Albert Austin "Sonny" Burgess

At 85, Sonny Burgess is still playing 100 gigs a year. He is one of the last musicians around from Sun Records’ heyday.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Sonny Burgess outside the Arkansas Rock 'N' Roll Highway 67 Museum in Newport, Arkansas.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Sonny Burgess outside the Arkansas Rock 'N' Roll Highway 67 Museum in Newport, Arkansas.

Correction: The original lineup of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers featured Burgess, Kern Kennedy, Johnny Ray Hubbard, Russ Smith, Joe Lewis and Jack Nance. Some first names were omitted in some print editions of this story. Hubbard, of Newport, died earlier this month at the age of 83.

Correction: The original lineup of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers featured Burgess, Kern Kennedy, Johnny Ray Hubbard, Russ Smith, Joe Lewis and Jack Nance. Some first names were omitted in some editions of this profile. Hubbard, of Newport, died earlier this month at the age of 83.

Newport — Longtime musician Sonny Burgess, dubbed the Arkansas Wild Man, is a paradox. In some ways, he has stayed put all his life. In others, he has gone far, traveling more places and experiencing much more than most. The man has performed a duet with Bruce Springsteen, no less. And that was in his later years -- in 2001.

Burgess was born in 1931 in Anderson, near Newport, a once vibrant but now weathered river city, into the farming family of Albert and Esta Burgess. He still lives there. But on the countless nights he and his band were performing all over the world, he lived the life of a rock star.

In the 1950s, Burgess opened for or performed alongside music giants such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty.

He has performed in every state except Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming and Montana, and outside U.S. borders in England, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

"I like Spain the best," recalled Burgess during a recent chat, held upstairs in the former First National Bank building in Newport, where a hallway and several rooms have been converted into the Arkansas Rock 'N' Roll Highway 67 Museum. The museum chronicles how a new music (later dubbed rock 'n' roll) emerged along U.S. 67 in the clubs that dotted it.

Since being signed to Sun Record Co. in the 1950s, Burgess estimates that his band has recorded nearly 35 albums, on labels such as Rounder, Hightone, Ace and Stomper Time.

In its heyday, the band regularly played six nights a week. Burgess has slowed down, but still plays close to 100 shows a year, some as close and down home as Ward Country Dance near Beebe, others as far away and highfalutin as Las Vegas.

On Friday, Burgess, who turned 85 last month, will be honored at a birthday bash and concert in Little Rock sponsored by the Central Arkansas Library System's Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in the Ron Robinson Theater. Burgess and his band will do about a dozen songs, interspersed with performances by younger local musicians -- Rodney Block, Bonnie Montgomery, Kevin Kerby, and Brad Williams and Nick Devlin of the Salty Dogs -- doing some of their songs in tribute. The show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10, available at the Butler Center Galleries and online at ArkansasSounds.org.

The event also celebrates Butler Center Books' forthcoming book, We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers. The retrospective of the band's 60-year career and the eras in which they played was written by Marvin Schwartz of Little Rock, and is set for release in September.

In Anderson, where Burgess was raised, his family grew cotton, soybeans, watermelons and even corn for a while. Burgess -- the fifth of six children -- picked a lot of cotton.

"My job was to follow the wagon and pick up what fell off," he says. "Farming is not a bad living these days; you can actually do good at it, but you couldn't back in mine."

When Burgess was 8 or 9, long before he acquired his red Telecaster guitar and later his red Gibson, his mother bought him his first instrument -- a Gene Autry guitar from Sears, Roebuck and Co. for $3.25.

"My sister's friend taught me to play 'Wildwood Flower' and I nearly drove my family out of the house," he says.

He got his musical baptism listening to rhythm and blues and country tunes on radio station KNBY-AM, 1280, in Newport, The Grand Ole Opry on WSM-AM, 650, in Nashville, Tenn., and an all-black station, WDIA-AM, 1070, in Memphis.

Burgess also had a passion for baseball, and played on the Newport High School team in 1947 and 1948. At one time, he considered pursuing a professional baseball career.

