassist   Stewart Strange; drummer Bob Simpson; and vocalists Dorothy Brandon or Dottie Dotson. Their very first   recordings were made as transcriptions for radio stations only, for Standard in 1939 and United in 1940.
 
Okeh Records signed them for commercial discs, and the band recorded a total of eight sides in October   1940 and June 1941, including their theme song, ''Oh, You Beautiful Doll'', and ''I've Been Drafted (Now I'm   Drafting You)''. It was stated that in 1941-1942 Foster and his orchestra traveled more than 50,000 miles in   private automobiles and played in 28 states, mostly one0night stands or theaters, with a few steady gigs in   hotels and ballrooms.
 
A special highlight for the band was working the Academy Awards ceremony held in Hollywood in 1951,   and which named among other honors, the best picture (''Rebecca''), best actor (James Stewart in ''The   Philadelphia Story'', his only Oscar win), and best actress (Ginger Rogers as ''Kitty Foyle''). Chicagoans, in   particular, seemed to like hearing or dancing to Foster's music. ''Chuck's band has already made a distinct   hit'', critic Will Davidson observed while the group was performing in the Continental Room of the Stevens   Hotel there in February 1942. ''It's a lively band without being boisterous'', he wrote.
In June of 1942, the band added the nearby Oriental Theatre to its appearances. When they returned to the   Oriental that December, former Chick Webb vocalist Ella Fitzgerald shared the bill. Then, on April 7, 1943,  Foster opened an engagement at the Blackhawk Restaurant, also in Chicago's ''Loop'', and in August of that   year, it was back to the Oriental, this time with the Mills Brothers vocal group. 
 
After his brief service in the Army during World War II, Foster organized a new band in early 1944, opening   at the Chanticleer nightclub in Baltimore, Maryland. They then headed back to the Blackhawk Restaurant in   Chicago for, as was typical, several months, A special anniversary celebration revived WGN's ''Midnight   Flyers'' radio program the night of May 13, 1946 at the Blackhawk. Foster and his orchestra were present,   along with others notables including Martha Raye, Gypsy Rose Lee, Danny Thomas, and Dean Martin. But,  depending on the circumstances, the band was based in different locales. When they operated out of New   York City, they played, for example, the Hotel New Yorker in-town or the Steel Pier in Nearby Atlantic City.
 
Starting in the 1940s, Chuck Foster and his band would take trips to the Hotel Peabody in Memphis,   Tennessee for a couple of lengthy engagements each year. In 1953, Foster officially moved to the Chicago   area, where he could continue to star at the Blackhawk, work the Aragon or Trianon ballrooms four of five   months a year, and go elsewhere around the Midwest dance circuit. He played a ''battle of dance music'' with   Eddy Howard at the Aragon on July 31, 1955, and a similar ''battle'' was held between Foster and Ralph   Marterie at the Aragon on June 17, 1956.
 
Chuck Foster and his orchestra recorded for Mercury in 1946-1948, on Vocalion in 1949, and on March 22,   1960, Foster and his band made what seems to have been his only 12'' LP, ''Chuck Foster at the Hotel   Peabody Overlooking Old Man River'' for Sam Phillips' International label (PLP 1965). 
 
He decided to return to California in 1965, ready to retire. But a band was needed at Myron's Ballroom in   downtown Los Angeles, so he agreed to go there. He stayed for eight years, stocking his playlists both with   standards (''Easter Parade'', ''Avalon'', ''Hindustan'') and more current pops (''Bom Free'', ''King Of The Road'',   ''Tijuana Taxi'').
 
Even into the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was still willing to play the Willowbrook or Holiday ballrooms   in Chicago. Foster always led an entertaining orchestra, including three trumpets, one trombone, three saxophones (not counting himself), and three rhythm. They played popular tunes at easy tempos, in a variety   of rhythms, with clean phrasing and dynamics.
 
