Moon Mullican

Moon Mullican – Broadcast August 2008

Every now and again the Colonel indulges me by letting me stray a little from the straight blues path we walk in these sessions. Today is one such instance. We are going to cover an artist I love, who was a huge influence in country music and early rock and roll during the 40’s and early 50’s, but who is not strictly categorized as a bluesman.

He is Moon Mullican, who merged country and RnR — as well as blues, pop, hillbilly and honky tonk —and also managed to play a key role in the history of Western swing, all in a recording career that lasted almost 30 years.

However, history generally remembers him as one of those "lost" musical figures from the '40s and early '50s, whose career paved the way for rock & roll, but who was born just a little too early, and who was a little too old to take advantage of what he'd started.

My favourite Moon Mullican track

1 Pipeliner Blues – July 1952 – Moonshine Jamboree - Tk 4 – 2.33

Moon was born Aubrey Mullican in 1909 in Corrigan, TX, a little more than an hour's drive north of Houston, to a very religious family that owned an 87-acre farm that was worked 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.

Young Aubrey showed talent on the guitar and the bass, but his instrument of choice was the keyboard: first the family organ, and later the piano.

By the time he was 14, he was able to make 40 dollars — more than a week's wages in 1923 — for two hours of piano playing at a local cafe.

Finally, at 16, Mullican left home for Houston where he made his living playing music and earned the nickname "Moon," short for "Moonshine," which stuck for the rest of his life.

During the mid-'30s, he joined the Western swing band the Blue Ridge Playboys,
Track from 1936 with MM backing the Blue Ridge Playboys on piano, with Leon ‘Pappy’ Selph on vocals.

2 Gimme My Dime Back, Give Me My Money – Nov 1936 – Sail My Ship Alone – Disc 1, Tk 1 – 2.50

Mullican's moved to the lead singer's spot in 1939 when working with fiddle player Cliff Bruner’s band. The first trucker song ever recorded "Truck Driver's Blues."

3 Truck Drivers Blues – Aug 1939 – Sail My Ship Alone – Disc 1, Tk 7 – 2.58

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 Davis’ successful campaign for governor of Louisiana, and finally put together his own band, called the Showboys

The Showboys 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 brought them amazingly close to a sound that would later be called rock & roll.

Track recorded in NYC in Nov 44, with Cliff Bruner again on fiddle

4 That’s What I Like About The South – Nov 1944 – Sail My Ship Alone – Disc 1, Tk 25 – 3.01

Mullican and his band got their big recording break two years later, in 1946 when they joined Syd Nathan’s King Records of Cincinnati, OH. The first 16 sides cut at those early King sessions were outstanding, capturing everything that Mullican 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 the Cajun classic "Jole Blon" recorded in Fort Worth that was a hit in 1947.

Moon couldn’t sing the French lyric, so he made up his own, mixing English nonsense with vague Cajun phrases. Don’t know what the good Cajuns of La thought of this, but when the track was picked up by Modern on West Coast, it became a big nationwide hit.

5 New Joli Blon – Sept 1946 – Sail My Ship Alone – Disc 2, Tk 1 – 2.56

It was in the realm of hillbilly boogie, however, that Mullican had his greatest influence, his version of “Don't Ever Take My Picture Down" pre-figuring rock & roll in tone and beat.

6 Don’t Ever Take My Picture Down – 1950 – Showboy Special – Tk 9 – 2.32

Cute number from 1950

7 Short But Sweet – 1950 – Seven Nights to Rock - Tk 6 – 2.27

By the late '40s, Moon was a member of the Grand Ole Opry and found a national audience from its radio broadcasts,.

At this stage he was a hard drinking, overweight and sometimes unreliable man who had spent the past 20 years working the dives and dancehalls of the Tx south west, and much of his repertoire was not suited to the Opry audiences.

Nevertheless, his Opry connection helped the sales of his biggest hit, this track from 1951.

8 Cherokee Boogie – 1951 – Moonshine Jamboree - Tk 7 – 3.03

Another track that showed where JLL got his influences from – a hard rockin instrumental from 1952

9 Shoot The Moon – 1952 – Showboy Special – Tk 6 – 2.52

Mullican had more influence in the country music world than the sales of his records would indicate. For decades, it was an open secret that he'd co-written this next track, from 1952, 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.

10 Jambalaya – 1952 – Seven Nights to Rock - Tk 17 – 2.31

Two tracks from 1953, firstly one with typical suggestive lyrics, followed by a Roy Brown comedy track that Roy had recorded himself a few months earlier.

11 Rocket To The Moon – 1953 – Moonshine Jamboree- Tk 12 – 2.29

12 Grandpa Stole My Baby – 1953 – Seven Nights to Rock - Tk 10 – 2.32

By the mid-'50s, Mullican was trying to get out of his King Records deal and onto one of the major labels. It didn't happen until the end of the '50s, a point where his star had fallen considerably. Rock & roll had taken a lot of the edge off the sales of country records, effectively stealing country music's audience.

Mullican's record sales, ironically, had fallen even as the stars of his successors like Jerry Lee Lewis rose. In a sense, his timing was off — Mullican, with his cowboy hat, Western twang in his singing, and 50-ish appearance was definitely not what the kids were buying, no matter what his records sounded like.

Chuck Berry was enjoying success with such suggestive numbers as "Reelin' and Rockin'," but Mullican was having a harder time with "Seven Nights to Rock," an equally bold number with a compelling beat, cut with Boyd Bennett & His Pockets in an effort to reach the rock & roll audience.

13 Seven Nights To Rock – Jan 1956 – Seven Nights to Rock - Tk 2 – 2.24

(To put this track in time context, when Seven Nights To Rock came out in early March 1956 it was competing with the likes of James Brown (Please Please Please), Little Richard (Long Tall Sally), Howlin Wolf’s Smokestack Lightnin',

Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock had been released a few months before, and Sam Philips had just sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for $35K.

And it was not until a year later, in 1957 that JLL burst onto the scene with Whole Lotta Shakin Going On)

Mullican entered the '60s as an overlooked figure, apart from country listeners with long memories and those people lucky enough to catch his performances in Texas and around the Southern and border states.

An on-stage heart attack in Kansas City in 1962 sidelined him for a while, 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. A very country style track from this period

14 The Cajun Coffee Song – 62-64 – Moon’s Rock – Tk 24 – 2.32

Time, and years of hard living finally caught up with Moon on New Year's Eve 1966 when, at the young age of 57 he suffered another heart attack, and died early in the morning on January 1, 1967.

Moon legacy is one of a major innovator with his piano stylings and as one of the main links between Western Swing, Honky Tonk and Country Boogie.

One commentator has written that this, allied with his great King recordings, should guarantee him a place in the Country Music Hall Of Fame as a true pioneer of a major C20th American art form, a link in the chain stretching from those old piney lumber camps to the classic honky tonkers like the Killer Jerry Lee Lewis. But it hasn’t.

However the more far sighted Nashville Songwriters Hall Of Fame inducted Moon back in 1976.