Cecil Gant was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1915. His early years are a faded stain, of which nothing is known, nor probably ever will be known.

Our first glimpse of him is in 1944: a small colored soldier in a loud crowd at a warbond rally on the corner of Broadway and Ninth in Los Angeles. He approaches the bandstand during an intermission and asks to play the piano. They let him. He goes over so well that the local campaign committee seeks and receives permission from his commanding officer for Gant to perform at all Treasury Bond rallies in the L.A. area.

Later that year, following one of his shows, Gant was offered a contract by GiltEdge, an L.A. record company that had barely begun to exist. Gant’s first release was a slow thing called “I Wonder,” a strong ballad sung from the viewpoint pf a soldier abroad who torments himself with wonderings about who his girlfriend’s fucking back home. The flipside was a fast boogiewoogie rocker, “Cecil Boogie.” A review in the January 6, 1945, issue of Billboard said that the record sounded “like something picked up with a machine hidden under a table in a smoky back room.” But, at the same time, “I Wonder” was heading toward the top of Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade and, in the end, emerged as one of the great R&B successes of 1945.

“I Wonder” sold so well, in fact, that GiltEdge issued a special pressing of the disc, on which a smiling Cecil Gant, in the khaki shirt and tie of his buck-private wardrobe, sat at the piano, smiling. It was the first rock ’n’ roll picture disc.

Gant recorded for Gilt-Edge until 1947.

All his early, wartime releases bore the name of “Pvt. Cecil Gant,” and he was further described as “The G.I. Sing-Sation.” In 1947 he recorded for the Los Angeles 4-Star label, then, very briefly, for King in Cincinnati. From late 1947 to 1949, Gant returned to his native Nashville, and recorded frequently for Bullet Records in that city.

Jim Bulleit, who ran Bullet, and who now operates a candy company outside of Nashville, says of Gant: “We never recorded a thing on him that didn’t sell and make money. It was just uncanny.

“He drank too much,” Bulleit recalls.

“He would say, ‘I want to do a session’ when he ran out of money. We would get a bass player and a guitarist and get him a piano and I’d go sit in the control room and he’d tinkle around on it, and then he’d say, i’m ready,’ and tap that bottle; and if we didn’t get it the first time, we didn’t get it, ’cause he couldn’t remember what he did. He’d dream up and write a song while he sat there and he’d give me the title of it. And the uniqueness of the thing is that all of them sold.”

In 1949 Gant returned to L.A., recording there for the related Down Beat and Swing Time labels. After that, in early 1950, he cut two singles for Imperial in New Orleans.

The following summer he began recording for Decca in New York.

Cecil Gant’s last session was on January rM 19, 1951. Not long after that, he was reH ported dead. Although the details of his premature demise—he was barely 35 years old—are unknown, it is generally believed that, like so many of these characters, he died from drinking.

Gant’s biggest hits—“I Wonder” (1944), “Another Day, Another Dollar” (1948), and “I’m A Good Man, But A Poor Man” (1949)—were slow, melancholy songs. His most remarkable stuff, however, was a group of fiery piano rockers with titles like Rocking The Boogie” (1947), “Nashville Jumps” (1947), “Ninth Street Jive” (1948), “Owl Stew” (1950), ‘Wre Gonna Rock” (1950), and “Rock Little Baby” (1951).

Gant’s grating, swampish voice, which lent pathos to his slower, sadder songs, gave to his breakneck rockers a certain sublime audacity. In “Nashville Jumps,” he rasps:

Seen ya goin ’ up Cedar Street hill,

I know you got your whiskey from Jack Daniel’s still!

Nashville really jumps, really jumps all night long-

I’d rather be in Nashville than to be way back down at home.

Yeah, jump, Nashville!

Before the last stanza, Gant yells, “Bring me another drink and I’ll be all right!” (He shouts something similar on the earlier “Ninth Street Jive,” but quickly amends the request to, “Call that waiter and tell ’im to bring me a fifth!”)

On “We’re Gonna Rock” he simply chants, over and over, like some sort of manic, apocalyptic subhuman, pounding his piano with both fists:

We’re gonna rock, we’re gonna roll,

We’re gonna rock, we’re gonna roll,

We ’re gonna roll, we ’re gonna rock,

We’re gonna roll, we’re gonna rock.

His “Owl Stew” is a bizarre tribute to a whorehouse on Fourth Avenue North in Nashville. “The stew in Nashville, it really is the best,” he explains, one eye open, one eye shut. “The price is very low; if you get it once, you gonna want some mo’.”

Although he recorded for a mere six years, Cecil Gant proved himself to be one of the great rockers of the late Forties. He had told his friends in Tennessee that all he really wanted to do was play piano and get drunk, laid, and rich. He succeeded in all butthe last. Three out of four isn’t bad at all.