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FRANK, HARMONICA - KING OF HARPS - Frank Floyd, born to Reuben Brewster Floyd and   Estella Miles in Toccopola, Pontotoc County, Mississippi, on October 11, 1908, was nicknamed   "Shak" (he was never christened with a formal name). Also known as "Rambling King" and   "The Silly Kid". Frank Floyd was one of 3 children and he raised and worked on the farm from   his childhood, and he taught himself the harmonica at 10 years of age. He spent his earliest   years with his grandparents in rural Arkansas, left home in 1922, and rambled throughout   much of the Depression. He left home in 1922 and adopted the name Frank Floyd.
 
Frank   joined a carnival in the early 1920s and played for nickels and dimes on street corners. Floyd was frequent and working as comedian, singing harmonicist in carnivals, amateur   shows, on the streets in honky tonk bars, and parks through the South and Southwest circa   1922 through the end of the 1920s.   He was influenced by DeFord Bailey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Palmer McAbee and Jimmy   Rodgers, Harmonica Frank worked with the Cole Brothers Carnival through the South in  the late 1920s and toured with the West Motorized Show through the South. 
 
In 1932,   Harmonica Frank toured as a one man band with the Happy Phillipson's Medicine Show,   and worked gigs in Juarez in Mexico, appeared with Buster Steele's Log Cabin Wranglers   for KELW-radio in Burbank, California. He also toured with Dr. Hood's Medicine Show   through the South in 1933-34 and appeared on his own show for KLCN-radio in Blytheville,   Arkansas and appeared on KTHS-radio in Hot Springs, Arkansas during the 1930s. In the early 1940s, Harmonica Frank appeared on WOBT-radio in Union City, Tennessee and   frequently worked outside the music as farmer in the mid-1940s, and frequently toured   with Eddie Hill's Troupe and he appeared on WMC-radio in Memphis, Tennessee during the   late 1940s. In the early 1950s, harmonica Frank appeared on the local radio station in   Valdosta, Georgia and worked in the Rainbow Lake Club in Memphis, Tennessee and   recorded for the Chess label in Memphis, Tennessee in 1951.
 
Having already developed his virtuosity on the harmonica he took up the guitar after   hearing the Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers. The shtick he developed during his spell   with the Happy Phillipson Medicine Show was faithfully reproduced on Frank's only Sun   record, "The Great Medical Menagerist"/"Rockin' Chair Daddy" (SUN 205), in 1954.   Occasionally, Frank landed a steady gig at a radio station. It was during a short-term gig   with Smilin' Eddie Hill on WMC, Memphis, that he first came to Phillips' attention in 1951.
 
His credibility high in the wake of "Rocket 88" (CHESS 1458), Sam Phillips persuaded the   Chess brothers in Chicago to take two cuts from Harmonica Frank. "Swamp Root" was   coupled with a primordel blues, "Goin' Away Walkin'" was replaced with a cover version of   Bigg Jeff and the Radio Playboys' hit, "Step It Up And Go".
 
By the time Frank's second Chess record was released in January 1952 his steady gig on   WMC had ended, Eddie Hill having left for Nashville. When he recorded for Sun in 1954,   Frank was working at a station in Dyersburg, Tennessee. The Sun single, which coupled the   charmingly anachronistic "Great Medical Menagerist" with "Rockin' Chair Daddy" (SUN 205),   was released at the same time as Elvis Presley's debut - July 1954. It was Presley's record   that sealed Frank's fate. Some reviewers noted that "Rockin' Chair Daddy" was a good   blend of black and white musical styles; the problem was that it blended the black and   withe musical styles of the 1920s.
 
Still sensing that he could be a part of the rockabilly revolution, Frank Floyd auditioned for   Meteor Records on 1794 Chelsea Avenue in Memphis, and then issued a record on the F   and L label, which he co-owned with another would-be rockabilly, Larry Kennon. Frank   took the lead vocal on one side, "Rock A Little Baby", and his partner, Larry Kennon, took   the vocal on the other side, "Monkey Love". They spent days promoting the record, selling   it to variety stores or any one who would take it but sales were very disappointing. Disappointed with its failure, Frank moved to Dallas, started hawking ice cream, and got   out of the music business, he even sold his Martin guitar that he had bought with the $100   cheque from Chess Records.
 
