A Whole Lot of Rockin' Preceded Elvis in The Delta
The Perkins Brothers Band based in Jackson, TennThe Perkins Brothers Band based in Jackson, Tenn., 1954, from left: Jay on acoustic guitar, songwriter Carl Perkins on electric guitar and vocals, and Clayton on standup bass. Digital image from the Jim Bailey Collection, for non-commercial use.
By Matt Chaney, USA, Copyright 2025 for original content and arrangement
As Elvis Presley’s fame rocketed in 1956, he said “rock ’n’ roll” had begun years earlier, when he was a schoolboy in Memphis, Tenn. Presley learned music from locals like Paul Burlison, a guitarist with the Burnette brothers, Johnny and Dorsey.
Burlison recalled he and the Burnettes “combined country and blues” for dance music in bars. "Whenever we’d blast ’em with something that had a pretty good beat, they’d get out there on the dance floor and the dust would get to flying.”
Musician Rocky Burnette, Johnny’s son, said the Burnette Trio struck "rockabilly" by 1953 for “taking Hank Williams tunes, old Joe Turner tunes, and putting a beat to them.”
There were more rockabilly pioneers, apparently, whose perspectives varied later on. Mississippi musician Charlie Feathers recalled he crafted rockabilly by 1949, and he declared the pure sound was vocals, guitar and bass.
Billy Lee Riley, an Arkansas native, believed his delta band made rockabilly. “We’ve never gotten credit for that, but it’s a fact,” Riley said in 1984. “I was doing what Elvis was doing before Elvis did it—mixing blues and hillbilly, putting a laidback, funky
beat to hillbilly music.”
The Perkins Brothers Band savored up-tempo picking at Jackson, Tenn., before Elvis was known. The Perkins boys came up amid delta flatlands north of Memphis, influenced by Ole Opry pickers but also blues and gospel singers. In the late ’40s the Perkins band
played a sharp beat of combined styles. “It didn’t have a name; we called it feel-good music,” Carl Perkins said later.
Electric guitarist Paul Burlison, sitting Electric guitarist Paul Burlison, sitting, who taught licks to Elvis Presley when the two worked for Crown Electric in Memphis. Burlison poses with the Burnette brothers, Johnny, standing left, and Dorsey Burnette. circa 1956. Ignored by Sam Phillips at Sun Records, the trio went to New York City and cut a hit song in "Tear It Up," released on the Coral label of Decca Records.
”We were just taking country music and putting that black rhythm in it, that’s what it was. It was a marriage of the white man’s lyrics and the black man’s soul.”
Carl Perkins hired a drummer in early 1954, Tony Austin, an addition unlike country bands, among differences. “Carl’s band was popular in Jackson, Tennessee, and was unusual for not having a fiddle or steel guitar,” observed historian Craig Robert Morrison
[1984], who interviewed regional musicians.
“Tony [Austin] states that they were playing country music with a black influence, and he feels that Perkins was ‘the original rockabilly.’ This was also expressed by Smoochie Smith, who played piano with Perkins in 1954. Perkins has stated that he realized
he had a chance in the music business when he heard Presley’s record because: ‘It was exactly what I was doing.’”
Scotty Moore emerged at Memphis with an electric guitar and cutting-edge riffs. “As a musician, I consider him one of the co-founders of rock ’n’ roll because of the guitar licks that he invented,” remarked James Dickenson, biographer.
Moore grew up listening to jazz players and Opry pickers on radio at Gadsden in western Tennessee. He learned guitar, modeling greats like Les Paul. In 1952 at Memphis, freshly discharged from the Navy, Moore joined bass player Bill Black in a country band
led by Clyde Leoppard, the Snearly Ranch Boys.
“Around the same time, Scotty began working on the thumb-and-finger style associated with Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, in which the thumb plays the rhythm on the bass strings while the other fingers pick out a melody on the higher strings,” Jay Orr reported
for the Nashville Banner [1997].
Moore said, “It sounded like two guitar players. I finally went and bought two or three of Chet’s records, 78s. I was listening and listening and began to get it a little bit. I couldn’t pick out the notes, but I could do it with the rhythm.”
“Scotty Moore had such an unusual style,” Burlison said. “You could walk into a building somewhere and not even know he was there and tell it was him … He played with all his fingers … He’d make those big old crab chords … He had the sound that just knocked
you out.”
On July 5, 1954, Moore and Black hooked up with unknown Elvis Presley for a recording session at Sun Records. Presley, 19, fashioned himself as a country singer and was unimpressive on initial takes, Moore would recall. But around midnight Elvis found his rockabilly
voice, swinging into a cover of “That’s All Right” by bluesman Arthur Crudup.
Bluesman Arthur Crudup Bluesman Arthur Crudup, circa 1940s, in a colorized photograph. In 1954 Elvis Presley covered Crudup's "That's All Right," combining styles of country music and R&B to forge the sound known as rockabilly. Digital image from Bear Family Records, for non-commercial use.
Moore dove in, adding his guitar in solos and bursts—“Rather than just play a few notes, I was trying to fill up space,” he said—while Black picked strings and tapped his upright bass. Sun producer Sam Phillips got excited, told them to continue, and recorded on audiotape.
Phillips had mastered slap-back echo, trademark of Sun recordings, “just to make it sound more live,” he said. Monophonic equipment could be tweaked, adding electronic textures like echo and reverb. Phillips manipulated a reel-to-reel for his echo, setting
a recording delay between tape heads, milliseconds apart. The tape gap required skill to gauge and avoid distortion, and Phillips was expert. Feathers said Phillips pulled a “stereo sound” from monaural setups.
Phillips recorded Presley, Moore and Black in single takes on one track, no dubbing, and quickly declared a wrap.
Within days the “Elvis Presley record” was a smash in his hometown and the surrounding delta, from Mississippi to Missouri. Radio stations were buried in listener requests for That’s All Right.
“That record opened the door for all of us around here,” Burlison said. “It combined country and blues, which we had been doing in clubs but which no one would play on the radio. Suddenly, we all had momentum.”
Elvis Presley and The Blue Moon Boys "Elvis Presley & The Blue Moon Boys," winter 1954-55 for Sun Records in Memphis, from left: Scotty Moore, electric guitar, Elvis Presley, vocals and acoustic, and Bill Black on standup bass. Photograph of the Louisiana Hayride Show in Shreveport.
The term “rock and roll” did not yet apply to music. The innovators at Sun Records grasped the meaning, nonetheless, according to Joe Keene [2017], a retired producer, songwriter and rockabilly in Kennett, Mo., north of Memphis.
Keene said, “That moment when Elvis did ‘That’s All Right,’ Sam [Phillips] said, ‘That’s what I’ve been looking for, that raw, energy feeling.’ Now when they did the next record, ‘Good Rocking Tonight,’ they KNEW who they were.”
“They knew exactly who they were, from then and that point on.”
Rockabilly had certifiably arrived at Memphis, the delta, and for the entire planet.
“All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that,” said Keith Richards [1997], Rolling Stones guitarist who grew up in the United Kingdom.
“Those early records were incredible. Everyone else wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Scotty.”
Producer Sam Phillips at the studio board in his Sun Records of Memphis Producer Sam Phillips at the studio board in his Sun Records of Memphis, 1950s, 706 Union Avenue. Digital image from wikimedia, for non-commercial use.
