1950’s: A wang dang wolf and a king like nobody else.

In 1951, West Point native and WWII veteran Chester Arthur Burnett already had his own gig at a West Memphis radio station when he auditioned for Sam Phillips at the now famed Sun Records. And by the mid 1950’s, settled in Chicago, Burnett had hit the charts with “Evil” and “Smokestack Lightning.” His 1962 “Howlin’ Wolf” album electrified the zeitgeist, with American and British bands lining up to “pitch a wang dang doodle.”

The genius of another Hills native, a young truck driver by the name of Elvis Presley, was less apparent when he came into Sun Records in 1953 to pay $3.98 to record a couple of demos that he reportedly gave to his mother. But the next year when he sat in on a session with Sun regulars Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the three recorded Arthur Crudup’s bluesy “That’s All Right, Mamma.” It was a lark; he was only “acting a fool,” Elvis said later, but in a single beat, the young truck driver’s world changed and so did ours. By the time he returned to his hometown of Tupelo to play the Mississippi-Alabama State Fair in 1956, Elvis was the first global superstar.

Although his style showed an amalgam of influences, from gospel to bluegrass to country to blues, Elvis was only telling truth when he said, “I don’t sound like nobody else.” That kind of sturdy individualism also applied to bluesmen like Turner and McDowell and Junior Kimbrough playing Mississippi Hills house parties and picnics throughout the fifties, carving out their own particular styles.

Future blues great R. L. Burnside considered a new life in Chicago during the fifties, since much of his family had migrated there, including his cousin by marriage, blues legend Muddy Waters. But when Burnside’s father, brother and uncle were all killed within a few weeks of each other, Burnside retreated to Holly Springs to a hard and ragged life that would inform the raw sound of his own raucous country blues.

While home to a thriving if largely underground blues scene, in the late fifties the Mississippi Hills also became the backdrop for a public scandal that almost the ended one rock and roll career, when Jerry Lee Lewis married his teenaged cousin in Hernando, and went from playing $10,000 concerts to $100 beer joints. It would take decades and a switch to country music to revive his career, but by then another Hills native was already at the top of the charts and the top of her game, ruling over Nashville as the First Lady of Country Music.