Unlike the Bohemian culture of Paris in the 1920’s and ’30’s, that of Birmingham, Alabama, bespoke itself not through painting and literature, but through music. Its voice was not that of sissy expatriates who had left their country to dwell with the loathsome frog, but rather that of men— men—who had stayed right where they belonged.

Most of these men earned their daily bread working in the mines from which were wrested,iron ore, coal, or limestone, or in the mills where -those wrested things were transformed into steel. The music of these men depended usually upon the color of their skin. Both country music and the blues had flourished in Birmingham since the 19th century, but in the years after World War I, the true music of Birmingham became the boogie.

The first and most famous of the Alabama boogie men was Pinetop Smith, who had moved to Birmingham as a teenager. It was there that he learned to play piano, and it was there that he eventually recorded, for Brunswick, in 1928, several years after leaving Birmingham. (Three months after he made the record, Pinetop was killed by a stray bullet while attending a party at the Odd Fellows Lounge in Chicago. By then, the strange new phrase in the title of his record had begun to be heard wherever the hep argot was spoken.) Other pianists, such as Robert McCoy and Pinetop’s friend Cow Cow Davenport, also contributed to the boogie fever that swept Birmingham in the 20’s and 30’s. From the forbidden North Side it Spread like a wicked thing throughout that city of steel and of the Holy Spirit; it spread urttil even the noble white man stomped in sublime fealty to it. And one of those noble white men was a young redneck named Sidney Louie Gunter.v

He had been bom on September 18, 1918, in a workman’s barracks on the outskirts of town. After dropping out of high school in the early'30’s, he took a job in the mines. In his off-hours he played guitar and sang in local beer-joints. The music that he made was hillbilly music, but it was hillbilly music with a boogie-woogie bent. No one in Birmingham had ever heard anything quite like it.

All those men and boys who, like Sid Gunter, worked with pick-axe were referred to as hardrock miners, or, simply, as hardrocks. In 1939, when Sid quit the mines and took a job as a singing disc jockey at Birmingham’s oldest station, WAPI (“The Voice of Alabama”), he carried that epithet with him and came to be known then and forevermore as Hardrock Gunter.

At WAPI, Hardrock worked as a solo performer and sometimes as a member of Happy Wilson’s Golden River Boys. He eventually formed his own six-piece band, consisting of himself, a fiddler, a steel-guitarist, a bass-player, a drummer, and a boogie-woogie piano man. They were known throughout Birmingham and as far as the mighty Voice of Alabama could be heard as Hardrock Gunter and the Pebbles.

In 1949 Hardrock wrote a song called “Birmingham Bounce.” It was a cut-time

boogie that made frequent use of the word “rockin’,” and it became a local sensation. Early in 1950, he and his band recorded the song for Bama, a small label which operated out of Room 905 at the Bankhead Hotel. The record was quickly covered, for Decca, by country singer Red Fdley. Foley’s' record hit the country charts during the first week of May, and by the end of the month ft had risen to Number One, beating out Hank Williams’s latest record, “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” Hardrock’s song contin4 ued to be covered, by slick hillbillies such as Tex Williams and Pee Wee King; by black acts such as Amos Milbum and Lionel Hampton. By summer’s end, -Birmingham Bounce” was one of the best-known songs in the country and the sudden anthem of Southern hep.

Hardrock’s second record for Bama, released in July 1950, was a song called “Gonna Dance All Night.” This new record ♦ was more emphatically frenzied than its predecessor. Again and again throughout the song, Gunter half-drawled, half-growlj ed, “We’re gonna rock ’n’ roll.” The record did not sell, in Birmingham or anywhere else; nor did his third and last Bama release, a nasty jump song called “Lonesome Blues.” (The flip-side of “Lonesome Blues” was an indictment of hillbilly music with the wonderful title “Dad Gave My Hog Away. ”)

Toward the end of 1950, Hardrock and -,the Pebbles recorded for Bullet Records in Nashville. Released in January 1951, “My Bucket’s Been Fixed” was Hardrock’s answer to Hank Williams’s 1949 hit “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It.”

Somehow, Gunter was signed by Decca in early 1951. “Boogie Woogie On Saturday Night,” recorded, like most of Decca’s country records, at the Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville, was released in April. It was a fine rockabilly record, but it failed to sell, as did its successor, “I’ve Done Gone Hog Wild.” Gunter’s choice for his third Decca release, . cut in the summer of 1951, was stranger by far than anything preceding it; a country version of “Sixty Minute; Man,” the Dominoes’ recent R&B hit about Lovin’ Dan, the hepster who could fuck for an hour without missing a stroke. As if this were not enough for Nashville to deal with, Hardrock had a smut-voiced lady named Roberta Lee sing along with him on the record.

Decca continued to release the recordings that Hardrock had made, but his days as a Decca country act definitely seemed to be numbered. In the fall of 1951, 33-yearold Hardrock Gunter, fearing a Chinese takeover of his beloved Alabama, joined tl^e Army. He got no closer to Korea than Fdrt Jackson, South Carolina, where he ended his hitch as a first lieutenant.

Back in Nashville, Hardrock recorded two singles for MGM in the summer of 1953. The first of these, “Naptown, Indiana,” was about colored people; the second, “Sunday Angel,” was about sluts. Hardrock’s stay in the Army had taught him nothing of commerciality, it seemed.

After his failed MGM recordings, Hardrock went North, to Wheeling, West , Virginia, where he joined the cast of the WWVA Jamboree., Throughout 1954 he recorded for King Records, which was located not too far away in Cincinnati. The best of his three King releases was a doublesided rocker, “I’ll Give ’Em Rhythm” and “I Put My Britches On Just Like Everybody Else”; but the record failed to receive even local airplay.

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In the spring of 1954, while in Wheeling,. Hardrock leased his 1950 Bama recording of “Gonna Dance All Night” to Sun Records in Memphis. The Sun record was released

in the early summer of 1954, and it sold as poorly as it had on the Bama label four years earlier. Several weeks later, Sun released a tamer rockabilly record by a young man named Elvis Presley. The other record fared considerably better. Two years later, Hardrock leased another record to Sun, "Jukebox, Help Me Find My Baby,” which he cut in Wheeling in the spring of 1956. Even though it was a bad record, It failed to sell.

Hardrock Gunter began to fade. He was 40 years old now, and rock ’n’ roll, which he had helped to create, had passed him by without even a cursory tip of the bebop hat. Hb continued to make records, bad records, for his own labels, such as Emperor (“Whoo! I Mean Wheel,” 1957), Cross Country (“Let Me Be A Fool,” 1958), and Cullman (“Is It Too Late,” 1959); but nothing could stay the fading.

Early in 1962, he cut his final record, for Starday. It was an atrocity called “Hillbilly Twist.” The Lord, who had taken a great liking to Hardrock’s records of ten years past, mercifully delivered the “Hillbilly Twist” to a fast darkness. Not long after this, Hardrock Gunter quit the WWVA Jamboree ana announced that he was retiring to Golden, Colorado.

Then, literally and -truly, Hardrock Gunter disappeared from the face of the earth never to be heard from again. ^