"There were four or five guys who were drafted in 1947 and 1948," Burgess says. He was one of them, chosen in 1949 to join the Orlando Senators, a minor league squad of the Washington Senators. He lasted a season.

In 1949 and 1950, Burgess and his band mates, then in their late teens and early 20s, named their group the Rocky Road Ramblers and began playing boogie-woogie music in dance halls and bars around Newport.

Through the years, Burgess learned to play a little banjo, a little piano and even the drums.

"Sometimes we had a drummer who wouldn't show or would quit on you. I remember this one night that happened and I was trying to play the bass drum with one foot, play the guitar and sing all at the same time. I could have killed him."

NEW SOUND IN NEWPORT

Newport was a red-hot spot for nightlife.

"Newport was wet," he says, meaning alcohol sales were legal. "And we had all the clubs to go along with it. Back then, there were clubs all up and down [U.S.] 67, which became known as the Rock 'n' Roll Highway because of all the musicians who traveled up and down it."

The stand-out venues in Newport were the Silver Moon Club and Porky's Roof Top Club, then there was Bob King's King of Clubs in nearby Swifton. Anyone who was anyone graced those stages -- the Dorsey Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Harold Jenkins (later known as Conway Twitty), Charlie Rich and more. Burgess and his boys often served as the house band.

The music scene was exploding all around, and Burgess and his mates performed anywhere they were hired to, including a debutante's ball in Batesville. "I first saw Jerry Lee Lewis at the Catholic Club in Helena in 1955, and he had this song 'Crazy Arms,' and it was like nothing else," recalls Burgess of concerts held in St. Mary's Church parish center. "You had never seen anything like it."

In 1954, after two years in the U.S. Army, Burgess re-formed the band, calling them the Moonlighters after the Silver Moon Club.

In 1955 or '56, he and his band opened for the popular hillbilly band Maddox Brothers and Rose, country musician Ray Price and western singer Marty Robbins at Robinson Auditorium (now Robinson Center Music Hall) in Little Rock, and then at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis.

"They were all heroes of mine," Burgess recalls.

In 1956, the band became known as Sonny Burgess and the Pacers, a name suggested by former member Joe Lewis, a pilot. (The Pacer was a popular small airplane.) That same year, Burgess married Joann Adams, from whom he's now divorced. The couple had two sons, John, a physical therapist in Little Rock, and Payton, who died in 2005 in a boating accident.

THE SUN RECORDS

Upon the advice of Presley, the group visited Sun Records owner Sam Phillips in Memphis, about 80 miles southeast of Newport. He told them to work up some songs and come back.

"The people over there thought we were drunk," Burgess recalls. "We weren't drunk, we were just scared."

Also on Phillips' advice, the group expanded, with the original Pacers including Burgess, Kennedy, Hubbard, Russ Smith, Lewis and Jack Nance. By 1957, Lewis and Nance had left to join Conway Twitty's band, and Smith joined up with Jerry Lee Lewis.

Burgess recalls with fondness his years at Sun Records, 1956-1959, during which the band released five singles. "The standard payment at Sun back then was half a cent per each record sold for recording it and another 1 1/2 cents per record sold for writing it."

The Pacers' first record for Sun was a pioneer rock 'n' roll song, "We Wanna Boogie," in 1956. The flip side was "Red Headed Woman." Both were Burgess'. While the group's songs and performances were rowdy and full of energy, their music didn't shoot up the charts.

"It didn't last too long," he said of the label's heyday. "It was the people Sam had that made it so great. It lasted about 10 years when, as D.J. Fontana likes to say, 'the magic left' -- Elvis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. Another reason it came to an end is that Sam, who was ahead of his time, went on to other projects and left others in charge. After our first session, we worked with 'Cowboy' Jack Clement, and Sam never really came up there anymore. He'd found other ways to make money -- with a chain of radio and TV stations and buying stock in Holiday Inn with his friend Kemmons Wilson, also of Memphis.

"One day we were in the studio, and Jack handed me a sheet of paper which had the words to 'Restless' written on it and nothing else. ... We had to come up with the music for it.

