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Charlie Feathers, born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on June 12, 1932, was an influential rockabilly and country music performer who started recording a string of popular singles like "Peepin' Eyes," "Defrost Your Heart," "Tongue-Tied Jill," and "Bottle to the Baby" on Sun Records in the 1950s. Never attaining the level of popular success of the top-selling Sun artists like Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash, he nonetheless recorded hits for the label.
He continued making records for years after that, releasing his New Jungle Fever album in 1987 and Honkey Tonk Man in 1988, featuring the lead guitar work of his son, Bubba Feathers. These later albums of original songs penned by Feathers were released on the French label New Rose Records, whose other 1980s releases included albums by cult music heroes like Johnny Thunders, Alex Chilton, Roky Erikson, The Cramps, The Gun Club, and others. In the mid-1980s, he performed at times at new music nightclubs like the Antenna Club in Memphis, Tennessee, sharing the bill with rock-and-roll bands like Tav Falco's Panther Burns, who, as devoted fans of Feathers, had introduced him to the label's president. Feathers was known for being a master of shifting emotional and sonic dynamics in his songs. His theatrical, hiccup-styled, energetic, rockabilly vocal style inspired a later generation of rock vocalists, including Lux Interior of The Cramps. He claimed his early influences were from African American field blues he heard in Mississippi as a youth. His childhood influences were reflected in his later music of the 1970s and 1980s, which had an easy-paced, sometimes sinister, country-blues tempo, as opposed to the frenetic fast-paced style favored by some of his rockabilly colleagues of the 1950s. He died on August 29, 1998.
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