“Birmingham Bounce” – Hardrock Gunter (1958) * Written by Hardrock Gunter * EP: “Gonna Be a Fire”/”Down in the Holler Where Sally Lives” (Bill Browning) “Juke Box Play for Me”/”You Gotta Go” (Cook Brothers) “You’re Just a Baby”/”Ida Red Rock” (Buddy Durham) “Birmingham Bounce”/”Rock-A-Bop Baby” (Hardrock Gunter) * Label: Island
Alabama’s Sidney Gunter Jr.—given his better-known nickname “Hardrock” after a truck’s hood clonked him on the head with no damage done—secured an eventual slot in the rock ‘n’ roll Pantheon with his 1950 single “Birmingham Bounce,” a vintage specimen of R&B + hillbilly coexistence. That same year Red Foley turned his version of the song, which would become Gunter’s lifelong calling-card, into a top-selling country hit. Seminal as Gunter’s own 1950 record is, his 1958 redo for Cleveland’s Island Record Co. on a jam-packed 8-song sampler EP jumps out as one with special attention-getting electricity, thanks in part to his newfound taste for slapback echo (which had inspired him, a year before, to try out a version of “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me)”). Since 1950, Gunter kept pumping out records for various labels, including the new rock-royal Sun, until retiring from the music business in the mid-sixties (and resurfacing momentarily for the avid European rockabilly community in the late ’90s).