Similar Artists:
Boyd Bennett,
Merrill Moore,
Jerry Lee Lewis,
Bill Nettles ,
Rose Maddox,
Tommy Jackson,
Speedy West,
Hardrock Gunter,
Ole Rasmussen
Influenced By:
Followers:
- Born: March 29, 1909, Corrigan, Polk County, TX
- Died: January 01, 1967, Beaumont, TX
- Active: '40s, '50s, '60s
- Genres: Country
- Instrument: Piano, Vocals
- Representative Albums: "Moonshine Jamboree," "Moon Mullican Sings His All-Time Greatest Hits," "I'll Sail My Ship Alone"
- Representative Songs: "I'll Sail My Ship Alone," "Pipeliner Blues," "Sweeter Than the Flowers"
Biography
By rights, Moon Mullican should be a legend twice over, in country music and rock & roll. He merged them both -- as well as blues, pop, and honky tonk -- into a seamless whole at the drop of a hat and the ripple of a keyboard, and also managed to play a seminal role in the history of Western swing, all in a recording career that lasted less than 30 years. Instead, for decades he was one of those "lost" musical figures from the '40s and early '50s, whose career paved the way for rock & roll, who was born just a little too early, and who was a little too old to take advantage of what he'd started. He was born Aubrey Mullican in 1909 in Corrigan, TX, a little more than an hour's drive north of Houston, to a family that owned an 87-acre farm that was worked (at least partly) by sharecroppers. It was one of them, a black blues guitarist named Joe Jones, who introduced Mullican to the blues before he was in his teens. This in itself constituted an act of rebellion on his part, because Mullican's family were devout churchgoers -- his father attended three times a week -- and abhorred anything to do with the elements of sun and excess with which the blues and the places where it was usually played were associated. He would spend most of his life attempting to reconcile -- or at least find a livable middle ground between -- these two sides of himself. He got good on the guitar and the bass, but Mullican's instrument of choice was the keyboard: first the family organ, which had been bought so that his sisters could practice playing hymns, and later the piano. By the time he was 14, he was able to make 40 dollars -- a good deal more than a week's wages in 1923 -- for two hours of piano playing at a local cafe. Music was not only something he loved, but it offered a lot more renumeration than farming (or even overseeing land worked by tenant farmers) seemed to; it was also something that his father despised. Mullican had already made a habit of hanging out at the roadhouses in East Texas, taking in the blues and barrelhouse music that poured off of their stages along with the rougher sides of life. Finally, at 16, Mullican left home for the big city of Houston, where he quickly fell in with people that his family would have pegged as "wrong." He made his living playing music and earned the nickname "Moon," short for "Moonshine," which stuck for the rest of his life, and all but trumpeted the direction his life was taking where sin and music were concerned. During the mid-'30s, he joined the Western swing band the Blue Ridge Playboys, and moved from there to playing in Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, as well as recording with the Sunshine Boys and Jimmie Davis in Louisiana, and then returned to working with Bruner for a time in the early '40s. Mullican's talents at the ivories were long established by the end of the '30s -- he played the piano like it was a part of him, and sometimes with surprising flashes of elegance -- but he moved to the lead singer's spot in 1939 when Bruner recorded the pioneering country trucker song, "Truck Driver's Blues." He turned out to be every bit as good a singer as he was a pianist, with a stunningly expressive voice even if it didn't have an overly great range. This recording and the advent of the '40s heralded the busiest phase of Mullican's career, as he juggled a long-term association with Bruner and a stint in the backing band for Jimmie Davis during the latter's successful campaign for governor of Louisiana, and finally put together his own band, the Showboys, known locally as the "band with a beat," an attributed sometimes referred to as "East Texas sock."They quickly became one of the most popular outfits working the Texas/Louisiana border during the mid-'40s, and though they couldn't have known it at the time, that beat, coupled with their mix of country music and Western swing, and Mullican's definite blues-influenced piano and singing (and sometime choice of repertoire) brought them amazingly close to a sound that would later be called rock & roll, and the fact that they were white practically sealed the premonition, at least on some of their repertoire -- Mullican also had a liking for ballads that were definitely more country than R&B in nature and execution. In any event, it was all going over well, and it seemed only a matter of time before Mullican would hit it big on record, he had recorded as a vocalist fronting Bruner's outfit and others for all of the majors -- Decca, RCA Victor, and Columbia Records -- going back to before World War II, and the Showboys were in the studio attempting to make records as early as 1945 for the tiny Gulf label, only to be thwarted by technical problems that made the results unreleasable. It wasn't until the fall of 1946 that someone was able to take advantage of what Mullican and his band could do on record, and that someone was Syd Nathan of Cincinnati, OH, who had lately founded a label called King Records. Those first 16 sides cut at those early King sessions were outstanding, capturing everything that Mullican and company had been delighting local audiences with for the last couple of years -- he went on to cut a decade's worth of superb music for King, including a uniquely stylized version of "New Jole Blon" that was a hit in 1947, and the ballad "Sweeter Than the Flowers" in 1948. It was in the realm of hillbilly boogie, however, that Mullican had his greatest influence, his versions of "Shoot the Moon" and "Don't Ever Take My Picture Down" pre-figuring rock & roll (especially Jerry Lee Lewis' brand of it) in tone and beat, if not youthful subject matter. In particular, the sides that Mullican cut with producer Henry Glover -- otherwise best known as a jazz trumpeter -- at King crossed over easily into R&B, though he was equally comfortable with pop standards, honky tonk, and traditional country. By the end of the '40s, he was a member of the Grand Ole Opry and found a national audience from its radio broadcasts, which helped propel the sales of his biggest hit, "Cherokee Boogie," in 1951. Mullican was a star in the world of country music, and may have had more influence there than the sales of his records would lead one to believe. For decades, it was an open secret that he'd co-written "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" with his fellow Grand Ole Opry member Hank Williams, collecting a 50 percent share of the royalties on the sly because of his contractual relationship to King Records. His influence on the country field may not have been as freely acknowledged at the time as the actual level of impact would have justified, because of the peculiarities of his music and persona. The United States was still almost entirely a segregated nation, and in the realm of country music that was true on a cultural level as much as such practicalities as restricted hotels and drinking fountains -- it was case of pure denial, of course, as anyone listening objectively to the work of such popular country figures as Hank Williams or Tennessee Ernie Ford couldn't miss the black influence somewhere in their sound, but it was how audiences and many musicians felt at the time; what's more, a lot of producers and promoters were uncomfortable with the subject, because most localities south of the Mason-Dixon Line had laws prohibiting black and white performers from sharing the same stages, and a white performer who sounded "too black" was pushing an envelope that most moneymen didn't want touched or even acknowledged.
Bill Haley and
A 1962 heart attack on-stage sidelined him into the following year, but he was back performing and recording in 1963, this time locally for the Hall-Way label of Beaumont, TX, where he made his home. He never gave up performing or neglected his love of pleasing an audience. Finally, on New Year's Eve of 1966-1967, he suffered another heart attack, and died early in the morning on January 1, 1967. Two years later, Kapp Records released The Moon Mullican Showcase LP, which included his last sides done in Beaumont more than half a decade earlier. In the decades since, Mullican's name has gradually become known to a generation of listeners attuned to the roots of rock & roll and pre-Nashville country music, and labels like Ace, West Side, and Bear Family have issued compilations of his King, Coral, and Hall-Way sides on CD. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
