Who was/is Maggie Sue Wimberly ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Maggie Sue Wimberly
Maggie Sue Wimberly, a wonderful name for a hillbilly singer, was in fact a 13 year old girl who would later blossom into Nashville performer Sue Richards. Here, in the hands of producers Bill Cantrell and Quinton Claunch, she offers a look at vintage Memphis country music, circa 1955. Almost everything about the sound of Daydreams Come True (Sun 229) belongs in a time capsule. In truth, it is an odd song, basically saying "I love you and you love me and everything is lovely" (see also Sun 231).
Most country music lyrics travel down into rockier roads than this, often littered with cheating, heartbreak or loss. The song was an 'answer record' to Bud Deckelman's regional hit Daydreaming, a song that made some money for the fledgling Meteor label located across town from Sun. Cantrell and Claunch had offered the original project to Phillips, who flatly turned it down, marking one of the few commercial miscalculations of his career. This belated attempt to rectify his mistake came to nothing as Maggie Sue's record sold nowhere near as well as Deckelman's opus. About a year later Ms. Wimberly tried her hand at some upbeat material as the rockabilly era dawned all around her, but she never again saw her name on a yellow Sun label.
And here is our major look at one of the moments when it all changed. In an unregulated world without copyrights and restrictions, we might have begun this disc with one of Elvis Presley's more primitive early Ballads like I Love You Because or Blue Moon. Since we were not able, we can at least remind you that the contrast between those early recordings and the hillbilly and blues material that appears on Disc #1 is – not to overstate it – staggering. By turning Elvis loose in that tiny studio at 706 Union Avenue, Sam Phillips literally changed the face of American popular music. Elvis was a hybrid of what was happening all around him. When Phillips was inadvertently captured on tape rushing into the studio after an early take of Blue Moon of Kentucky, uttering the words, "Hell, that's different! That's a pop song now, nearly 'bout ! " he spoke for music journalists yet unborn. Looking back, it is easy to see the quantum leap made by Elvis's earliest recordings. In retrospect, the changes seem easy to make. The trick is to remind ourselves that things looked a whole lot different from ground level in 1954 and '55...
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Various - SUN Records
Sun Ballads 1953-1962 (3-CD)
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