Hank C. Burnette - "Dirty Boogie"

Описание: This track originally came out of the Detroit based Fortune label's catalog, where a member of Roy Hall's band, the Cohutta Mountain Boys (fiddle player Frankie Brumbalough) both wrote it and sang it on one of Roy Hall's first ever recordings. I got the record from Fortune boss Jack Brown himself and picked up the lyrics that way. Roy & the Boys' version of "Dirty Boogie" was straight hillbilly (cut in 1949) and had no resemblances to what would eventually lay ahead when rock'n roll was the way to go, a change which must have come quite easily to the boogie woogie driven beat that Roy had already investigated during his early hillbilly days.
TRIVIA:
James Faye "Roy" Hall was born on May 7, 1922, in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. An old colored man taught him to play piano. By the time Roy turned twenty-one, he departed the town of his birth to seek fame. He made it to Bristol and farther, pumping boogie-woogie in every Virginia, Tennessee, or Alabama beer-joint that had a piano. He organized his own band, Roy Hall and His Cohutta Mountain Boys (Cohutta was part of the Appalachians). It was a five-piece band, with Tommy Odum on lead guitar, Bud White on rhythm guitar, Flash Griner on bass, and Frankie Brumbalough on fiddle. Roy pounded the piano and did most of the singing; but everybody else in the band sang too.
In 1949 Roy and the band cut their first records, for Fortune, a small, independent label located in Detroit. Over the next year Fortune released six sides by Roy Hall. Most of these recordings were slick hillbilly blues, similar to the sort of music with which Hank Williams had recently risen to fame. But the most successful of the bunch, "Dirty Boogie" was a wild, nasty rocker which foreshadowed much of what was to come to be musically in the South during the next few years.
In 1950 Roy traveled on to Nashville alone. He cut two records there that year for Bullet, one of Nashville's most active independent labels. Both of these Bullet singles, "Mule Boogie" and "Ain't You Afraid," were fine hard-driving things, but they failed to sell. After Bullet, he recorded for Tennessee, a small local company that had a national hit in 1951 with Del Wood's piano instrumental "Down Yonder"; but Roy Hall's piano brought no hits.
He opened a joint in Nashville called the Music Box. One of Roy Hall's most loyal customers was Webb Pierce, who, following Hank Williams's death on NewYear's Day 1953, became the undisputed king of the country singers. Pierce hired Roy as his piano-player, using him on most of his recordings in 1954-55.
In the summer of 1954 Elvis Presley came to Roy Hall's club looking for work. Roy recalled; "I fired him after just that one night. He weren't no damn good." Towards the end of that same year another young man came to the club looking for work. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy kept him on for a few weeks. Roy hired Jerry for $15 a night.
On September 15, 1955, Hall went into the studio and cut three songs for the Decca label, including "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On". The record was released three weeks later. Roy Hall continued to record for Decca until the summer of 1956. While a few of these recordings were plainly uninspired, his "Diggin' the Boogie" contained one of the toughest and most unrelenting rhythms that had ever been recorded in the South. But none of this amounted to a hit record.
Bad luck seemed to follow Roy Hall. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," which he had co-written under the pseudonym of Sunny David, became a huge hit for Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957 and Roy stood to make a good deal of money in royalties. But when the time came to collect he was sued by his ex-wife and the court awarded her his share of the royalties from the song.
But Roy Hall kept on pumping his music, and he kept playing around Nashville and wherever else he could find a piano and a paycheck. Roy died on March 2, 1984, in Nashville. He was sixty-one years old.
My own version of "Dirty Boogie" bears no resemblance whatsoever to Roy Hall's Cohutta Mountain Boys' hillbilly flavoured version. Sonet included it as the 1st track on my "Rockabilly Gasseroonie" album released in 1977. Although I've received quite a few rave reviews over it throughout the years (one from world famous modern art painter, David Oxtoby, whom gave me one of his paintings of Elvis amply signed "I Love Your 'Dirty Boogie'"!!), it's never been one of my own personal faves, I must admit (no hype here, ha, ha!). Perhaps I got tired of it, as I re-did it so many times and changed the overall arrangement of it so often that I felt I had gone too far, since my usual way of recording is one take and one take only. Cause if a take 'don't happen' the first time around, it's bound to be a flop according to my musical philosophy. Well, as time has rolled along I've grown accustomed to it and I now think it's got a few passable points to it here and there, lol! Enjoy...