One of the first white rock & rollers to record for a major label (Columbia),
(born Sid Erwin) was also one of the first young Southern musicians to go from Western swing to rockabilly in the mid-'50s.
grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He sang and played guitar at school, and while still in his mid-teens he began appearing on local radio with a friend,
. The duo eventually took over the program, and
on drums.
The group, by then known as the Western Melody Makers, stuck to playing country and Western swing in their gigs and radio appearances, but they were listening to lots of records by black artists. They were signed to Starday Records in 1954 and recorded a handful of songs, but these yielded no hits. They subsequently got a contract with Columbia Records and rechristened themselves the Five Strings.
Erwin, in turn, changed his name to
Sid King, all for the sake of a rhyming moniker,
Sid King & the Five Strings.
The Columbia sessions show just how far afield from country the group's listening had gotten. Their harmonies, the high-compression beat of their playing, and their choice of songs, coupled with
Jim Beck's hard, up-front mixing of the rhythm section, made them, for a time, one of the hotter rockabilly acts outside of Memphis. They weren't as wild as
the Sparkletones, but within Columbia Records' stable of artists, their music (along with that of
the Collins Kids) constituted a tiny corner of rockabilly validity. Hearing their stuff today, they could have been fair rivals to
Bill Haley & His Comets or
Carl Perkins, with a sound midway between the two.
Sid King & the Five Strings were featured on the Louisiana Hayride alongside
Elvis Presley and
Johnny Horton and inherited "Ooby Dooby" from
Roy Orbison (competing head to head with the latter's Sun version), but they never had the success of those whose paths they crossed. Their success was still confined to Texas, and by 1957 their Columbia contract had ended. The group's sound had also softened by that time, and their music no longer had the same edge, so by 1958 the band had called it quits.
King saw recording activity on his own in the early '60s on the Dot label through his acquaintance with
Pat Boone, a fellow native of Denton whom he'd met years earlier, but by 1965 he was out of the music business. He resumed performing part-time in the 1980s, drawn back to the stage by a new generation of Europeans eager to hear authentic American rockabilly.
He never quite jumped into rock head over heels, nor did he ever break through to a national audience. The only vintage
King available on CD domestically is an interesting, but not wholly representative, set of radio broadcasts from the mid-'50s that are closer to hillbilly than rockabilly. His Columbia recordings have been reissued in Germany on Bear Family's
Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight.
–
Richie Unterberger & Bruce Eder, Rovi