In the early 1960s, Harmonica Frank worked outside in the music in the Dallas, Texas and   the Memphis, Tennessee area. At some point, Frank Floyd returned to Tennessee to work   for his cousin. He married a woman he met through a lonely hearts club and settled in   Millington outside music, near Memphis. It was there, in the early 1970s, that he was   rediscovered by Stephen LaVere, who followed a tortuous path to Frank's door, giving him   a second lease on life as an attraction at folk music festivals. In 1971, Harmonica Frank,   worked at the Mid-South Jamboree, at Linden Circle Theater in Memphis, Tennessee and  play frequently in Mama's Coffeehouse in Memphis during 1972, and appeared at the   University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois, performed at the River City Blues Festival in   Memphis and on the First Church Congregational in Cambridge, Massachusetts from that   same year.
 
In 1972 through 1974, Harmonica Frank Floyd recorded for the Adelphi label in Silver   Spring, Maryland, and toured with the Memphis Blues caravan on concert dates through   the mid-West. In 1974, Frank Floyd appeared and worked at the University of California in   Santa Barbara, California, and the San Diego State University in San Diego, California   (portion remote on KPFK-radio) and recorded in 1975 for the Barrelhouse label in Chicago,   Illinois. For his death, Harmonica Frank Floyd worked frequently in coffeehouses, blues festivals, university concerts through the 1970s.
 
First and last, Frank Floyd was an entertainer: he had learned his craft on countless street   corners, where he had only a few seconds to catchosomeone's attention. That skill   remained intact fifty years later. Floyd's music belongs to the American disenfranchised of   the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He is a self-proclaimed spokesman for the rounders,   backwoods rebels, poor farmers, sharecroppers, labourers, drifters, hobos and alley   people of that hardtime period.
 
After his rediscovery, Frank Floyd claimed to have invented rock and roll with much the   same cheerful disregard for the facts that Jelly Roll Morton exhibited in claiming to have   invented jazz. Yet when Harmonica Frank Floyd entered the Continental Hospital in   Blanchester, Ohio where he died August 7, 1984 on pneumonia. Harmonica Frank Floyd is   buried at the Clover Cemetery in Bethel, Ohio, and a piece of American musical history   died with him.
 
Only Chris Strachwitz, who runs the Blues Classic label, and Down Home Music, ever paid   him any money for his music. He told blues researcher Steve LaVere, who rediscovered   him in 1972: "I spent a lot of time listening to the darkies in days gone by singing in the   cottonfield down South and I picket up their songs and speech. That is the reason people   think I am a coloured man, But I really am white. I never played with no blacks, but I was a   fan of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson". (CE)
 
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FROST, FRANK – Born on a small cotton farm April 15, 1936 in Auvergne, Arkansas, was   one of the foremost American delta blues harmonica players of his generation. He is the   second of seven children of T.R. Winston and Dorthula Frost. Frank Otis Frost learned to play   piano at church as a young boy. Frank, in the search to find his place in the world, left home   to get a glimpse of the 'big world' around him and try to get ideas as to what it took to get   into the music business. His love for music was natural and automatic and his ability with the  guitar, piano and harp was seemingly born in him.
 
He moved to St. Louis, Missouri at age 15, and spent time as a guitarist with drummer Sam   Carr and Carr's father, Robert Nighthawk. He learned to play harmonica from Sonny Boy   Williamson, who he toured with. While playing with guitarist Big Jack Johnson, Frost   attracted the interest of the record producer Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records. Some   recordings of note that followed included "Hey Boss Man" and "My Back Scratcher".
 
