Paul Burlison: The Complete Rock ’n Roll Trio Interview

A 1978 Conversation With a Rockabilly Pioneer

Paul Burlison holds two distinctions in American music history. As a founding member of the Rock ’n Roll Trio, he helped pioneer rockabilly and, through a fortuitous amp accident, he introduced the sound of distorted guitar to rock and roll audiences.

Growing up in Memphis, rockabilly’s epicenter, Burlison played in country bands before forming the Rock ’n Roll Trio with brothers Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. Inspired by Elvis Presley’s sudden success, the trio traveled to New York City in 1955 and made it onto TV’s popular Ted Mack Amateur Hour. Winning three shows in a row brought them a national tour, during which crazed female fans literally tore the shirt off Johnny’s back. Upon their return, the Rock ’n Roll Trio signed with Coral Records. Burlison co-wrote their first single, “Tear It Up,” recorded in New York City on May 7, 1956. While on tour, Burlison dropped his amp, which loosened a tube and caused his amp to distort onstage. He liked the sound so much he dialed it in at their next session, held in Nashville in July 1956 with Grady Martin on second guitar. (For decades, some listeners have speculated that Martin, rather than Burlison, played the distorted-sounding electric guitar parts during this session, perhaps using Burlison’s amp. Regardless, Burlison deserves credit for introducing the sound of distorting electric guitar to rock audiences.) The session yielded their best-selling single, “Train Kept A-Rollin',” a primal cover of Tiny Bradshaw’s 1951 hit, backed with “Honey Hush,” which also featured fuzzed guitar. That 45, along with the album that followed in December, failed to bring the Rock ’n Roll Trio the success they’d hoped for, and they called it quits in 1957.

Paul returned home to raise his family, work as an electrical contractor, and play in country bands. In 1978, Solid Smoke, a small indie label in San Francisco, anthologized the original Rock ’n Roll Trio recordings as the Tear It Up album. A copy reached me during my third week on the job at Guitar Player magazine, and I jumped at the opportunity to interview one of rock’s unsung guitar innovators. At the time, Paul was living just south of Memphis in Walls, Mississippi. A heavily edited version of our May 30, 1978, interview was published in the magazine. Here is a complete transcription of our conversation.

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When did you get interested in music and playing the guitar?

Everybody tells about their first guitar. You want me to tell you about it?

Yeah.

Now this is the truth – I mean, you hear a lot of tales about how people got their first guitar. My mother gave me three dollars to go uptown. I had a hole in the bottom of my shoe and she gave me three dollars to get that pair of shoes fixed. She was at work, school was out. We lived close to town, where I could walk up there and back. So I went up there and went down on Beale Street. They had a bunch of pawn shops and stuff there in town, in Memphis. I went down there and saw this old guitar. Fellow told me that he wanted $3.50 for it. I told him all I had was three dollars. He could tell that I wanted it real bad, so he sold me the guitar. It didn’t have a case. It just had one of those ol’ fishin’ cords on it. I took the thing home back to my house and I put a piece of cardboard inside of my shoe to cover the hole up. I hid the guitar up under the bed. My mother was workin’ and my dad was workin’ during the day, so when they would work during the day, I would take the guitar out and try to play a little bit on it. Those strings on the guitar was up about a half, three-quarters of an inch above the neck. I didn’t know one chord from the other.

Do you know what kind of guitar it was?

I think it was an old Regal – something like that. It was a round-hole guitar. It had an old bridge that stuck up real high – I think somebody been playing it with an old bottle, like a steel guitar. I think they’d raised the tail bridge up and played it with a bottle – that’s the way a lot of blues back then was played here. They’d take an old bottle instead of a bar and slide the bottle up and down the neck – like a whole bottle or something – and play slide. I think it was used primarily for that, but I wanted to play chords.