“The thing I really wanna say is—and really, really mean is that real things last. Any way you look at it. Real things last.” — Dale Hawkins

Dale Hawkins, 1957, playing on the Louisiana Hayride radio show (just a year after Elvis completed his world-shaking run on the program)

It’s his birthday today. Time moved really fast in the mid-50s rock-rockabilly world. Elvis exploded and made everyone irrelevant almost overnight. He turned everyone into wannabes, generating a million copycats, some of which rode his coattails to some success (at the very least financially). But it was one of those events that EXPLODED overnight and then deflated almost as quickly. It almost never happens that way. Buddy Holly was on a bill with Elvis in 1955, and his style almost immediately veered away from country into Elvis-land, a sharp right-angle – he was like “oh wait, I need to be doing THIS.” This happened across the board. For perspective: Elvis was an unknown less than a year before. He recorded “That’s All Right’ in July 1954. It made local waves. His Louisiana Hayride appearances launched him regionally. This is still 1954, though – 1955 he started his tear through the Southwest and Southeast. This is where all these future legends like Holly encountered him. The culture veered Elvis’ way, unstoppably. Buddy Holly “hit” in 1957, which doesn’t sound like it’s a long gap – 1955 to 1957 – but in the fast-moving 1950s rockabilly world it was an eternity. By 1957, Elvis was a movie star. Wild. His style almost immediately moved into what we now would probably just call “pop” – but he also put out a Christmas album, a gospel album, he did whatever the hell he wanted to do, and don’t let anyone tell you different. But the point is: He couldn’t be considered pure rockabilly. He never was. But he was a comet with a long long tail.

The field became extremely crowded almost overnight. The gold rush. Sun Records became a single-artist operation, causing tension with other artists like Billy Lee Riley, Johnny Cash, etc. Jerry Lee Lewis was the new shining star but he flamed out almost immediately with the scandal of his marriage. Sun Records didn’t have a crowded roster anymore. Charlie Rich came and went. It was no longer the Mecca.

“I was raised by my grandparents in Louisiana. That led, I think, to a lot of the types of sounds that I do music wise because I was in the melting pot of good music. In the saloons, the front would be where the white people were, and if you swing the door, you’d hear Hank Williams sing “Lovesick Blues.” And then on the other side, you’d hear Elmore James “Dust My Broom,” or, you know, some good classic blues. Plus the churches. I mean, people don’t realize that all of the churches with the exception of the Catholic and Episcopal sang the same hymns but sang it with different feeling.” — Dale Hawkins, 2008 interview

Dale Hawkins is a tail-end-of-the-comet figure, but that doesn’t mean he was derivative. He wasn’t a pale imitation of anybody. He grew up in a musical family. He loved blues music. He was a kid but he was smart. Elvis was the game-changer. Dale positioned himself adjacent to the Louisiana Hayride, parking cars in the Hayride lot. That’s as close as he could get at first. He got to know some of the Hayride musicians (D.J. Fontana primarily, who then got sucked into the Elvis Monsoon). He got the attention of Stan Lewis at Chess, and went into the studio to record a demo, the song by which Dale Hawkins is primarily known to this day: “Susie Q.” The song was written as an instrumental by a kid named … James Burton (speaking of which, and speaking of the Louisiana Hayride to Elvis Pipeline). (Burton wouldn’t hook up with Elvis, though, until the 70s.)

The guitar part on “Susie Q” is fucking legendary. Keep in mind: James Burton was just seventeen years old when he came up with this lick. Insane.

But the whole thing is legendary. The cowbell in the opening. There’s something nasty about all of it. It’s dirrrrrty. Dirtier than a lot of the “rockabilly” stuff going on at the time, geared towards the sock hop crowd. Genres are imprecise. This isn’t “rockabilly” although history tries to loop him into it. Dale Hawkins was a harbinger of the future. Without Dale Hawkins, there’d be no Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Rolling Stones were CLEARLY inspired by Dale Hawkins, Keith Richards for SURE (so … inspired by the song, but mostly inspired by that guitar). It’s hard to call anything the first – you have to be very careful with it – but Hawkins’ sound, made just as the first Elvis Explosion was dissipating (before going even further and longer – it was all very unpredictable) – and just as the Rockabilly Revolution spun out into space losing speed … pushed its way outside the margins, basically carving out a teeny bit of real estate which would eventually be called “swamp rock”, the dirty guitar-heavy sound of the 70s.

When this happens … when something new comes along – or “new” – it’s sometimes viewed as an anomaly, or a one-off, or a fluke. People LOVE labels, and they love it when things are NEAT. Dale Hawkins was not neat. His moment in the sun was brief and his one big hit was “Susie Q” (although his discography rewards the curious and patient. There’s a lot of great stuff there. Hawkins attracted great musicians from the jump, people who would go on to be legends – like Burton – or stellar studio musicians who became part of the Wrecking Crew. And so his tracks show a really high level of musicianship (unlike, it must be said, a lot of the other rockabilly stuff). Granted, for rockabilly you don’t NEED amazing musicianship, and in some cases high technical skill could be a detriment. But Hawkins was different.

“Susie Q” is a nothing of a song without that instrumentation. The lyrics are about a girl named Susie Q with a distinctive walk. It’s Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”. That’s it. But the way it SOUNDS is … I mean, it sounds like SEX is what it sounds like. Sex in a moldy wet bayou shack, if I’m being honest. The song is unimaginable without James Burton’s guitar part. (Feel so fortunate I went and saw James Burton back in 2013.)

Ricky Nelson and James Burton

“Susie Q” did “chart”, and fairly well, although nothing really “stuck”, and it didn’t generate momentum – at least not for Hawkins personally. This is wild since the song is now seen as one of the most crucial and influential tracks of the 1950s. It happens that way sometimes. I think its newness and obvious dirtiness – its spare nasty sound – a cowbell, a guitar, a bass, and drums – it’s a grown-up sound, not a sock-hop sound – was threatening to the label, so they didn’t really push it. Hawkins kept recording though. He hosted a TV show for a while. He died in 2010, so he rode the nostalgia waves, and put out a couple of albums late in the game which got a lot of attention and critical chatter. He seemed to enjoy this late success.

Here’s a 1958 television performance, and this whole setup is kind of funny because … as I mentioned before, Dale Hawkins was no soda-shop good boy. It’s 1958, though: the Elvis wave was almost completely over. He was about to enter the Army. He had made 4 movies. Rockabilly burned out. “The Day the Music Died” was coming. So the proverbial “they” had him perform in an ice cream parlor set, your basic white-bread teenage set – a world he himself never belonged to. His songs don’t belong there either.

And finally, the man of the hour playing the song that inspired generations of guitarists, 50, 60 years of them.

 
 
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