"Just what it says it is: Elvis Presley done bluegrass style, and just about as much fun
as it gets. And how could it not be? Bluegrass by its very nature is a good-time, uplifting genre, and Elvis is Elvis. Put the two together, get some
hot veteran, retro-minded pickers and singers together, and you've got a party started...You gotta think that Elvis is smiling, wherever he
is."
--Jeff Tamarkin, allmusic.com
"Nothing like the joy of not caring what the neighbors think. The hit writing duo
reaches back into their back pages finding an Elvis commonality, mixes their similar backgrounds and tastes and comes out with hard charging
bluegrass takes on classic Elvis in time for the 30th anni of his shuffling off."
--Chris Spector, Midwest Record Review
Feel A Hunk O' Burnin' Love with
The Bluegrass Elvises, Volume One
Shawn Camp & Billy Burnette
Street Date: August 16, 2007
On
July 6, 1954, in a 30 X 18 foot recording studio at 706 Union Avenue in
Memphis, TN., a 19-year old hopeful with the unlikely name of Elvis
Presley grabbed an acoustic guitar and dared to do the unthinkable.
With a doghouse bass and a primitive electric guitar egging him on, he
put a gnawing scrub rhythm to Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky,"
changing Monroe's elegant waltz to a 4/4 rockabilly tune, and charging
both forms with the slurred vibrato that would become his signature.
"Fine, man! Hell, that's different," Sun Studio owner Sam Phillips
famously remarked. "That's a pop song now, nearly 'bout!"
What had started as a parody became the B-side of Presley's first single. But in the fall of 1956, when
Elvis played Monroe's 1947 classic on his
only appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, he approached the Father of
Bluegrass backstage in his dressing room and apologized.
"I thought he had a beautiful voice," Monroe recalled in the '80s,
speaking in his brittle husk of a tenor. "I told him, "Well, if
it give you your start, it's all right with me." But it also made
Monroe re-think his own composition, and the elder musician later
re-recorded the song, shoving the tempo up into overdrive and
showcasing a syncopated mandolin break as a hallmark of the bluegrass
idiom. Rules, it seems, are made to be broken.
Which
brings us to the Bluegrass Elvises, aka bluegrass/country singer Shawn
Camp and rockabilly/country performer Billy Burnette, one's ying to the
other's yang, but both steeped in the snaky soul of the
Tennessee-Arkansas mythology of the '50s, and connected by the
spiritual placenta of the twins Elvis Aaron and Jessie Garon.
Billy, whose father Dorsey and uncle Johnny Burnette used to kick a
young Elvis out of their rehearsals in the laundry room at the
Lauderdale Courts housing project, had so many connections to
Presley--with Crown Electric and Humes High figuring prominently in
their shared stories--that they felt like kin.
"They were all good buddies, they all knew the same people, Scotty
Moore and Bill Black," Billy says. "Elvis used to call the house a
lot." Things were happening so fast in the early '50s--when Billy and
his cousin, Rocky, were born three weeks apart, their dads named their
new "rockabilly" style after them--that at first it was hard to tell
which Memphis practitioner would get famous first. Billy, with a pair
of black sideburns in his future, would meet them all, including Elvis
on a downtown Memphis street during his "Teddy Bear" era.
Two hundred miles over in Arkansas, Shawn would grow up grooving on his
parents' Sun singles, his fascination eventually leading to a peanut
butter and banana-fed addiction. In years to come, Presley fervor would
take such a firm grip on his psyche that he would get, as Elvis might
put it, "real, real gone." He'd make all the pilgrimages--stopping at
Graceland every time he went through Memphis, even seeking out the
forgotten grave of Elvis's paternal grandfather in Louisville. The cab
of his truck became a cocoon, a nesting room spun from the sounds of
the Sirius Elvis channel. And when he put his mind to it, he could
imitate Elvis's Whitehaven-via-Tupelo drawl so perfectly as to maybe
even fool Gladys Presley.
Fate has a way of bringing such people together, of course. Labelmates
at Warner Bros. in the early '90s, Billy and Shawn eventually joined to
play a little music together, and to write more than 100 songs,
including Alan's Jackson's "Burnin' the Honky Tonks Down" and Del
McCoury's "My Love Will Not Change."
Then, in 2003, as in that seminal day at Sun in 1954, genius raged.
