T. Texas Tyler - Bumming Around

I'm as free as the breeze and i'll do what i please...

I've done a bunch of bumming around too....

1953.

T. Texas Tyler - Bumming Around

Cliff Martin And His Cliff Dwellers - Back Street Affair

Some more early country music w/ Cliff Martin And His Cliff Dwellers doing Back Street Affair on the Crest record label. Scant info on this, so again, i have no idea what year but has to be the 50's? Any help DrunkenHobo? This one kind of slinks along with some creepy fiddle and steel guitar and a kooky vocal delivery from Mr. Martin which creates a pretty somber tone. Nice.

edit: Bob The Scared Data Miner said 1953. Thanks Bob!

Cliff Martin And His Cliff Dwellers - Back Street Affair

Bonnie Lou - Tennessee Wig Walk

Going to stick with the King label here and some more early country rockin' style, this time from 1953.

Bonnie Lou (born Mary Jo Kath October 27, 1924, Talawanda, Indiana) is an American Rock and Roll and Country Music singer. During the mid 1950s, rock and roll was the hottest selling music on the market. Few women however ventured into this territory, like Bonnie Lou. Bonnie Lou was one of the first female Rock & Roll stars who proved to the public that female singers could indeed sing rock and roll.

Bonnie Lou's real name is Mary Jo Kath, and she was born in 1924 in Illinois. Mary grew up listening to Patsy Montana and her band "The Prairie Ramblers", and was greatly inspired by her. Mary learned how to yodel, which was from the help of her Swiss grandmother. As a child she learned how to play two instruments, the violin and guitar. By the young age of 16, she was singing and performing on a local radio show in Bloomington, Illinois. By age 18, Mary went on a bigger radio show, which aired in Kansas City, Missouri. Her exposure on this radio show in Kansas City, helped her land a job as a singer on WLW Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio, where station executive Bill McCluskey hired Mary as a singer a yodeler for his radio show called Midwestern Hayride Country & Western Radio Program. McCluskey was the one who gave Mary Jo the stage name she would be known by for the rest of her life, "Bonnie Lou". While on the radio show in Cincinnati, Lou performed regularly with Country Music girl group the Girls of the Golden West, which Lou listened to as a child.

Bonnie Lou continued radio performances until the end of the 1940s. Her radio performances were even cut to acetate and released to the public. However, Bonnie Lou never truly broke as a recording artist until the 1950s.

In 1953, Lou signed on with her first record company called King Records in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the beginning stages of her recording career, Lou recorded Country Music material and released it. Bonnie soon had big Country Music hits with "Tennessee Wig Walk" and "Seven Lonely Days". Both songs were Top 10 Country hits. The flip side of her hit "Seven Lonely Days" featured the song "Just Out of Reach", which would later be covered by other Country singers, like Patsy Cline, Billie Jo Spears, Jean Shepard, and k.d. Lang.

Soon, Bonnie started recording Rockabilly or Rock & Roll. In 1954, she recorded the song "Two-Step Side-Step", which was written by Murry Wilson, who is the father of The Beach Boys, Carl, Brian, and Dennis. In 1955, she released her first Rock & Roll record called "Daddy-O". The song was a Top 15 Pop hit that year, and turned Lou into a major Rock & Roll star overnight. The song was later covered by The Fontaine Sisters on the Dot Records label. It wasn't until 1958 though that Bonnie had another hit, this a duet with Rusty York called "La Dee Dah". They soon recorded a Teen Pop song together called "I Let the School Bell Ding-a-Ling". Soon, Lou left the King label for another Cincinnati record label called Fraternity. She released several different singles for Fraternity, one of which were as successful as her singles for the King label.

Bonnie Lou - Tennessee Wig Walk

The Smith Brothers - Sinner's Dream

To Prove that anything and everything goes here at the devil's music and after a few great funky soul cuts from The Triumphs & Alvin Cash, and then some blistering heavy psych, we now switch it up even further with some fine hillbilly country gospel music with The Smith Brothers from 1953.

The Smith Brothers, Smitty and Tennessee, were born in a small town called Oneida, Tennessee into a musical family. The boys learned to sing the gospel and folk tunes that were familiar to the local folks back then. The Smith Brothers were a gospel duet team. They did numerous personal appearances in the Southern region of the United States as well as recording for Capitol records.

They were at first with the group called the Sunshine Boys.

The Smith Brothers found themselves in Hollywood for a time. During their four years, mostly with the Columbia studio, they appeared in 17 films. They were said to especially be proud of their work with Charles Starrett in the "Durango Kid" series.

But television was coming onto the scene and the brothers wanted to see what it would offer them. They heard that WSB-TV was to become Atlanta and the south's first television station. In fact, it went on the air in September 1948. The Smith Brothers made a favorable impression with the station manager and program director and became the first musical act and thus, the first "live" television show in Atlanta.

Soon, Atlanta had a new station - WAGA-TV. Smitty and Tennessee put their heads together again and thought they could have a bigger and better show. Evidently they couldn't convince the folks at WSB-TV, so they switched to WAGA-TV. They went on the air with folks such as Boots Woodall, Paul Rice and announcer Jon Farmer, doing a 75-minute daily show called "TV Ranch". The show gained immediate popularity with the fans and in 1952, the folks who read Atlanta's "TV Digest" voted "TV Ranch" their favorite local music show.

Around this time, they recorded four sides for an independent record label. The records sold well and word got back to Ken Nelson of Capitol Records who convinced them to sign a recording contract with Capitol.

Their popularity continued to gain momentum in Atlanta. WAGA-TV gave them another daily show at 5:45pm which they did alone, singing their familiar duets and gospel melodies.

A 1954 article notes that the brothers were well qualified and talented enough to play Western swing and popular music, but their real interest was in the Gospel songs.
http://www.hillbilly-music.com

The Smith Brothers - Sinner's Dream