Sidney Louis Gunter was born in Birmingham, Alabama on February 27, 1925.
As a child, growing up and listening to the family radio, young Sid became a fan of Gobal Leon Reeves, better known as The Texas Drifter. Young Sid convinced his parents to get him a cheap guitar and started to learn songs from the Drifter. Hank Penny also became an important influence in Sid’s early days. Penny was a western swing musician that was heard on the radio.
By thirteen Gunter had formed his first band, The Hoot Owl Ramblers and was mimicking the act of Penny, literally stealing some of his influencer’s jokes. In addition Gunter created a solo act as Goofy Sid, blacking out one of his teeth and wearing a “hee-haw” style outfit. This act won a local talent contest thirteen weeks in a row, garnering attention from the promoter, who elevated his status to “special attraction”.
Happy Wilson, a Birmingham native, was returning to the area from Hollywood, where he had been featured in several cowboy movies, to recruit talent for his new band, The Golden River Boys. One thing led to another and young Sid was invited to play a couple engagements with the man he was emulating on stage.
The night of his first gig, the band came to pick him up at his home. In those days, the trunks didn’t have the spring or hydraulic lifts that held the trunk up, but instead you had a post to prop the lid up. While loading his gear into the back of the car, Gunter asked his new bandmates, “will someone hand me that banjo?” and just then the post slipped and the lid fell down and whacked him in the head. He acted like nothing happened, lifting the lid back up and asking the others, “you going to give me that banjo?”
Happy Wilson was laughing and stated, “My God, your head is hard as a rock”. That night on stage the band started calling him Hardrock on stage and the name stuck. (His friends shortened it to Rock.)
By 1939, Hardrock had joined The Golden River Boys as a continuing band member while still in High School. He still did some solo shows while traveling the area with the band, including regular appearances on WAPI radio.
In 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Wilson was drafted prompting the break up of the band. By December of ’43, Gunter had reached the age and was drafted into the 106th Infantry.
In December of 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge, Rock’s entire unit was captured by the German army. As a POW, he spent 104 days in the POW camp barricks and lost 80 pounds, barely staying over 100 pounds total. His unit was liberated by Patton’s troops in March of 1945.
Returning to the states and back in civilian life, Rock had married and had two sons. His attention turned to the insurance business and moved to Indiana to start his new career. But he missed Birmingham and the music life, so he returned to Birmingham with the opportunity to manage Happy Wilson’s reformed Golden River Boys. That blossomed into managing other acts and soon led to working on a couple radio programs and also the television station WAPI-TV. This included Hardrock’s Roundup Time, a puppet show for kids. The TV show proved extremely popular, sometimes the fan mail would come in from the post office a bag at a time.
In 1950 he started recording and his first song was Birmingham Bounce on the Bama label. The song has been cited as potentially the first rock and roll recording, with a bouncing rockabilly sound and references to “while the music’s rocking, nobody’s blue”. His next song, also recording in 1950, Gonna Dance All Night is the first time a song used the phrase “rock and roll” in a musical context. Hardrock actually wanted to call the song Gonna Rock and Roll, Gonna Dance All Night, but the owner of the label fought him on that front. Before this time the phrase “rock and roll” was a black slang term for having sex.
When Birmingham Bounce started selling well on a regional basis, Decca Records approached the small Bama label with an offer to distribute the song nationally. Bama owner, Manley Pearson, refused to transfer those rights over. So Decca had big country star Red Foley, who was signed to their label, record a cover version. Foley’s version, released on a national basis, marched up the charts to the number one song in the country. When this happened the Hardrock version stopped selling; distributors sent back their unsold records to Bama, which led to the actual demise of the smaller label.
Decca later signed Hardrock to their label, but with limited success. Rock was recalled to active duty in the military to serve while the Korean War was growing. Stationed in the U.S., he could make new recordings in his spare time, but is active duty status made him unable to tour to support those songs.
After his second stint in the military, and now released by Decca Records, Rock was hired to emcee and perform for Wheeling, West Virginia radio station WWVA. He recorded some songs for MGM and then returned to Birmingham to do some work at WJLD radio. That’s when the radio stations program director introduced Hardrock to a small record label in Memphis owned by Sam Phillips.
At the time, Phillips’ Sun Records was recording black blues singers like Howling Wolf and Little Junior Parker. He was hoping to find white artists that could embrace the R&B vibe. He signed Hardrock on and released an updated version of Gonna Dance All Night in May of 1954, with the B-side of “allen Angel. (Elvis’s first song, That’s Alright Mama” was released not too long afterwards in July.) In 1956 Sun Records also released Hardrock’s Jukebox Help Me Find My Baby backed by Fiddle Bop.
The Sun recordings didn’t do as well as hoped for Hardrock and the success of Elvis and others (Carl Perkins, Jonny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis), led Phillips to send his attention to his new artists.
Rock spent the next few years building a reputation at WWVA’s Jamboree as their emcee and musical host. He continued to record for several years on small labels, but by 1960 he went back to insurance sales to build a quality career in that industry.
While some of his songs found their ways on rock compilation CDs, and with Rollercoaster Records release of Gonna Rock ‘n’ Roll“, a collection CD of Hardrock songs, Hardrock found himself in demand for rockabilly concerts in the mid-1990s. Relearning his own songs, he played to audiences in Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the US.
Sid “Hardrock” Gunter died on March 15, 2013.
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Learn more:
http://alabamalama.sylviaparker.net/2010/03/hardrock-gunter-that-bouncin-man-from.html
https://bhamwikie.com/w/Hardrock_Gunter
https://www.discogs.com/artist/1138130-Hardrock-Gunter
Hardrock Gunter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardrock_Gunter