Moon Mullican

By rights, Moon Mullican should be a legend twice over, in country music and rock & roll. He merged them both -- as well as blues, pop, and honky tonk -- into a seamless whole at the drop of a hat and the ripple of a keyboard, and also managed to play a seminal role in the history of Western swing, all in a recording career that lasted less than 30 years. Instead, for decades he was one of those "lost" musical figures from the '40s and early '50s, whose career paved the way for rock & roll, who was born just a little too early, and who was a little too old to take advantage of what he'd started. He was born Aubrey Mullican in 1909 in Corrigan, TX, a little more than an hour's drive north of Houston, to a family that owned an 87-acre farm that was worked (at least partly) by sharecroppers. It was one of them, a black blues guitarist named Joe Jones, who introduced Mullican to the blues before he was in his teens. This in itself constituted an act of rebellion on his part, because Mullican's family were devout churchgoers -- his father attended three times a week -- and abhorred anything to do with the elements of sun and excess with which the blues and the places where it was usually played were associated. He would spend most of his life attempting to reconcile -- or at least find a livable middle ground between -- these two sides of himself. He got good on the guitar and the bass, but Mullican's instrument of choice was the keyboard: first the family organ, which had been bought so that his sisters could practice playing hymns, and later the piano. By the time he was 14, he was able to make 40 dollars -- a good deal more than a week's wages in 1923 -- for two hours of piano playing at a local cafe. Music was not only something he loved, but it offered a lot more...