"We recorded it and for about a month, Sam thought it would be bigger than 'Blue Suede Shoes,' but it wasn't," Burgess says. "Conway Twitty later recorded it the same way we had but it didn't go anywhere for him either."

In 1957, the Pacers started working regularly with Cash, Roy Orbison, and Billy Lee Riley, when Bob Neal (Elvis' second manager, who worked with Sun Records) booked them on tour dates, mostly in the western part of the country.

TRAVELING SALESMAN

In 1959, Burgess began playing electric bass for Twitty, a gig he had until the early 1960s, when Twitty disbanded the group to move to country music.

"He and I both loved Ray Price," Burgess says of Twitty. "And I really loved Conway Twitty; he was one of the nicest guys in the business. He ended up writing a song Ray Price recorded, and as they say, the rest is history."

From 1965 to 1972, Burgess continued to make music with his group, The King's Four.

"We started to play Bob's King of Clubs on Friday nights for $10 each and Mike's 67 Club on Saturday nights for $10 each," Burgess says.

"If we'd been smarter, we would have left Newport," Burgess says. "If you want to be a star, you have to work at it. Conway Twitty realized that but I guess I never really had that will or drive. I've always been a more laid-back kind of person."

Bobby Crafford agrees. He met Burgess in 1957, became his drummer that year, and is still with the band.

"I think some of it was that Sonny and [fellow band member] Kern Kennedy had families," Crafford explains. "The guys that made it gave up a lot and lost their families. Also, they were at the right time at the right place and with the right song.

"But we have traveled the world together and always enjoy wherever we go and all the friends we have made," Crafford says. "And Sonny always promotes Newport, Highway 67 and Arkansas."

Burgess says he and his band never made a lot of money playing the local clubs. His early working days were spent at a local box factory making ammunition boxes and Pepsi-Cola crates, working eight hours a day for a dollar an hour.

In 1972, he began a career as a traveling salesman for a dry goods company, selling fabric, buttons and other notions in eight states. He worked that job for 25 years, retiring in the late 1990s.

STILL ROCKIN'

Burgess and fellow Sun Records artists, decked out in shirts from Lansky Brothers in Memphis (a favorite tailor of Elvis') found audiences in Europe, performing with the Sun Rhythm Section between 1974 and 1986. Former session musicians from Sun comprised the group: Burgess and Paul Burlison on electric guitar, J.L. "Smoochy" Smith on piano, Stan Kessler on bass, Marcus Van Story on acoustic guitar and lead vocals, and Elvis' longtime drummer D.J. Fontana.

Burgess was inducted into Europe's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. He and his group -- now the Legendary Pacers -- were inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in Jackson, Tenn., in 2002. The Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis includes a display on the band.

Burgess and the band recorded Still Rockin' and Rollin' in 2000, voted the best new album in the country and roots field in Europe. Original or longtime members today are Kennedy; Crafford, who joined in late 1957; Fred Douglas, who joined in 1962; and Jim Alridge, who came aboard in 1961. In 2006, the band performed at the National Folk Festival in Richmond, Va., to large, enthusiastic audiences.

Back home, Burgess tapes his weekly radio program, We Wanna Boogie, which he co-hosts with June Taylor. The program, named for his first record, airs Sunday nights from 5 to 7 p.m. on KASU-FM, 91.9, at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro.

"Sonny and his band continue to inspire people," says John Miller, Arkansas Sounds music coordinator for the Butler Center. "These guys are in their 80s and playing more dates now than ever before. And he's one of the last men standing who recorded on Sun Records. He's the real deal. And his influence runs deep and wide. That's why Bruce Springsteen went out of his way to give him a song to perform at that benefit in New Jersey following 9/11. You can influence a lot of people without having huge chart hits."

Why, nearly 60 years later, now at 85, Burgess and the band still performs about 100 gigs a year is simple.

"I love the playing," he explains. "A good audience really makes you feel good, like you're 39 and holding."

NW Profiles on 06/15/2014

photo

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Arkansas Rock and Roller Sonny Burgess said he was encouraged to whistle on several of his Sun Label records.

Upcoming Events