Dale Hawkins, 1936-2010

The first time I met Dale, he had a really disgruntled expression set on his face. We'd interrupted what was apparently an impromptu recording session in his tiny Little Rock studio. There was no one else there with Dale that day. Just a bunch of equipment, a crate of empty soda bottles, and the smell of stale carpet. That was his little hovel, and Dave Anderson (my undergrad mentor and one of the finest scholars of southern music I know) and I had ventured to tap into the pysche of a man that rock and roll had seemingly given up on a long, long time ago. The man was in his late sixties. Gone was the neatly greased-up puff hair and slender frame from the above photo. His hair was fright-white, his gut a little round and soft, but his smile was genuine once he talked to us for five minutes and realized we were for real. Famous for his recording of the original "Susie Q" and a brief tenure in the rockabilly scene of the 1950s, Dale was a piney woods native, the cousin of Ronnie Hawkins and, more than anything, a spitfire of a man who struggled all his life to fit in and make quality music.

I began to study him for a History of American Music course at Louisiana Tech University. I wanted to interview him as a "one-hit wonder," and I know that sounds trite now. It was, actually. I was young and naive as a scholar. I wanted to ask of him: What was it like, to be immortalized in one song? Did he feel robbed of a longer career? And hell...well, I realized "real quick-like," as they say, that Dale's career had never ended. He spent forty years trying to overcome that image as a one-hit wonder, and he did succeed. His resume as a producer in the 1960s and 1970s is impressive, and when Dave and I arrived to see him in 2005, Dale was still belting out regularly at shows across the South as well as still writing a lot of music.

I have digital recordings of our time with Dale. About twelve hours of interviews total. Now I know we've got to do more with it than we have. Dave and I did write a nice article about his early career in Shreveport; it ran as an essay in a collected volume--the link is to the right here>>>>

Dale was everything you might imagine the South to represent. He came from nothing but a dirt road and an old radio playing gospel music, really. His family was broken. He was prone to threatening violence in his youth, I think, and I know he enjoyed the bottle a bit too much at one point in his life. But he was also a lot about rising up from all of this. He knew his soul was made of music, if he could just learn to make it work efficiently. He knew that's what he could contribute tothe world, song and rhythm, and when he played his face lit up like a firecracker right before it sparks its brightest. My favorite memory? I snuck up behind him backstage at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, where he was playing a rockabilly revival, and he was so excited to see me that he scooped me up into an almost-painful hug and screamed so loud the stage manager grimaced.

Dale, I'll miss you, man.