Billy Lee Riley

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billy Lee Riley at the Memphis Music Festival , 2008

Billy Lee Riley (born October 5, 1933 in Pocahontas , Arkansas , † August 2, 2009 in Jonesboro , Arkansas) was an American musician . His musical spectrum ranged from rockabilly and country to blues to folk and rock music . In addition to guitar , Riley played harmonica and bass .

Life

Childhood and youth

Billy Riley was of Irish and Native American descent and had seven siblings. He learned the harmonica at the age of seven and spent his childhood in Osceola and Forrest City . There he worked in the cotton fields. Riley began playing the guitar as a teenager. In addition to the usual rural country music, Riley was strongly influenced by the blues of the mostly black field workers: "Blues is the music I grew up hearing on the plantation ," he later said.

At the age of ten, Riley left school to work in the fields. Five years later he volunteered for the US Army , where he founded his first band during his military service, which played mainly old hillbilly music , the forerunner of country.

Rockabilly career

In 1953, when Riley left Army service, he moved to Memphis , Tennessee after a brief stint in Jonesboro . In Jonesboro he had played in a country band called CD Tennyson and his Happy Valley Boys . In Memphis he made contact with Jack Clement , with whom he soon became a member of Slim Wallace's group. During the day Riley worked as a truck driver, while in the evening he performed in bars and pubs. When Wallace founded the record label Fernwood Records in 1956 , Riley got the chance to record a demo of his track Trouble Bound with Johnny Bernero on drums . Jack Clement brought the recordings to Sam Phillips , the owner of Sun Records . The label already had successful musicians such as Elvis Presley , Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash under contract and was known for the so-called "Sun Sound", the rockabilly.

Phillips signed Riley. Together with his own band, to which the then unknown Jerry Lee Lewis later belonged, he recorded his first single Rock With Me Baby / Trouble Bound in the Sun Studio . Although this was a failure commercially, Riley went on an extensive tour of the southern states with other Sun artists . His next singles like Flyin 'Saucer Rock'n'Roll didn't bring the desired success either. In the meantime, Jerry Lee Lewis, who had started a solo career, had been replaced by pianists Jimmy Wilson and Charlie Rich . But when commercial success began to emerge with Riley's single Red Hot , Phillips dropped Riley to build Jerry Lee Lewis, who just hit the charts with Great Balls of Fire .

Riley acted as a session musician on many classic Sun recordings and brought out five more singles under his name by 1959. In between he also recorded Is That All To The Ball, Mr. Hall / Rockin 'On The Moon for Brunswick Records . However, there were no real hits, even if Red Hot sold well regionally.

Later career

In 1959 he left Sun and founded his own label Rita , which achieved a hit with Harold Dorman's Mountain of Love in 1960. In 1962, Riley moved to Los Angeles , where he was under contract with Mercury Records .

His own country, soul, blues and rock records for Rita, Mojo, Pen, GNP Crescendo and a number of other labels didn't sell particularly well in the 1960s. Nevertheless, in 1966 his LP Funk Harmonica , on which he interpreted current folk rock hits on the harmonica, was also released in Germany as folk hits . That same year, Riley moved to Atlanta , Georgia .

In the 1960s, thanks to his harmonica playing, Riley was a sought-after accompanist and studio musician , who was regarded as a “musical chameleon ” because of his stylistic range .

During the rockabilly revival triggered by Elvis Presley's death, Riley became a well-known rockabilly musician. Since then, he has been revered by the global rockabilly fan base as a living rockabilly legend and has performed at international rockabilly festivals to the present day.

Bob Dylan brought him back to the stage in 1992. It was then that Riley remembered the blues that had shaped his musical childhood. Since then, Riley's reputation, notoriety and success have grown. For his blues album » hot damn! «In 1997 he was nominated for a Grammy . On the cover and in the booklet , Riley presents himself as an endorser with a Gibson Blueshawk in order to stir interest in the new electric guitar model. But it turned out the other way around, with the advertised instrument drawing attention to Riley and his music. Because of the photographs, Riley's album "hot damn!" Was noticed by the Gibson Blueshawk community and the former rockabilly star was discovered as an interesting blues musician. As a result, his fame, which had been limited to the rockabilly scene until then, was broken at the end of 2006 by a nearly one-hour radio portrait of “ Spielräume Spezial ”, which presented Riley's changeable life and varied work in German-speaking countries to a broader public for the first time.

