Moon Mullican

Aubrey Wilson Mullican was born on 29 March 1909 near Corrigan, in Polk County, Texas, the son of Oscar Luther and Virginia Jordan Mullican, and grew up on the family farm at Corrigan. His father, a religious man who wanted his children to learn sacred music, bought a pump organ around 1917, and Moon played organ in church in his teens; he also learned guitar from a Black farmer and listened to the pianists in the local juke joints. He began playing for dances as a teenager and at about sixteen moved to Houston, where he played piano in clubs at night. One account traces his nickname to those nocturnal hours.

In the 1930s he led his own band in clubs and on the radio in southeast Texas and Louisiana and became one of the singing pianists of Texas western swing. On 20 November 1936 in San Antonio he sang and played piano on “Georgia Pines” and “Swing Baby Swing” with Leon “Pappy” Selph’s Blue Ridge Playboys, a band that included Floyd Tillman. From September 1938 he recorded for Decca with the fiddler Cliff Bruner’s bands, and also with Bob Dunn’s Vagabonds in 1939 and the Modern Mountaineers in 1940; with Bruner, in Houston on 26 August 1939, he sang “Truck Driver’s Blues.” In 1944 he led the band that played for Jimmie Davis’s campaign for governor of Louisiana, and that November he recorded with Bruner in New York.

Late in 1945, in Houston, he recorded with his own band, the Showboys, and in October 1946 he made his first session for King Records, in Fort Worth, with Mutt Collins on lead guitar and Cotton Thompson on fiddle. One of those sides, “New Pretty Blonde (New Jole Blon),” his version of Harry Choates’s Cajun hit, reached No. 2 on the country chart in 1947 and sold more than a million copies. “Jole Blon’s Sister” followed, and “Sweeter Than the Flowers,” recorded in Fort Worth in June 1947, reached No. 3 in 1948. On 15 March 1949, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, with Noel Boggs on steel guitar and Joe Holley on fiddle, he recorded “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone,” issued with “Moon’s Tune” on King 830; it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in June 1950, crossed to No. 17 on the pop chart and also sold more than a million. His versions of “Goodnight Irene” and “Mona Lisa” were country hits the same year. From April 1950 he recorded at King’s own studio in Cincinnati, where on 8 December 1950 he cut “Cherokee Boogie (Eh-Oh-Aleena),” which he wrote with W. C. Redbird and which reached No. 7 in 1951.

He joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville at the turn of the 1950s and stayed until 1955, probably the first singing pianist to appear there regularly as a solo act. He also had his own radio show on KECK in Odessa, Texas, appeared on Jubilee U.S.A. and the Big D Jamboree, and played on more than two hundred records by other performers; Jim Reeves was a member of one of his bands in the Beaumont area in the late 1940s. His “Jambalaya,” recorded in Hollywood on 9 July 1952 with Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West, came out the same month as Hank Williams’s. In January 1956, at the end of his King years, he cut four rock and roll sides with Boyd Bennett and His Rockets, among them “Seven Nights to Rock.”

In 1958 and 1959 he recorded in Nashville for Coral, a Decca subsidiary, with Owen Bradley producing and Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Harold Bradley and Bob Moore among the players; the records, among them “Moon’s Rock,” “Jenny Lee” and new versions of his King songs, sold poorly. From 1960 to 1963 he was a member of Jimmie Davis’s band. He recorded for Starday in Nashville in 1960 and 1961, with Pete Drake on steel guitar, and had his last hit there with “Ragged but Right” (1961). Between 1962 and 1964 he recorded at the Hall–Clement studio in Beaumont, with Jack Clement producing, for the Hall–Way and Hall labels, sides later issued by Kapp, and his last records were for Musicor in 1965 and Spar in 1966. He died at his home in Beaumont on 1 January 1967, at fifty-seven, and was buried in Magnolia Cemetery there. Besides the songs above he wrote “Pipeliner Blues,” “Moonshine Blues,” “Cush Cush Ky Yai,” “That’s Me” and “Heartless Lover,” and Jerry Lee Lewis and his cousin Mickey Gilley both took up his bobbing two-finger piano style.