Moon Mullican - Seven Nights to Rock - More King Classics 1950-1956 (2004)

With 24 sides cut for King between 1950 and 1956, this complements Ace's prior Moon Mullican compilation Moonshine Jamboree, which also covered his King stint, though with 24 different tracks. Moonshine Jamboree remains the best single release with which to start investigating Mullican, but certainly anyone who liked Moonshine Jamboree a lot would like Seven Nights to Rock too, documenting as it does the pianist during the same era. Mullican's gotten some ink for being an influence on early rockabilly musicians, and this does have a few 1956 stabs at recording in a Bill Haley-influenced, nearly-rockabilly style with Boyd Bennett & His Rockets. In truth, however, Mullican sounds more comfortable in an easygoing, rollicking honky tonk style influenced by Western swing and boogie, and it's that approach which dominates this compilation. Certainly you can hear a resemblance to Jerry Lee Lewis on cuts like "Keep a Light in the Window for Me," but it's much closer to Lewis' lazier, more country-oriented numbers than to Jerry Lee's wilder rockabilly outings. The boogie and blues elements do rise higher on occasion, though, as on the instrumentals "Memphis Blues" and "Piano Breakdown," and the 1953 single "Grandpa Stole My Baby," the last of which is actually much closer to R&B (complete with sax) than hillbilly. The over-the-top pathos of "Crippled for Life" isn't much fun to grimace through, but it's not typical of this generally first-rate collection of early-to mid-'50s honky-tonk country. Almost everything here was issued on King singles in the 1950s, incidentally, but the CD does include two previously unreleased alternate takes, of "So Long" and "Wanted."