was so popular on local radio that Manny Pearson, the owner of Bama Records, approached him with an offer to make some records. Bama was a small, independent local label with no offices and no recording studio, so Gunter went to the studios of WAPI to record “Birmingham Bounce,” and “How Can I Believe You Love Me.” The Golden River Boys (renamed the Pebbles for the session), were made up of Hardrock on guitar, Billy Tucker on fiddle, Ted Crabtree on steel guitar, Huel Murphy on piano, Jim O’Day on bass, and Bob Sanders on drums. “Birmingham Bounce” soon became a regional hit and Hardrock played for large crowds as he toured the Deep South. “Birmingham Bounce” is about having a good time in “a town we love called Birmingham.” Gunter’s song rocks along with a pounding boogie-woogie piano and drum beat, yet prominent fiddle and steel guitar breaks mark this disc as country. Gunter’s music sounds like old-time radio with a folksy spoken introduction and down-home banter, but it also has enough rhythm and excitement to qualify for early rock ’n’ roll, even though the trademark twangy electric guitar is absent. Country singer Red Foley recorded a version for the major Decca label that quickly climbed the national charts, finally making number 1 on the country charts for several months.
Bama followed the success of “Birmingham Bounce” with another single in 1950: “Gonna Dance All Night” / “Why Don’t You Show Me That You Love Me.” This record has a place in the history books as it claims one of the first mentions of the term “rock-’n’-roll,” years before deejay Alan Freed popularized it. Gunter remembered later that he had often heard the term at dances, especially after a good up-tempo number. So he started to use it in his introductions—“here’s one you can rock ’n’ roll to”— in order, as he admitted, to be “in with the kids.”2 Bill Haley had done the same thing: he had picked up the phrase that formed the title of his song “Crazy Man, Crazy” from the teenagers in his audience. Country singers and their fellow professionals in R&B were incorporating the vernacular of their audiences in their songs and putting both “rock” and “roll” in the lyrics. On “Birmingham Bounce” Hardrock sang, “When the beat starts rockin,’ no one’s blue,” and he added to this on “Gonna Dance All Night” with: “We’re gonna rock ’n’ roll while we dance all night.” While solidly in the country genre — his next Bama release was “Dad Gave My Hog Away” / “Lonesome Blues”— Hardrock was playing rock ’n’ roll and defining it as up-tempo songs that “the kids” can dance to.
Unfortunately for Gunter, his regional hits did not help his career as a recording artist, and he remained in radio and television. In 1953 he returned to Birmingham, where he was a deejay on radio station WJLD. The program director there was Jim Connally, who was related to Sam Phillips, owner of the small Sun label in Memphis. Phillips had expressed an interest in recording Hardrock in Memphis, but Gunter could not find the time to travel up there, so he remade “Gonna Dance All Night” at a Birmingham radio station. The tapes were sent to Memphis, and in May 1954 Phillips released it on the Sun label.
Elvis Presley was another country singer signed to Sun. Phillips always told the story that he was searching for a young white kid who could put over the rhythm and blues that was so popular with his black customers, and Presley turned out to be that person. “Birmingham Bounce” was Sun’s #201 release and soon after came Sun #209, “That’s Alright Mama,” a reworking of bluesman Arthur Crudup’s earlier record. Sun Records were trying to cover all their bases for Presley’s first release, for on the flip side of this R&B cover was a country standard, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” done over in a much faster and louder rockabilly style. Elvis’s second Sun release, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (Sun #210), was a cover of Wynonie Harris’s hit. Birmingham musician Lenard Brown: “See, black people were doing that for so long before Elvis, it was unreal. They [Sun Records] just had the money to put behind it — he was not doing anything different.”