In 2009 it was announced that Riley had cancer. In the same year he died of complications from the disease at St. Bernards Medical Center in Jonesboro, aged 75 . Riley's death caused great consternation within the rockabilly scene, for example the American rockabilly radio broadcast a Billy Lee Riley special show of their Weekly Jamboree . On August 30, 2009 , a tribute concert in honor of Riley took place in Newport , Arkansas, at which rockabilly stars such as Sonny Burgess and the Pacers , WS Holland , Ace Cannon , Carl Mann , Larry Donn , Dale Hawkins and Riley's former drummer Jimmy Van Eaton performed.

plant

His song Trouble Bound made a lasting impression on the young Bob Dylan and prompted Elvis Presley to comment to Sam Phillips: "He sounds more like me - than I do" . Elvis Presley invited Riley to his New Years Eve parties as a musician in 1967 and 1968.

DVD recordings

In the two-hour US television documentary "Good Rockin 'Tonight. The Legacy of Sun Records “(2001) is Billy Lee Riley as an interview partner, as an interpreter of his songs and as part of a roundtable discussion with former Sun Records musicians who are discussing the Sun Records studio with Sam Phillips.

The John Prine concert DVD “Live on Soundstage 1980” (2007) also includes a guest appearance by Billy Lee Riley. Together with Prine and his band he interprets No Name Girl and Red Hot .

Discography

Albums

  • 1962: Harmonica & the Blues , Crown
  • 1964: Big Harmonica Special , Mercury
  • 1965: Harmonica Beatlemania , Mercury
  • 1965: Whiskey a Go Go Presents , Mercury
  • 1966: Funk Harmonica , GNP
  • 1966: In Action , GNP
  • 1968: Southern Soul , Mojo; reissued, Cowboy Carl , 1981.
  • 1977: Legendary Sun Performers: Billy Lee Riley, Charly
  • 1978: Sun Sound Special: Billy Lee Riley , Charly
  • 1978: Vintage, Mojo
  • 1981: Southern Man
  • 1992: 706 Reunion, Sun-Up
  • 1992: Blue Collar Blues , Hightone
  • 1994: Classic Recordings 1959–1960 , Bear Family Records
  • 1995: Rockin 'Fifties , Icehouse
  • 1997: hot damn! , Capricorn
  • 1998: Very Best of Billy Lee Riley: Red Hot , Collectables
  • 1999: Shade Tree Blues , Icehouse
  • 2002: One More Time , Sun-Up
  • 2003: Hillbilly Rockin 'Man , Reba Records
  • 2009: Still Got My Mojo , Rhythm Bomb Records
  • 2009: The many Sides of… (Best Of Billy's Blues) , Rhythm Bomb Records
  • 2010: The Mojo Albums , Bear Family Records
  • 2010: The Outtakes , Bear Family Records

swell

  • Andreas Weigel: Billy Lee Riley's unsteady career . Life motto "Trouble Bound". ORF , Ö1 , special games rooms (November 5, 2006).
  • Colin Escott, Martin Hawkins: Catalyst. The Sun Records Story . Aquarius Books, London 1975, ISBN 0-904619-00-1 .
  • Phil Hardy, Dave Laing: Encyclopedia of Rock 1955-1975 . Aquarius Books, London 1977, p. 78.
  • Billy Lee Riley. In: Leigh Ann DeRemer (Ed.): Contemporary Musicians . Vol. 43. Thomson Gale, 2004.
  • Michael Gray: The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia . New York, London 2006. pp. 575f.
  • Colin Escott, Martin Hawkins: Sun Records. The Discography . Bear Family Records, Vollersode 1987, ISBN 3-924787-09-3 , pp. 170-173.

Web links

Online biographies

MP3 portrait with Billy Lee Riley interview

Discography

Over the course of 50 years, Billy Lee Riley has recorded singles and albums on numerous labels under a number of pseudonyms. The following discographies, which, thanks to their chronological order, also document Riley's musical career, are accordingly of great help.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adam Komorowski: Classic Rockabilly ; Liner Notes Proper Records
  2. ↑ For Riley's years at Sun Records, see: Escott, Colin / Hawkins, Martin: Good Rockin 'Tonight. Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll . New York City, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991, pp. 174-178
  3. ↑ Andreas Weigel : Billy Lee Riley's unsteady career ( Memento of the original from March 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Life motto "Trouble Bound". ORF , Ö1 , special games rooms (November 5, 2006).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / oe1.orf.at
  4. ↑ cf. Sun Records' 'lost giant' Billy Lee Riley dies at 75 ( Memento of the original from August 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at commercialappeal.com, August 2, 2009 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.commercialappeal.com
personal data
SURNAME Riley, Billy Lee
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American musician
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Pocahontas , Arkansas
DATE OF DEATH August 2, 2009
Place of death Jonesboro , Arkansas