Charlie Feathers was many things to many fans of rock and country music. To some, he was a superb country stylist who could take almost any piece of material and stamp it with the full force of his personality. To others, he was one of rockabilly's great pioneers, there at the dawn of Sun Records. And Feathers' stubborn insistence on combining elements of country, raw blues, and bluegrass to make his own version of the rockabilly experience showed him to be one of the genre's most original and enduring artists.
Feathers was born near Slayden, MS, with music all around the sharecropping community he grew up in. After day jobs in Illinois and Texas, Feathers moved to Memphis in 1950, working for a box manufacturer until a bout with spinal meningitis left him hospitalized. Listening to the radio there on a daily basis, he emerged from his stay determined to become a professional singer. By 1954, Feathers was working his way into the confines of Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service, with an eye toward getting something released on Sun Records. He filled in whenever and wherever he could, helping with arrangement ideas, even playing spoons on a Miller Sisters session. Demoing songs for steel guitarist Stan Kesler found him getting half credit on the Elvis Sun side "I Forgot to Remember to Forget." Phillips decided to start a local non-union label called Flip to test out new artists, and after pairing Feathers with country session songwriter-musicians Bill Cantrell and Quinton Claunch, released Charlie's first single on that label, the classic "Peepin' Eyes" coupled with "I've Been Deceived." The record kicked enough noise locally to get Feathers transferred to Sun for a second single, but the artist had bigger visions. Although Phillips saw him as "a superb country stylist," Feathers wanted to rock and cut many Sun demo sessions in that style. When Phillips turned a deaf ear to it all, Feathers' impatience led him to Memphis rival Meteor Records, where he waxed the two-sided rockabilly classic "Tongue-Tied Jill" and "Get With It." This single garnered enough Memphis airplay to cement him a deal with King Records, and it is here that the Charlie Feathers as rockabilly legend story begins in earnest. The dozen or so sides he cut as singles for King are the greatest '50s rockabilly tracks to escape the hegemony of the Sun studios, with "One Hand Loose," "Bottle to the Baby," "Everybody's Lovin' My Baby," and "I Can't Hardly Stand It" all becoming classics of the genre. Their territorial success got Feathers on numerous package tours and multiple appearances on Dallas' Big D Jamboree. When the King contract ran out, Feathers continued to record one-off singles of very high musical quality, for a variety of Memphis labels, while stubbornly playing his music for whatever local audience cared to listen.
When the rockabilly revival started up in Europe in the early '70s, Feathers became the first living artist up for deification by collectors. His old 45s suddenly became worth hundreds of dollars, and every interviewer wanted to know why he never really made it big and what his true involvement with Sun consisted of. Feathers embroidered the story with a skewed view of rock & roll history with each retelling, to be sure, but once he picked up his guitar and sang to reinforce his point, the truth came out in his music. Never mind why he didn't make it back in the '50s; he could still deliver the goods now.
With health problems plaguing him from his diabetes and a surgically removed lung, Feathers continued on his own irascible course, recording his first album for a major label in 1991 (Elektra's American Masters series) and continuing to perform and record for his wide European fan base. Truly an American music original, Feathers died August 29, 1998, of complications following a stroke; he was 66.
Charlie Feathers was a key engineer of the bridge between country music and rock & roll. This enlightening collection shows his progression from piercing hillbilly to energetic rocker, as fiddle and steel guitar get left behind in favor of the pulsing backbeat and guitar churn. No one really knows if he taught the Sun masters all they know, as he often claimed, but these recordings make that case irrelevant, since they stand very tall on their own merits.
Charlie Feathers - Get With It Essential Recordings (1954-69)
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Watch Charlie on Youtube "Good Rockin' Tonight"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCvkS...eature=related
Released: 1998
Contents: 2 CD's,
Revenant No. 209
Charlie Feathers: No other performer scaled such heights in both primeval rockabilly and keening hillbilly country. Presley? Nary a hillbilly wail in sight; Feathers' adenoidal whine could strip paint off walls. Here are all his Sun, Flip, King, Meteor, Kay, Walmay and Holiday Inn sides plus rare, unissued tracks including Sun demos, alternate takes and early home recordings with the likes of Junior Kimbrough. 2 discs, 42 tracks, and a 48 page photo-packed book with notes by Jim Dickinson, Colin Escott, Peter Guralnick and Nick Tosches.
