Formation
The Burnette brothers were keen amateur boxers and became Golden Gloves champions. In 1949, Dorsey met Paul Burlison, also a Golden Gloves champion, at an amateur boxing tournament in Memphis. The two became firm friends, and through this friendship Burlison would also meet Johnny Burnette. All three had an interest in music, and in 1951 they began playing together at the hillbilly nightspots on the outskirts of Memphis, both as a trio and as a part of other groups. In these early days, they played a mixture of country and bluegrass, not untainted with cottonpatch blues. In the honkytonks in and around Memphis the Trio would often play an upbeat country and blues so that the patrons had music to do the 1940-50's bop and jitterbug, popular at the time. And the sound later called rockabilly, which they perfected in their 1956 Coral records album.
Johnny and Dorsey Burnette were reported to be early performers on the Saturday Night Jamboree, which was a local stage show held every Saturday night at the Goodwyn Institute Auditorium in downtown Memphis in 1953-54. The show was founded by Joe Manuel, who had been a popular Hillbilly radio star of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1952 or 1953, they formed a group with Burlison playing lead guitar, Dorsey playing stand-up bass and Johnny playing rhythm guitar and taking the vocal lead. Occasionally they were joined by steel guitarist Albert Vescovo and by fiddler Tommy Seeley. With this line-up and at this time, the group may have been known as the Rhythm Rangers.
A contemporary poster from the Von Theater in Boonville, Tennessee, which advertised The Dixieland Jamboree, puts as the top of the bill, Johnny Burnett & his “Rhythm Rangers” and describes him as A VON Recording Artist from Memphis, Tenn.. Second on this bill is Hayden Thomson and his “Southern Melody Boys”, who are described as Just Back from WSM Nashville Tenn. and Ernest Tubb Jamboree.
Read more about this topic: The Rock And Roll Trio
Famous quotes containing the word formation:
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle. This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel “safe” ... must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses.”
—Bell (c. 1955)
“That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)