Roy Hall was bom on May 7, 1922, in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, a backwoods town about 20 miles from the Tennessee line, near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. An old colored man taught him to play piano, and to drink. By the time that he turned 21, Roy knew that he was the best drunken piano-player in Big Stone Gap, and, armed with the pride and confidence that this knowledge gave him, he departed the town of his birth to seek fame in those dreamed-of places beyond: Jasper, Slant, Nicklesville, Weber City, and Bristol.

He made it to Bristol and farther, pumping boogie-woogie in every Virginia, Tennessee, or Alabama beer-joint that had a piano. He played those pianos fast and hard and sinful, like that colored man who had taught him back in Big Stone Gap; but he sang like the hillbilly that he was. Wherever he went, the people told him that they had never heard a country singer quite like him, and they bought him drinks and gave him silver coins toward closing-time.

He organized his own band, Roy Hall and His Cohutta Mountain Boys (Cohutta was part of the Appalachians, in the shadows of whose foothills he had been raised up). It was a five-piece band, with Tommy Odum on lead guitar, Bud White on rhythm guitar, Flash Griner on bass, and Frankie Brumbalough on fiddle. Roy pounded the piano and did most of the singing; but everybody else in the band sang, too, especially the rhythm guitarist and the fiddler.

In the late 40’s, Roy Hall and His Cohutta Mountain Boys headed north, through West Virginia, through Ohio, into Michigan. In 1949 Roy and the band cut their first records, for Fortune, a small, independent label located on 12th Street in Detroit. Over the next year, Fortune released six sides by Roy Hall: “Dirty Boogie,” “Okee Doaks,” “Never Marry A Tennessee Girl,” “We Never Get Too Big To Cry,” “Five Years In Prison,” and “My Freckle Face Gal.” Most of these recordings were slick hillbilly blues, similar to the sort of music with which Hank Williams had recently risen to fame. But the most successful of the bunch, “Dirty Boogie”—the closest that Fortune came to a C&W hit—was a wild, nasty rocker that foreshadowed much of what was to come to be musically in the South in the next few years.

In 1950 Roy traveled to Nashville, leaving the Cohutta Mountain Boys to fend for themselves in the wicked North. He cut two records there that year, for Bullet, one of Nashville’s most active independent labels. Both of these Bullet singles, “Mule Boogie” and “Ain’t You Afraid,” were fine hard-driving things, but they failed to sell. After Bullet, he recorded for Tennesssee, a small local company that had a national hit in 1951 with Del Wood’s piano instrumental “Down Yonder;” but Roy Hall’s piano brought no hits.

He opened an after-hours joint on Commerce Street in downtown Nashville called the Music Box (later renamed the Musicians’ Hideway). Here he played piano and drank, and, for a sweet change, made money doing so. In addition to liquor and music, Roy’s club also featured blackjack and roulette, toward which diversions many of the Grand Ole Opry’s most revered stars directed with moist and shaking hands their many-zeroed royalty checks.

One of Roy Hall’s most loyal customers was Webb Pierce, who, following Hank Williams’s death on New Year’s Day 1953, became the undisputed king of the country singers. Pierce hired Roy as his pianoplayer, using him on most of his recordings in 1954-5. During this time, Roy also recorded with Marty Robbins and Hawkshaw Hawkins, a couple of successful cornballs whose music gave him even less room to move around in than Pierce’s.

In the summer of 1954, Elvis Presley came to Roy Hall’s club looking for work. “I was drunk that night, didn’t feel like playin’ piano, so I told ’im to git up there an’ start doin’ whatever in hell it was that he did,” Roy recalled to me last spring. “I fired ’im after just that one night. He weren’t no damn good.

Toward the end of that same year, another young man came to the club looking for work. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy kept him on for a few weeks, until Jerry Lee decided to return home to his wife and son in Louisiana.

“I hired ’im for $15 a night. He’d play that damned piano from one in the mornin’ till daylight. We did a lotta duets together. He was still a teenager, and ever’body figured that when we got busted he’d be the one that the cop’s let go; so ever’body give ’em their watches an’ jewelry to hold for ’em, case the cops came. We got hit one night, he musta had 15 wristwatches on his arms. Sure enough he was the only one didn’t git searched.”

It was also in 1954 that Roy Hall and a black musician named Dave Williams took a trip to the Everglades that resulted in one of the classic rock ’n’ roll songs.

“We was down in Pahokee, on Lake Okeechobee. We was down there, out on a damn pond, fishin’ an’ milkin’ snakes. Drinkin’ wine, mostly. There was a bunch of us down there.

“See, this guy down there had a big bell that he’d ring to git us all to come in to dinner, an’ I call over there to th’other part of th’island, I say, ‘What’s goin’ on?’ Colored guy said, ‘We got twen’y-one drums’—see, we was all drunk—’we got an ol' bass horn an’ they even keepin’ time on a ding-dong.’ See, that was the big bell they’d ring to git us t’come in.”

Out of this legless colloquy came a song thatbegan:

Twenty-one drums and an 61’ bass horn, Somebody heatin' on a ding-dong.

Come on over, baby, whole lotta shakin’ goin’on;

Come on over, baby; baby, you can’t go wrong.

There ain’t no fakin’, whole lottashakin’ goin’on.

Webb Pierce arranged for Hall to sign a contract with Decca, and on September 15, 1955, Hall went into the studio and cut three songs for the label, including “Whole Lotts Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The record was released three weeks later, coupled with a cover version of Fats Domino’s “All By Myself.”

In its review of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Billboard said, “Webb Pierce’s pianist takes a stab in the vocal field and shows a highly distinctive, flavorsome voice.” But the stab did not result in a hit.

Roy Hall continued to record for Decca until the summer of 1956. While a few of these recordings, such as his cover of Carl Perkin’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” were plainly uninspired, most of them were among the most fiery rockabilly records of the mid-50’s. His “Diggin’ the Boogie” contained one of the toughest and most unrelenting rhythms that had ever been recorede in the South. But none of this amounted to a hit record. .

Bad luck seemed to follow Roy Hall. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” which he had co-written under the pseudonym of Sunny David (“I was tryin’ to git away from the income tax. They finally caught my ass, too”) became a huge hit for Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy’s ex-employee, in 1957, and Roy stood to make a good deal of money in royalties. But when the time came to collect, he was sued by his ex-wife, and the court awarded her his share of the royalties from the song. “And,” Roy said, “Paul Cohen, who was the head of Decca, got me to sign a buncha papers when I was drunk, one o’ them kinda deals, and I lost out that way. I worked for Webb Pierce for six years, an’ he did the trick to me, too.”

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But Roy Hall kept on pumping his rockabilly music, and at the age of 58 he is still, playing around Nashville and wherever else he can find a piano and a paycheck.

“I quit drinkin’ in 1972,” he told me, “an’ I play rock ’n’ roll better’n I did 25 years ago. Ain’t none of these young fellas got nothin’ on me when it comes to rockin’ out, nosir. You git me a date somewhere, transportation an’ a few bucks, an’ I’ll put out some good ol’ rockabilly, knock ’em dead.”

For he, if for no other reason, Big Stone Gap shall stand tall forever in a purple girdle of pride.