Enter the King
Although the country radio stations steered well clear of “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley knew that they were onto something. During 1954 Elvis continued to perform as “The Hillbilly Cat” (backing Bill Haley and the Comets on one occasion) and playing gigs in Alabama, including one-nighters in Sheffield and Montgomery, and some say a honky-tonk in Prattville. Elvis Presley was gaining exposure, especially after he secured gigs on Louisiana Hayride, a Saturday night country radio show that was broadcast all over the South. One day in November 1955 Ken Shackleford was eating lunch with RCA executive Ed Hines in Gulas’s restaurant in downtown Birmingham. Shackleford was a new entry into the record business: “I got out of the navy and came to Birmingham and went to work in a bank. I won a contest to sell accounts, and I won and got a tape recorder — a reel-to-reel. Being a musician myself, and I met this guy, a saxophone player and he said, ‘You need a mixer.’ So I went out and got a Boken mixer. My friend said, ‘We should go downtown and start a studio.’ I had a friend downtown who had a blood bank, who gave me the upstairs for nothing. We go in and build a studio … We would tape a session and we would send our tapes to RCA [in Nashville] and then they would [custom] press them. We sent them the tape and they did the rest. We knew nothing about soundproofing and recording … The only thing [recording studio] they had at that time was Homer Milam [of Reed Records]. He’s a good friend, but he didn’t have the kind of equipment we did. At the time the best stuff on the market was an Ampex two-track reel to reel … Homer had a three-track, that’s what he did all the Reed stuff on … In the meantime we were recording various people, a session for Marion Worth, who got a Columbia record contract, she was like Patty Page.” While the two were eating, Ed Hines, “the RCA head honcho in Nashville,” blurted out “We bought Elvis’s contract from Sun Records for $35,000!” Shackleford was shocked: “What! My God, did somebody lose their mind?” This was an unheard amount for a little-known singer and the most that any record company had ever paid for an individual artist. An entrepreneur with a background in carnivals and a fake military title called Colonel Tom Parker had taken over managing Elvis from Sam Phillips, and he steered the young man away from Sun Records to RCA — one of the five or six major recording companies. RCA proclaimed their new signing as an up-and-coming star of country music and his first release on their label was a country song, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” (recorded in Sun Studios in 1955). The B side of this disc was the sublime “Mystery Train,” one of the great rock songs, and its relegation to the B side indicates where RCA thought the core audience for Elvis might be. Yet RCA alerted their dealers that Elvis’s records should be catalogued as both pop and country.
Twenty-one-year old Elvis made the journey to Nashville at the beginning of 1956 and found himself in RCA’s recording studio under the watchful gaze of Chet Atkins. This was a complex of studios, first-rate equipment, and some of the best guitar pickers in the nation — a big change from the tiny, primitive independent studios like Sun in Memphis or Shackleford’s Heart Studios in Birmingham. When “Heartbreak Hotel” was released in January 1956, there was an anxious feeling in RCA’s offices in Nashville and New York that someone had made a big mistake. A few weeks later no one was worrying anymore; “Heartbreak Hotel” was racing up the charts — not just the pop charts, but all the charts. It had reached number 1 in pop and country and number 5 in the rhythm and blues charts by March. Its sales were astounding. Even the black radio stations were playing it. The next time Shackleford and Hines met for lunch a few weeks after that November meeting, Hines said: “Ken, you are not going to believe this but we are shipping records out of Indianapolis in boxcars” — that is, in railroad boxcars instead of in trucks or U.S. Mail packages. The national network of record distributors operated by RCA was spreading the word of rock ’n’ roll in the form of this single disc.
The Rock ’n’ Roll Show
The first national tours of artists playing the new music came to Alabama in 1956, such as Bill Haley, the Drifters, Bo Diddley, and Big Joe Turner, whose “Shake, Rattle and Roll” had been the basis of many successful covers by white artists, including one by Bill Haley. These were the days when a concert was more than one headliner and an opening band, but as many as fifteen nationally known artists all performing on one bill. Music promoter Tony Ruffino: “There was eleven acts on one show and they all did one song. The radio would only play one or two songs. So therefore no one