Shawn, mindful that country music was at the heart of such early Elvis
offerings as "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" and "I Forgot to
Remember to Forget," made a furtive notation on a piece of
paper...something about doing an album of Elvis songs high-lonesome
style. A few weeks later, he and Billy were at the Nashville studio of
Cowboy Jack Clement - the famed engineer who watched it all go down at
Sun and has the scratches Elvis made on his guitar to prove it - when
producer David Ferguson walked in and off-handedly suggested they cut a
bluegrass Elvis record. "It all came together right then," Shawn
remembers. "And a month later we started cutting on this thing."
First session: January 8, Elvis's birthday, at Ferguson's tiny Naughty
Pines studio. With Dave Talbot on banjo and Terry Eldridge thumping
bass--Aubrey Haynie would later replace Shawn's own fiddle parts--they
kicked into "Good Rockin' Tonight," "Mystery Train," and "A Big Hunk O'
Love." Even they were surprised. When they played back the 'grassy
yipping on "Good Rockin' Tonight," a delightfully eerie sound that
threatened to reach into the stratosphere, everybody's hair stood on
end.
The melding of bluegrass and rockabilly turned out to be such an
organic synthesis that it went down smooth and easy, Billy's rocking,
back-alley swagger twining with Shawn's joyous, hillbilly tenor in a
sweet siren call of seduction: "She said, 'Meet me in a hurry out
behind the barn'/Don't you worry baby I'll do you no harm.'" At the
end, it's easy to imagine the ghost of Bill Monroe crowing, "Hell,
that's different! That's a bluegrass song now, nearly 'bout!"
Still, the album languished for several years, until Shawn mentioned it
to Tamara Saviano, the Grammy winning president of American Roots
Publishing. Saviano, who has enjoyed recent success with Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster and The Pilgrim: A Celebration
of Kris Kristofferson, enthusiastically sanctioned the project, and a
second session was quickly underway, this time at the Butcher Shoppe
with sidemen Scott Vestal (banjo), Chris Henry (mandolin), Aubrey
Haynie (fiddle) and Mike Bub (bass). As before, the vibe in the studio
was blue suede bliss, beginning with the 28-second intro, "2007: A
Bluegrass Oddity," a brilliant, if hilarious take on "Also Sprach
Zarathustra," the Richard Strauss tone poem widely known from Stanley
Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Oddyssey," and which Presley used to
open his shows in the '70s.
"We're not making fun of either bluegrass or Elvis, but we laughed a
lot on this record, hearing some of the classic Elvis licks done in a
bluegrass fashion," Billy says, recalling the fiddle flourishes on
"Little Sister," the mandolin fills on "Hound Dog," and the banjo zings
on "A Big Hunk O' Love." (The latter rendition was inspired as much by
Bonnie Raitt's version as Presley's.) Most of the songs have been
totally recast, "Don't Be Cruel" standing as one of the few songs that
retain the original tempo. For "Blue Suede Shoes," the two pulled
nuances from Bill Monroe's "Heavy Traffic Ahead," and added jazz,
western-swing, and jump blues stylings.
Other surprises abound: Shawn's masterful and heartfelt recitation on
"Are You Lonesome Tonight," where Haynie lays down a mournful
twin-fiddle effect; Billy's switchblade sharp vocal on "Jailhouse
Rock," perhaps the first understandable reading of the lyrics; and the
inclusion of original verses of "Hound Dog" that Elvis chose not to
record.
"I did the Elvis version up front, and then at the end I did the Big
Mama Thornton lyric, but a little bit from the male perspective," Shawn
says. "And I used her attack, the way she emphasized specific words."
The project was so inventively fun that everyone stayed behind long after the sessions had ended.
"I'll tell you," Shawn recalls, "it's rare that you work on a record
and even at the mix stage, listen back and enjoy it so much that you're
almost dancing around. And everybody in the studio was doing it. It all
just fell into place. Maybe that was the spirit of Elvis, coming back
and guiding us along."
Billy got a stronger jolt from the blue when his cell phone rang and
the caller I.D. spelled out Graceland. "That was so cool! Elvis on the
line!"
It turned out to be an invitation to appear on a radio show. But Billy
and Shawn often ponder what Elvis would be like today if he had lived.
The two wrote a song about it, which they may include on a second
volume. Which seems sorely needed. After they finished volume one,
Billy realized, "God, we forgot to do 'Blue Moon of Kentucky!'"
Chances are, Elvis will haunt them until they make it right. The polite
Mr. Presley will want to repay Bill Monroe for the favor of a song that
started it all. Thirty years after his death, Elvis is still
influencing a broad spectrum of genres, even as he once borrowed from
them.
--Alanna Nash
Contact Tamara Saviano / tsaviano@comcast.net /
615-400-0388
