A Real Cool Cat: The Starday Recordings

For a few brief years in the 1950s, Sonny Burns personified Texas honky-tonk music. Tall and handsome, with a powerfully emotive voice, he seemed poised at any minute to graduate from the STARDAY label to major label success and national stardom. Many country singers of his time portrayed themselves in song as hard-drinking womanizers, but for Burns this was no pose - it was his life, and his wild and reckless ways probably doomed any chance he might have had at wider recognition. He enjoyed a big regional hit with Too Hot To Handle, but Faron Young stole Burns's momentum by covering his follow-up record A Place For Girls Like You (a Top 10 hit for Faron in 1954), and when Burns failed to show up to duet with George Jones on what became Georges breakthrough hit (Why, Baby, Why), his career was essentially over. There was a brief attempt at a comeback with UNITED ARTISTS in the early sixties before Burns disappeared back into the rural East Texas woods for good. This BEAR FAMILY release gathers together for the first time the complete STARDAY recordings of Sonny Burns - all ten original singles, plus eight unissued songs and alternate takes. Most have been transferred from the original master tapes, resulting in the finest sound quality ever for these recordings. Having been unfairly relegated to footnote status in the George Jones Story in all previous treatments, this CD proves that Burns had a formidable voice all his own. The set includes liner notes and a discography by Texas music historian Andrew Brown.