Elvis Presley's ex-guitarist Scotty Moore produced Frost's next sessions in Nashville in 1966   for Jewel Records. Augmented by session bassist Chip Young, the trio's tight down-home   ensemble work was once again seamless. "My Back Scratcher," Frost's takeoff on Slim Harpo's   "Baby Scratch My Back," even dented the Rhythm & Blues charts on Shreveport-based Jewel   for three weeks.
 
In the late 1970s, Frost was re-discovered by a blues enthusiast, Michael Frank, who began   releasing albums on his Earwig Music Company label by the trio, now called The Jelly Roll   Kings, after a song from ''Hey Boss Man'' LP. By this time the innovative Jelly Roll Kings format had solidified, Frank singing, blowing harp and playing keyboards, Gig Jack Johnson singing and picking, Sam Carr shoring it all up with a hellacious backbeat. 
 
Since then they have drifted together and apart countless times. They didn't record again under the name Jelly Roll Kings until 1996, when Robert Palmer recorded them and produced ''Off Yonder Wall'' for Exford, Mississippi-based Fat Possum Records, proving that no matter how much time passes, Frank Frost, Sam Carr and Big Jack Johnson can still conjure the old magic.
 
Frost appeared in the films ''Deep Blues: A   Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'' and Ralph Macchio movie ''Crossroads'' and contributed to the soundtrack. 
 
On October 10, 1997, Frank Frost playing together with his friend Sam Carr, take the stage at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas, but t he days Frost takes it easy. His drinking days have taken their toll. At 61, he moves slowly and relies on medication. He prefers to spend his days fishing. That's where he writes his songs, taking his harmonica along when he feels like it. ''Most of the times I write a song I'll be out on the fish lake or hunting or doing something. Keep a pencil and pad in my pocket so when it comes to me I write the line down out of my mind, and then I just write the words down and I don't think of it no more... Most of the time it works. When I get to the studio they say, 'That's fine. Play that'''.
 
Frank Frost died of cardiac arrest at   his home in Helena, Arkansas on October 12, 1999 at the age of 63.
 
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FOWLER, WALLY - John Wallace "Wally" Fowler was an American Southern gospel music singer, manager, and music promoter and businessman. He founded the Oak Ridge Quartet, a gospel act that eventually became the Oak Ridge Boys; and popularized all-night gospel sings. An accomplished songwriter in both the country music and gospel fields, Fowler's composition "Wasted Years" became a gospel music standard. He was known as The Man with a Million Friends and Mr. Gospel Music.

Born on February 15, 1917 near Adairsville, Georgia, Fowler's father was the cotton king of Bartow County, Georgia until the Great Depression left him broken both in health and financially.

He then struck out on his own, forming a country music group, Wally Fowler and the Georgia Clodhoppers, which included Chet Atkins on lead guitar. They performed on WNOX-AM in Knoxville, Tennessee and became regulars on mid-day ''Merry Go Round''. Fowler later formed his Harmony Quartet, which sang in weekly concerts for children at nearby Oak Ridge, which led to Fowler renaming the group the Oak Ridge Quartet. The group consisted of himself, Lon "Deacon" Freeman, Curly Kinsey and Johnny New.

Fowler moved to Nashville, and from 1946-1950 became a regular part of The Prince Albert Show segment of the Grand Ole Opry on NBC Radio. In 1948, he launched his first all-night gospel sing, popularizing a format that would blanket the south over the next two decades. Originating from Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium and later taken to other major cities across the region, each show featured many of the day's premier Southern gospel quartets.

In the 1950s, he hosted a syndicated television program, The Wally Fowler Show, featuring Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters, The Speers, The Statesmen and others. He recorded for several labels, but in later years, went into semi-retirement and tended to avoid publicity, although he continued to promote some gospel and variety shows in North Carolina.

On June 3, 1994, Fowler apparently suffered a heart attack while fishing from a dock on Dale Hollow Lake, northeast of Nashville, and his body was found floating in the water.He was survived by his widow, Judy Moss Fowler, and daughters Faith McCoy and Hope Kimmer.

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Sun recordings can be heard on the playlists from 706 Union Avenue Sessions on > YouTube <
 
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