When I was thirteen years old we still lived in Arkansas and I traded my BB gun for a beat up Gene Autry guitar that was held together with a Prince Albert tobacco can and some bailing wire. A year later, when I was fourteen, we had moved to Missouri and I picked cotton and ordered a new one from Sears & Roebuck for $15.98. Then in early 1956, I was seventeen at the time, I entered a high school talent contest at Bernie, Missouri. I sang "Baby Let's Play House" and when they wanted an encore there was a new song I had heard a few times by Carl Perkins, called "Blue Suede Shoes." By chance there was a disk jockey in the audience that night from KDEX radio in Dexter, Missouri - his name was Weldon Grimsley, and the next day I was sitting at home listening to the radio, and they said "if Narvel Felts is listening please contact KDEX immediately". I ran outside and told my daddy what they had said on the radio. It was cold winter time and he had the water drained out of the radiator of his 1946 International truck. He put water in the truck and drove me eight miles up the gravel road to Bernie to the nearest phone, and I called KDEX and they said "bring your guitar and come on." I took J.W. Grubbs with me and they gave us a little Saturday afternoon radio show, live.
A little while after that, on March 24, 1956, I ran across Jerry Mercer one night at the Four Way Inn in Dudley, Missouri. He got me up to sing and invited me to come to Pop schmitzer's, near Malden, the next night and sit in with him some more and this led to a regular job in Jerry Mercer's band along about the spring of 1956. We played a lot of the local clubs in southeast Missouri, north-east Arkansas and some in illinois and played a package show that summer with Roy Orbison when "Ooby Dooby" was his current record and "Go Go Go" the B-side of it. Eddie Bond and The Stompers were also on the show and Eddie's record on Mercury at the time was "I Got A Woman" and "Rockin' Daddy."
During 1956 from the spring until about mid December I worked with Jerry Mercer and I would play the slap bass when he was singing and he would play it when I was singing. We would trade and both of us played. I would play rhythm guitar when I sang and he would play rhythm guitar when he sang. During this period of time we did that show with Roy Orbison and Eddie Bond at Dexter, Missouri, and within a couple of weeks after that show I wound up with an audition with Sun Records. Calvin Richardson, who was my manager and a Dexter music store owner at the time, told me that Roy was going to help him get an appointment at Sun for me, so Leon Barnett and I drove down in my Chevrolet to Sun. It was very hot summer-time, probably August or early September, when we auditioned for Jack Clement. Jack told us to write some more songs, bring the whole band back. However, we did not wind up doing that until early 1957. In the meantime, in December of 1956, Jerry Mercer got married and decided to quit the music business. The band now became 'Narvel Felts and the Rockets'.
On my Sun recordings Jack Clement was the producer. We went in with the band, the first time was in January 1957 when we did five songs, then we came back for another session in April. I had felt like there were three sessions but the Sun session book doesn't confirm that. They say that the following session was in early April of 1957 and it would probably have been the one that produced "My Babe." I remember at the first session Roy Orbison was in the control room with Jack Clement. Conway Twitty was still Harold Jenkins and had a chair pulled up by my microphone in the studio, listening to me. I had met Jerry Lee Lewis at Taylor's cafe next door that morning, and Johnny Cash came in at the front office and watched us for a little while that day. I remember that at the session when I recorded "My Babe", I said the line, "when she's hot, there ain't no colin', "I remember Jack Clement and Roy Orbison had their heads popping around, looking at each other kind of in surprise when I said that, like it was a sort of shocking line at that time.
After I'd finished the last session at Sun, Jack Clement said "well, I think we've got a record here. It may take about a year to get around to releasing it because we've got so many in front of you." At the session when Conway Titty was also there, Roy Orbison called Conway and myself off in a corner, and said, "Boys, if I were you, I would look elsewhere for a label. That's what I'm going to do when my contract's up, because Sam's not interested in me, he's not interested in you, he's not even interested in Perkins. He's only interested in Cash and this new kid, Jerry Lee Lewis."
In early march of 1957, I was playing the Fox Theatre in St. Louis and Fred Varney, who had some connections with Mercury Records in Chicago, wanted to take us to Chicago to audition for Mercury. At that time I still was recording for Sun. We were at the Fox theatre playing, I believe it was probably three shows a day, possibly more, with the movie 'Rock Pretty Baby'. We did not go to Chicago at that time, but a little later, after we had done the other session for Sun and Jack had said, it would be a year before they could release anything. I was doing another tour of theatres in Illinois and we were playing in Lichfield, Illinois, I believe two nights off in between, Fred Varney came by again. He had had a man named Cliff Mantle book those theatres and they were kind of partners in the business. Fred had a printing company in St. Louis. He offered again to take us to Chicago and this time we took him up on it.
He took us to 35 East Wacker Drive, just walked in the Mercury offices with us and the band, so the people were saying "what are you doin', bringing a band in here like this . . .?" Anyway, they finally decided to listen to us and so we brought the equipment up and sat in the office with no microphone, and Art Talmadge walked over and stood near me where he could hear my voice over the band. I was kind of singing in his ear. We did a couple of songs and he said send them on down to Universal Studios to record. We went down that afternoon and recorded until probably midnight after taking a supper break, and wound up recording ten songs. Within a month my first record "Kiss-A-Me Baby" and "Foolish Thoughts" was on the market. I believe it was the 10th of June, 1957.
