The writer's credit on the label went to Sam Phillips, though he probably wasn't the real author of the new lyrics. Four weeks later, "Bear Cat" sat comfortably at # 3 on the R&B charts, giving Sun its first hit. Billboard was impressed and wrote "This is the fastest answer yet!" (April 4 issue). Within days he was in the Sun studio recording an answer record, "Bear Cat" (Sun 181), which came out before March was over. When Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" hit the market in the first week of March 1953, Thomas immediately saw its potential. As a star DJ at WDIA, he was in a good position to predict which records would become hits. The next year Rufus made his first recordings for Sam Phillips, who leased three singles to Chess in 1951-52, after which Phillips started his own label, Sun Records. Thomas made his debut as a recording artist in late 1949, with "I'll Be A Good Boy"/"I'm So Worried" (Star Talent 807), followed in 1950 by "Beer Bottle Boogie" (Bullet 327), which was credited to "Mr. Its impact went far beyond the large Black audience allegedly Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis all tuned in regularly. From 1951 onwards, he also worked as a deejay at WDIA, an influential Memphis station (still in existence), which billed itself as "America's Only 50,000-Watt Negro Radio Station". Though he was a born entertainer, he kept his dayjob at a textile plant until 1963, when he started having his "Dog" hits. He started his artistic career in minstrelsy and vaudeville, working as a tapdancer and comedian before he took up singing. He recorded for the two most important independent labels in Memphis, Sun (for less than a year) and Stax (for fifteen years) and had his greatest success with novelty dance hits.īorn a sharecropper's son in the rural community of Cayce, Mississippi, Rufus moved to Memphis with his family when he was two years old. Thomas, Jr., 26 March 1917, Cayce, Mississippiĭied 15 December 2001, Memphis, Tennessseeįor many years Rufus Thomas was a central figure on the Memphis music scene, as singer, songwriter, dancer, dynamic stage performer and, above all, radio personality.
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