John Fahey and Richard K. Spottswood's Revenant label has done some pretty audacious things since it began issuing recordings. The label released everything from the earliest Dock Boggs material to primal material from the Stanley Brothers, a collection of (very) raw American pre-World War II gospel music, and even Cecil Taylor's Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come. But nothing could have prepared the public for this deluxe double-CD issue of the work of rockabilly legend and music biz phantom Charlie Feathers. Feathers was an enigma, a man who claimed to have shown Jerry Lee Lewis how to play his "pumping" style of piano and arranged Elvis' Sun material. He co-wrote Elvis' first number one hit, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget," and spouted off about why music sucks and the secrets of the Sun sound ad nauseum for close to four decades. But in this collection, none of that matters -- it does not prove or disprove his claims, but certainly testifies that it is possible that what he boasted was true, because the truth is in the grooves. The package is deluxe as hell: long essays by Peter Guralnick, Jim Dickinson, and Colin Escott accompany two CDs broken down into issued and unissued material. The released material features all the masters of his singles for Sun, Meteor, King, Kay, Walmay, and Holiday Inn. There are a couple of missing sides, such as the Memphis label single "Wild, Wild Party," covered by Link Wray in the 1980s, and a Philwood single of Feathers' cover of "Tear It Up." There is something in the grain of Feathers' voice on his issued singles that is off-kilter or off the rails. It stutters, sputters, spits, and stings, while slipping and blurring and rolling through lyrics as if they are dialogue from outer space being dictated to him on the spot. From "I've Been Deceived"; "Defrost Your Heart," with its ghostly, voodoo lyrics; to the King "Can't Hardly Stand It," with its sidewinder guitar; to Meteor's "Get With It" and RCA's "When You Decide," the effect is the same. This is a cat who knows just what he's about, even if nobody else does. And he doesn't try too hard to get it across, he just lets it all happen, like a flood on a suburban street -- the sewer blocks up and all sorts of crazy sht pours out into the gutter. Disc two is where the revelation and science-fiction show really happens, though. All of it is unissued demos. Feathers accompanies himself on a guitar, or someone else helps him out and remains uncredited; his son plays lead. Feathers changes words mid-sentence, figures out a new bridge as the tape is rolling and the song is unfolding from the confines of his spooked-out mind -- and then there are the recordings Feathers did in Mississippi with Junior Kimbrough. Feathers celebrated Kimbrough as the greatest musician alive long before the late Bob Palmer ever heard of him. These 21 tracks (including three takes of "Bottle to the Baby") offer a view of an artist whose time never came, whose dreams simply will not give way to reality, and whose amazing merit as a creative force will not let him rest. It's too much and not nearly enough; it's full of questions with only ciphers for answers. For any fan of primitive, pure American roots music, Get With It is indispensable.
The timing of this exciting new 2-disc, 42-song collection of rockabilly legend Charlie Feathers, is absolutely chilling, given Feathers' death in late August at 66; about a month after its release.
The first disc collects all of his sides cut for Flip, Sun, Meteor, King, Kay, Wal-May and Holiday Inn between 1955 and 1962, including his classic rockabilly numbers "One Hand Loose," "Bottle to the Baby" and "Tongue Tied Jill" plus early hillbilly numbers like "Peepin' Eyes" and "Defrost Your Heart. They show Feathers to have been one of the most promising country singers of his generation, possessing a fine tenor that sounded like a cross between Bill Monroe and Lefty Frizzell. It's easy to fault Sam Phillips for pushing Feathers as a country singer, but the fact is Feathers was every bit as good at country as he was at rockabilly.
The second disc dips into the archives, unearthing demos recorded at Sun in the mid '50's and two 1969 numbers recorded with blues guitarist Junior Kimbrough. One of the more interesting Sun numbers is "We're Getting Closer to Being Apart," which more than one source has said would have ended up being Elvis Presley's sixth Sun single had he not signed with RCA in 1956.
"Nothing short of amazing." - Billboard
"Revelatory, making a persuasive case for his unjustly obscure genius." - Entertainment Weekly
"Charlie Feathers is the main reason there is and was Sun Records. I will always be a Charlie Feathers fan." - Johnny Cash
"He was a damn talent. He could have been the George Jones of his day--a superb stylist." - Sam Phillips
"Something about Memphis in the '50s allowed for the unexpected marriage of country and blues, bluegrass and R&B, and the spirit of that time and place is captured in Feathers' music as powerfully as anywhere else." - The Onion
"Some tough goddamn stuff, baby. Damn sure is!" - Charlie Feathers
Track:
Disc 1
1. I've Been Deceived
2. Peepin' Eyes
3. Someday You Will Pay
4. Defrost Your Heart
5. Wedding Gown of White
6. Get With It
7. Tongue Tied Jill
8. One Hand Loose
9. Can't Hardly Stand It
10. Bottle to the Baby
11. Everybody's Lovin' My Baby
12. Too Much Alike
13. When You Come Around
14. When You Decide
15. Nobody's Woman
16. Jungle Fever
17. Why Don't You
18. Dinky John
19. South of Chicago
20. Nobody's Darlin'
21. Deep Elm Blues
Disc 2
1. Runnin' Around
2. So Ashamed
3. Honky Tonk Kind
4. Frankie & Johnny
5. Corrinne, Corrina
6. We're Getting Close to Being Apart
7. The Man in Love
8. Johnny Come Listen
9. Talkin 'Bout Lovin'
10. Early in the Morning
11. Don't Let Me Cross Over
12. Where's She At Tonight
13. Don't You Know
14. Wild Side of Life
15. Release Me
16. Feel Good Again
17. Defrost Your Heart
18. I've Been Deceived
19. Bottle to the Baby
20. Bottle to the Baby
21. Bottle to the Baby
http://rapidshare.com/files/103743072/C.F.-TE.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/103747750/C.F.-TE.part2.rar
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