Sonny Burgess born 28 May 1929

"Sonny" Burgess (May 28, 1929 – August 18, 2017) was an American rockabilly guitarist and singer.

Albert Austin Burgess was born near Newport, Arkansas, about 60 miles west of Memphis. His parents, Albert Austin and the former Esta Parsley, ran a cotton and soybean farm. After graduating from Newport High School in 1948, he spent two years in baseball’s minor leagues but could not hit a curveball. Giving up on a baseball career, he formed a country band, the Rocky Road Ramblers, with three friends, Kern Kennedy, Johnny Ray Hubbard, and Gerald Jackson and played boogie woogie music in dance halls and bars around Newport. He served in the Army (1951-1953) during the Korean War, stationed in West Germany with the military police. On his return to Arkansas, he reorganized the Ramblers into the Moonlighters, taking the name from the Silver Moon Club in Newport, where the group often played.

Burgess was a fan of the blues singers Jimmy Reed and Big Joe Turner and performed a mix of rhythm and blues and old standards, but in 1955 the group changed its sound after opening for Elvis Presley on four dates. “We heard Elvis and said, ‘Man, I want to go to Memphis and record and be like that,’ ” Mr. Burgess told Kicks magazine in 1988. Presley, in turn, liked the group’s version of Smiley Lewis’s “One Night of Sin,” which he recorded in 1958 as “One Night.” Adding a second guitar and trumpet and taking a new name, the Pacers, the group began recording at Sun with Sam Phillips, who encouraged Burgess to coarsen his vocal style and let loose, which he did.

The band's first record was "Red Headed Woman."  The flip side was "We Wanna Boogie." Both were written by Burgess and delivered a straight shot of full-tilt rockabilly, with manic instrumental solos behind Mr. Burgess’s growling vocals, punctuated by whoops and shrieks and growls. “Here was total abandon: coarse, untutored singing; unintelligible lyrics; ragged drumming; distorted guitar, backed by a wildly bleating trumpet,” Colin Escott wrote in “Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music” (2002). “It was punk before punk, thrash before thrash.”

                                  

The record was said to have sold nearly 100,000 copies, but Mr. Burgess, who wrote both songs, was unable to capitalize on its success. His later releases for Sun including  “Thunderbird,” “Ain’t Got a Thing,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “Sadie’s Back in Town,” went nowhere. “Maybe Sonny’s sound was too raw, I don’t know — but I tell you this,” Phillips said in an interview for a boxed set of Sun recordings. “They were pure rock ’n’ roll.” In performance, the Pacers lived up to their sound. Inspired by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose stage antics had enlivened Bill Haley and the Comets’ movie “Rock Around the Clock,” they did splits and back flips onstage, formed a human pyramid and threw themselves into the audience at the end of every performance.

After leaving the Sun label in 1959 he scratched out a living playing bass and touring with the country singer Conway Twitty and performing with a variety of groups. After leaving Twitty in 1964, Burgess formed a new group, the King’s IV, but in 1972 he left the music business to run shoe store in Little Rock and also becoming a traveling salesman for St. Louis Trimming, a sewing-supply company. In 1986 he joined with former musicians from the Sun label to form the Sun Rhythm Section and was invited to a show in Washington DC where he made a big hit. After that, Burgess travelled all over the world and became a sensation in Europe. Due to his European fans, Mr. Burgess enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s, and recorded the albums Tennessee Border with Dave Alvin of the Blasters and Sonny Burgess with Garry Tallent of the E Street Band.

In 1998, the Smithsonian Institution made a video called “Rockin’ on the River” that brought Burgess and the Legendary Pacers together again. In addition to original member Kern Kennedy, the group now included Bobby Crafford, Jim Aldridge, Fred Douglas, J. C. Caughron, and Charles Watson II. They made two album-length recordings in the late 1990s: They Came from the South and Still Rockin’ and Rollin’ which in 2000, was voted the best new album in the country and roots field in Europe. The group was inducted in 2002 into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. They also performed at the 2006 National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia. With June Taylor, he was the host of “We Wanna Boogie,” a Sunday night show on KASU, the radio station of Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro. Burgess was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro on May 7, 2011.

In 2014, he received the Delta Cultural Center’s Sonny Payne Award for Blues Excellence. Sonny Burgess and the Legendary Pacers were given the Folklife Award by the Arkansas Arts Council, presented at the Governor’s Arts Awards ceremony on March 10, 2016. That same year, in poor heath, he moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). In July 2017, Burgess suffered a fall at his home. He died the following month in Little Rocks Arkansas hospital, at the age of 88. 

He performed with his band, The Pacers, up until a month before he passed away. His legacy endures as a testament to his role in shaping the sound of rockabilly and influencing generations of musicians who followed.

(Edited from The New York Times, Wikipedia & Encyclopedia of Arkansas)