The Guy Who Got Left In Elvis’ Wake-With The Legendary Sonny Burgess In Mind

 By Lester Lannon

“You know I was built for stardom, built bigger than that hillbilly truck driver from down in godforsaken Tupelo, down in damn Mississippi. Elvis waved up his hair, grew some silly sideburns that the rest of us had to imitate or we wouldn’t get a look see, swiveled a little hip which all the girls took for doing the act, doing the act with them, snarled a lot to show how alienated he was and took a bunch of Negro songs from Negro singers on the “race” records like Smiley Jackson’s One Night With You and rode that to the top based on nothing more than that. Sam Phillips, hell I knew Sam when his selling shoes door to door in Memphis before he got that raggedy record studio and a lot of kids with a couple of bucks and some piped-up dreams went in to have their shot at stardom at least for their girlfriends,” muttered Sonny Burrows one night at Johnny Dee’s, his old time hang-out when he had a few bucks or when he was looking for something, looking for a gig, talking to Les Drover, the owner.

Sonny had been in the midst of a long dry spell looking for work, looking for those mystical gigs that kept every performer, good or bad, going and he was trying to connect once again with Les in order to pick up a few playing dates on the weekend to make ends meet, to make the room rent over on Tappan Street before the landlord gave him the boot. He had laid the Elvis story on Les for what Les could not remember but maybe the fiftieth time over the years and while he never said anything about it while Sonny was going on and on Les was utterly tired of the rag. See he knew what Sonny didn’t. Couldn’t get through his head. Elvis had something besides all those things Sonny was running off about which Sonny thought had made the nut for him. There was something inside, some desire, some eternal showman that one-hit wonder Sonny could never touch. But he listened in silence as Sonny continued.            

“You know Red-Headed Woman went right to the top of the rockabilly charts, you couldn’t hear it enough on the jukeboxes all over the country, kids asking DJs to play it more than once at Saturday night dances. The whole nine yards. Then Elvis came out with Good Rockin’ Tonight, not even his song, not written by him, or for him, and he does a couple of wiggles and giggles and that was that. No showmanship, no craft, just pure animal drive.” Les looked wearily over his glasses and thought back to those glory days when Sonny had his moment in the sun, had made Johnny Dee’s the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night and made Les himself a local legend-for a minute. Such was fate, Sonny just never got over that one minute when he was the king. Too bad, maybe he should have stayed on the farm out in Loring and played his Saturday nights in some roadside dive and be done with it.      

Sonny was like a lot of kids though, a lot of kids who had come through World War II too young to fight and so nothing to brag about against older brothers and fathers who had war stories to tell as long as people would listen before everybody got back to their lives again. Had that same sense of alienation that everybody talked about later with Marlon Brando and his motorcycle boys, the surfers out on the West Coast, JD kids in the cities, Jimmy Dean out in the suburbs with that rebel without a cause label. But all that was later when everybody wanted to explain what the hell was wrong with American youth. What was happening in places like Loring, Tupelo, Jackson, Grand Rapids was that kids were cleaning out their parents’ garages or chicken coops, who knows, and putting together little bands with a new beat, not the swing and be-bop of jazz, not the crooner stuff like Frank but something more like the stuff that was on the “race” records, stuff that made you jump, let you go, and Les didn’t know if this was part of it but let you dance to your own beat with or without a partner like you needed to have in jitterbug. Some kind of free-form expression. But the beat drove the thing. 

So six million guys, and it was mostly guys, put something together. Most of it stayed in the garage but a few like Sonny made it out for a while. Made that trip to Memphis or to some record studio where for a few bucks they could make a demo and try to push it around the radio stations. Those too wound up mostly being played for girlfriends as kicks. Sonny had one great idea, one idea about a sexy feckless red-headed woman, his girlfriend at the time who was two-timing him from what he said and he had put that angst into a song that a million guys could relate to and had a beat that a million girls could dance too and maybe daydream about two-timing their guys just for the hell of it. Who knows what drove them to the song, except it was always the beat in the back that put the thing over.

Like all records though the thing got played out. Went to the back of the record collection to be played not fifty times a day but once in fifty days, if that. That is where Sonny got stuck, got all bent out of shape over Elvis. He had steady work at Johnny Dee’s for a year or so after the heyday of Red-Headed Woman, filled the club up most weekend nights and then didn’t as people moved on to other sounds to the rock and roll without the hillbilly touch that drove Sonny. Worse Sonny couldn’t adjust to the times, could see that he needed another idea and so he was left off to the sidelines. Went downhill a little since he swore he would never go back to the farm. And so he picked up day jobs here and there, mostly manual labor, and tried to write songs in the old way. Tried to get gigs based on that stuff but except for Les who would humor him a little and give him some nights out of kindness nobody was interested.

Over the years Sonny kept plugging away, still working day labor and writing and playing at night in his lonely room except those times when he had to hock his guitar for some small expense to keep from going to the missions. Periodically, like this night, some twenty years after that Sonny minute he would show up to have a drink, talk to Les, and start to rant about Elvis and how he took all the air out of rockabilly. That is when Les knew Sonny would be putting the bite on him to get some dates. And Les, remembering the old days, would go into his worn out schedule book and see if he had a couple of openings. Such is life.