Moon Mullican
"Seven Nights to Rock:
The King Years, 1946-1956"
(Rounder, 1981)

By ANDREW ROSS "You got to shake those bottles off the table," said Moon Mullican -- and the "King of the Hillbilly Piano Players" sure did that. He also made me swerve over three lanes of freeway traffic the first time "Seven Nights to Rock" came bouncing out of my car radio. I screeched to a halt, transfixed on the shoulder until the song ended, at which point I headed for the nearest phone, called the station, got through to the DJ and demanded, "What the hell was that?" Why? The sheer exuberance of it all, I guess. The flat-out, get-down, hell-let's-rock spirit that makes you boogie around the room, laugh out loud and generally look silly. But more. Aubrey "Moon" Mullican, as I learned by listening to him and reading the liner notes, belongs to that long line of unsung hero-prophets that runs like a leitmotif through American music. An uncredited co-composer with Hank Williams of "Jambalaya," Mullican recorded half of his King Records sessions (which began in Cincinnati in 1946) with sidemen so obscure nobody bothered to take down their names. He did for a while regularly appear at the Grand Ole Opry, though being billed as "King of the Hillbilly Piano Players" did not amount to a ticket to fame and fortune. But he's every bit as much a "godfather" of rock 'n' roll as Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Carl Perkins. Just listen to Jerry Lee Lewis and you'll see what I mean. Mullican represented a fusion of musical cultures and styles, the stuff that makes for revolutions. He hitched the up-tempo Western Swing of Bob Wills to a pumping, driving barrelhouse piano straight out of the east Texas piney woods juke-joints where Mullican grew up and played, a white man in a community of black laborers. Listen to the first 16 bars of "Shoot the Moon" (1946) and you know something new is going on. Yes, you'll hear a lot of lame country and Western in Mullican's recordings (he had bills to pay), but you'll also hear, by turns, the blues, country blues, rhythm 'n' blues, and, without a doubt, rock 'n' roll. And if you think Elvis Presley's swiveling hips introduced raunch to the white folks, check out "Grandpa Stole My Baby" (1950), and Mullican's absolutely classic 1953 rendition of "Rocket to the Moon" ("You'll have to hold tight baby/When I go into my spin"). Moon Mullican isn't the most nearly perfect pop artist I have ever heard -- Steely Dan or Frank Zappa would be my likely choices there. His records certainly don't, for me, contain the poetry of Joni Mitchell's "Blue," nor the flooding sense of remembered places found in "Crosby, Stills and Nash" or "Who's Next." But for me, an immigrant, Moon Mullican represents that optimism of spirit that made me want to come to America in the first place.

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from "Seven Nights to Rock: The King Years, 1946-1956"

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