Moon Mullican
King of the Hillbilly Piano Players

by Clay Coppedge

A 14-year old kid named Aubrey Mullican walked into a Lufkin café one night in 1923, played piano for two hours and walked home with $40 in tips, or about two weeks salary for the average working man of the day.

Back home on the family's 87-acre farm in Polk County near the Louisiana border, young Aubrey's parents weren't as happy about the windfall as he might have hoped. This playing of the devil's music - in the devil's den, no less - was not what the Mullicans hoped for when he took over his sister's organ and started playing hymns, note for note, by ear in no time at all.

But the kid the world would know as Moon Mullican, introduced far and wide as "the King of the Hillbilly Piano Players," had access to a veritable gumbo of musical influences beyond the church, beginning with a black sharecropper named Joe Jones who introduced him to the blues and the guitar, though Mullican always gravitated toward the piano.

In that slice of Southeast Texas, Mullican heard and was influenced by not only blues and gospel music, but also country, swing, jazz and Cajun styles. We only know of piano players like Buster Pickens and Cowboy Washington today because they influenced Mullican in that time and place.

The row with his parents over what kind of music he played and where he played it was never resolved, so at 16 Mullican left Polk County for Houston. Somewhere early in the course of a long musical career he acquired the nickname "Moon" either in honor of moonshine or because he worked all night long in honky tonks. And worse.

"The only place a piano-playing kid like me could get work wasn't exactly high class," Mullican later recalled. "The ladies of the evening, who worked there, would come and sit on the piano bench and fan me as I played."

Mullican first made his mark and his living with Western swing bands like the Blue Ridge Playboys and Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, bands that fused jazz and country music into something Mullican recognized from the East Texas musical gumbo he grew up with. He also played for a time with Jimmie Davis, governor of Louisiana and a swing musician of note, and was a sought-after session player. He formed his own band, the Showboys - the "Band with a Beat" - in the late 1930s and took over as a surprisingly good vocalist.

The Showboys were regulars on the honky tonk circuit along the Texas and Louisiana border, playing country ballads but also a combination of country and swing and Mullican's blues-influenced piano, creating what sounds today a whole lot like rock and roll.

As kid growing up in Ferriday, Louisiana, Jerry Lee Lewis, like Mullican, took to the piano at an early age and endured the same tug of war between the church and the honky tonk that Mullican did. Jerry Lee took in many of the same influences as Mullican, but he was looking for a sound he hadn't heard yet when he heard Mullican play piano for the first time.

Rock and roll was the sound Jerry Lee Lewis was looking for. Moon Mullican was playing it.

"Moon Mullican knew what to do with a piano," Lewis said later.

Mullican's biggest hit was "Cherokee Boogie" in 1951. Other songs, rocker like "Shoot the Moon" and "Don't Ever Take My Picture Down," influenced a younger generation of musicians who wanted to feel like Moon Mullican's songs sounded, and a generation beyond that one felt the same pull. You can still hear the influence today.

Mullican's Cajun influences also served him well. He had a minor hit with "New Jole Blon" in 1947 and is widely credited today as the uncredited co-writer of his pal Hank Williams' monster hit, "Jambalaya." But he's not widely known today even for the music that is unmistakably his.

Moon Mullican was in his 50s, overweight, pasty-faced and always wearing a big cowboy hat when Elvis, Jerry Lee and the others introduced the masses to rock and roll. Born at just the right time and place to soak up an intoxicating stew of raw and divergent musical styles, he was born too early to cash in on the style of music he helped create.

That's not to say his talents have gone completely unrecognized. He's a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. We could say of Mullican's music that they don't write 'em like that anymore, but they do. It's just that Mullican wrote 'em first.