With a big, booming voice and promising musical chops, Aubrey left for Houston at the age of 16 and began sitting in with western swing bands that borrowed heavily from the Texas roadhouse blues and jazz tradition. (When later asked why he played the piano, Moon replied: “Because the beer kept sliding off my fiddle.”)

But dad had the good sense to bring an old pump organ into the house, which his son used to play ill-gotten tunes that you can’t find in the Sunday hymnal. Aubrey’s father – a devout, church-going man – didn’t share his son’s appreciation for the devil’s music. That’s where he first was exposed to the blues and, more specifically, a black sharecropper named Joe Jones, who showed him a few tricks on guitar and probably laid a few songs on him too. Born Aubrey Mullican in 1909, he grew up on the family farm in Corrigan, some 90 miles north of Houston. He’s on that long list of notable blues-based musicians from the great state of Texas (although he seemed to have a greater affinity for neighboring Louisiana, where he toured and recorded with eventual governor Jimmie “You Are My Sunshine” Davis). Virtually all his recordings qualify as essential American music – a potent brew of country, blues, western swing, Cajun, rock, pop… and maybe a few other strains related to his Scottish-Irish heritage.

He also had a flair for country ballads and Cajun-flavored stomps like Jole Blon and Jambalaya, a tune Mullican co-wrote with another famous protégé, Hank Williams, to get around a contractual arrangement with Cincinnati-based King Records. Others rank among the best rockers of the era, especially this tune from ’56 that was covered nearly 30 years later by Moon admirer Nick Lowe on his album The Rose of England (here Mullican is backed by the red-hot Boyd Bennett & His Rockets): Seven Nights to Rock Some of Mullican’s recordings from the Forties and Fifties sound like Bob Wills with a bad attitude. I like to think of Moon Mullican as one of the lost heroes of rock ‘n roll – a vital link between R&B piano pounders like Amos Milburn and early rockers like Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis who owed a huge debt to the Moon songbook.

They called him the King of the Hillbilly Piano Players.

Hillbilly rock hillbilly roll original