The band that I recorded with at Mercury was still the same that was on my Sun sessions. Also a piano player named Chuck Stacy worked some of the songs on the Chicago session with us. The line-up was myself doing vocals and rhythm guitar, Leon Barnett on lead guitar, J.W. Grubbs on bass, Bob Taylor on drums and Jerry Tuttle playing steel guitar and saxophone; in fact later on that year we recorded an instrumental that featured Jerry on saxophone, called "Rocket Ride." That record came out and really started getting some action, this was early '58. The story goes that art Talmadge heard a radio station in Chicago play "Rocket Ride" on a slow speed and it sounded like a stroll record to him, and they had a hit at the time with the diamonds "The Stroll", and so he slowed it down, and it was re-issued very quickly as "Rocket ride Stroll." That was actually a re-recording and I believe it was Sil Austin and the orchestra who recorded "Rocket Ride Stroll" and they issued it under my name. The original "Rocket Ride" was just us, the Rockets. We did that at RCA Studio B in Nashville in October of 1957, featuring Jerry Tuttle on saxophone.
Narvel & The Rockets, 1957. Left to right: J.W. Grubbs, Leon Barnett, Narvel, Bob Taylor and Jerry Tuttle.
In late 1958 Conway Twitty recommended me for the club circuit in Canada that he had been working prior to "It's Only Make Believe becoming a number one record. He had also recommended Ronnie Hawkins to that circuit. I had recommended both Conway and Ronnie to Pop Warner's and some other local places a little bit earlier and Conway started playing around my home area around 1957. Conway became quite successful in Canada then he recommended Ronnie Hawkins, who became quite successful. Then Conway recommended me and on January 5, 1959 we opened at the Flamingo Club in Hamilton, Ontario. We had played Pop Warner's in Malden, Missouri on the Saturday night prior to that and my voice had started breaking that night, and we left after work and drove on ice and snow all the way to Hamilton. Took us all night Saturday, all day Sunday, all night Sunday and got to Hamilton on Monday morning and by the time we got there I had laryngitis and could not even talk. Luckily I did have a good band, so all I did was play guitar the first week and by the second week I was able to sing again. We wound up doing well on that circuit and that's where we worked mostly in 1959 and '60. During that month at the Flamingo Club in Hamilton, Leon Barnett, Jerry Tuttle and myself wrote "Three Thousand Miles" in the dressing room. The same room that Conway Twitty and Jack Nance had written "It's Only Make Believe" in.
We got to London, Ontario which we played the entire month of February at the Brass Rail. When we got there two disk jockeys from CKSL in London came out to see us, one of them being Dean Hargopian. They invited us up to the studio to put down some of the new songs we had written. One afternoon we took the band and went up to CKSL Studios and sat up, and the engineer got some slap-back echo going, and we recorded "Three Thousand Miles" and three other songs, and I sent the original tape to Art Talmadge in Chicago and followed up with a phone call and David Carroll, the orchestra leader of Fascination-fame, talked to me. He was the head of A&R for Mercury at the time, and he said he thought they would pass on "Three Thousand Miles," and told me I could go elsewhere if I felt that strong about it. So when we got back home, I sent the tape to Chet Atkins in Nashville at RCA and also Hi Records had just been formed in Memphis, so I sent them a copy. Chet called me back and told me that he thought the song "Darlin' Sue" on there was the bag I needed to be in but he did not think the song was quite there. I got a call back from Hi saying that they thought "Three Thousand Miles" was a smash, and to get on down to the studio and record it. We went down to Memphis and tried to re-record it; we never could get the feel that we had on the original demo-tape that we did in the radio station in Canada, and so they wound up releasing that and it came out on Pink Records and was my first national chart hit. After it made the charts, Mercury Records sent me a magazine with "Three Thousand Miles" circled in the chart, saying "Narvel, we obviously missed on this one."
After it was obvious there was some success with "Three Thousand Miles", playing very well in Canada and making the national pop-charts in the United States, Walt Maynard, who was running Pink Records, wanted us to come back to Memphis and record again. So between dates in Canada we went to Memphis to the Royal Studio with Jack Clement engineering, with J. M. Van Eaton on the drums and the rest of us. "Honey Love" was one of the songs we did. I had always loved that song by the Drifters, so just from memory we took a few takes on it that day and then Walt decided that should be the one for the next record.
At the Terrace Lounge, East St. Louis, MO., February 1957. From left to right: J.W. Grubbs, Jerry Tuttle, Narvel, Leon Barnett and Bob Taylor.
It was also one that made the pop-charts in the United States and played very well in Canada in early 1960 - it was released in late 1959.
After the three Pink releases I had been getting calls from New York. I would up signing with Don Seat in New York City as a manager. He was also managing Conway Twitty and Joanne Campbell. Jim Vienneau was also calling me from New York and told me, "look what you're doing on that little label, think what you could do on MGM." So I signed with MGM. They took me to Nashville and recorded one session and it remained unissued until Bear Family put it on a album in 1987.
So all my Sun, Mercury, Pink and MGM masters are on this CD, demonstrating how we got started. After these recordings, I cut one single for Bob Cloud's Starline label then I embarked on a series of sessions for Roland Janes, featured on the Bear Family release 'Memphis Days' (BCD 15515). The big national hits came along in the seventies when "Drift Away" started a hit streak that lasted throughout that decade into the Eighties and Nineties, giving me hits over five decades. For this I am truly grateful. My greatest successes are featured on my other Bear Family CD 'Drift Away - The Best of Narvel Felts 1973 - 1979' (BCD 15690).
Thanks for continuing to listen.
by NARVEL FELTS, with Howard Cockburn, Summer 1997
"I would very much like to dedicate this web page to the memory of the precious son of Loretta and myself, Narvel 'Bub' Felts Jr. - April 1st 1964 to September 14th, 1995 - A wonderful person and a great drummer. 'To know him was to love him.'" -NARVEL FELTS
Official Narvel Felts Homepage
Narvel Felts, The Man And His Music. Get all the facts! Roy E. Combs, Fan Club President - rcombs8198@aol.com
