A guitar tune written in 1958 has the distinction of being the only instrumental song ever banned for radio play in the U.S.  The song’s name was “Rumble,” performed by a guitarist named Link Wray and his band, the Wraymen.  The offensiveness, apparently, had to do with the fear that the song might incite gang violence.  More on that in a moment.  First, some context.

     In January 1958, there were live dance nights held in Fredericksburg, Virginia hosted by the popular Washington, D.C. television disc jockey named Milt Grant – of Milt Grant’s House Party, a teen dance show similar to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in Philadelphia.  At one of these live dance events that January, Link Wray and his band, a local group from the area, were being urged to come up with a song like “The Stroll,” then a popular hit by The Diamonds.  What Wray and his group came up with instead was an instrumental, power-guitar driven, blues type song that would later become
known as “Rumble.”

     At the dance that night in Fredericksburg, the song was quite popular, as Wray and his band did four requested encores.  The dance crowd’s reaction to the song made Wray and his band think – along with disc jockey Milt Grant, their de facto manager – that they were on to something.  So they set about trying to get the song on tape for a demo to shop it around to record labels.  However, when they tried to record it, they could not quite duplicate the sound they had on the dance night, especially frustrating Wray.  That’s when he started moving speakers and mics around to get feedback, and then took a pencil and began punching holes through an amplifier to get the sound he wanted.  What Wray had done in his frustration was “invent” a new sound, a sound that would later be known as “fuzztone guitar.”  There was also some novel use of reverberation on the track as well.  The song they had recorded on their demo was then using the name “Oddball.”  And they began shopping it around to record labels, but there were no takers.  Capitol and Decca Records both turned down “Oddball.”

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     Milt Grant then took the demo to Archie Bleyer of Cadence Records in New York.  When Bleyer first heard the song, he hated it and the novel sound that Link Wray had created.  Still, he recorded some demos, not sure what would happen next.  Bleyer’s stepdaughter and some of her teenage friends, however, loved the song.  One story has it that she was the one who suggested naming it “Rumble” because it reminded her of West Side Story, a popular stage play about rival New York street gangs.  West Side Story had debuted on Broadway in 1957 and “rumble” was then the popular slang term for “gang fight.”  Another account credits one of the Everly Brothers with coming up with the same name for the song.  In any event, the tune became “Rumble” and Bleyer decided to release the song despite his dislike for it.  Quoted in a promotional article in Billboard magazine at the time, Bleyer reportedly said something to the effect: “Rumble, schmumble, who cares, as long as it’s a hit?”

     “Rumble” wasn’t exactly the lightest, easy listening fare of the day, true enough.  Still, rock ‘n roll by then was finding its voice and raucuous edge.  Although the term “rock and roll” dates to song lyrics from the 1920s and 1930s, a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed in 1951 is credited with introducing the term to a much larger audience, especially through his play and promotion of African American rhythm & blues (R&B) music in the 1950s.  New white artists, picking up on the R&B sound in some of their recordings, were also finding an audience.  Bill Haley had “Rock Around the Clock” by mid-1955, and Elvis Presley had “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” by the fall of 1956.  Both Haley and Presley had riled convention with their own rock ‘n roll styles.  Still, rock ’n roll music was by no means the dominant sound of the day.  There was still plenty of more sedate, “easy listening” music to be found on the Billboard top twenty in the mid- and late-1950s – music from artists such as Andy Williams, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Tab Hunter, and others.  “Rumble,” by comparison, was all instrumental, but a tune that had a distinct “attitude” about it.  The guitar riffs in “Rumble” stood out, and went well beyond the moment.  The musical sound created by Wray, and his distinctive playing, would soon have a direct effect on the future of rock and guitar music.  “With one mean D-to-E chord change,” observes writer Angie Carlson in a 2007 Gibson.com article, “Link Wray changed the electric guitar forever.”

“Rumble” Not Played

     But in the late 1950s, radio disc jockeys had the power of determining what music was played and what wasn’t.  And in some cities and towns, including radio stations in Boston and New York City, “Rumble” just wasn’t played for fear it could incite gang violence or be an influence on juvenile delinquency. Even Dick Clark on American Bandstand was careful to avoid mention- ing the song’s title when introducing Wray on his show. The song’s title  — “Rumble” – was a stumbling block for some DJs; they just couldn’t get past it.  However, the song itself, an instrumental, had no lyrics of course, so there was no language per se to incite kids; no fiery rhetoric.  Still, those aware of the controversy took precautions.  Even Dick Clark on American Bandstand, a popular TV dance show, was careful to avoid mentioning the song’s title when he introduced Link Wray and his band as guests.

     Rock ‘n roll music was not always welcomed back then, and in fact, there were some efforts nationally to block the more objectionable sounds, suggestive lyrics, and loud or raucous music.  Band leader Mitch Miller was one of those who helped put a damper on the more raucous forms of rock ’n roll.  Miller was then head of A&R – “artists and repertoire” – for Columbia Records, and as such, had the power to determine which musicians and songs would be recorded and promoted at Columbia and beyond.  Miller had some of his own hit tunes on the Billboard charts of the 1905s.  But he also had broad influence at the time, and was publicly critical of rock ‘n roll and Top 40 radio stations that played rock ‘n roll.  Miller, however, did allow for some lighter forms rock ‘n roll, such as the 1957 million-selling hit by Marty Robbins, “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation,” which he helped produce.

     In addition, West Side Story’s gang scenes had permeated popular culture by 1957-58.  In fact, a dance scene in Act 1 of the play is titled “The Rumble,” and other scenes showed the activities of the play’s two featured gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.  “Juvenile delinquen- cy” was a national topic of discussion by then as well, even attracting the attention of the U.S. Congress.  There was also proposed legislation in Congress in 1957 that song lyrics be screened and altered by a review com- mittee before being broadcast or offered for sale.  That legislation, treading on free speech, never became law, but it was a sign of the times and part of the broader cultural concern then revolving around gangs and juvenile delinquency.  In 1958 the Mutual Broadcasting System dropped all rock ‘n records from its network music programs, calling the music “distorted, monotonous, noisy music.”  Link Wray’s instrumental was part of the music that became entangled in those fears and prohibitions.

     Nevertheless, despite all the tiptoeing around “Rumble” as a musical instigator of teen trouble, the song became a huge hit, rising into the Top 20.  Despite Dick Clark’s care not to mention the song’s title at Wray’s appearance, Bandstand did give the song enough air time to help it along, as did other music venues.  And the attempted suppression by some radio stations, in fact, likely contributed to its success, as Wray himself would later surmise of the radio bans.  “Rumble” went on to sell more than one million copies in its prime, with some estimates as high as four million, though it’s not clear what time frame is involved and whether sales of albums with the song are also included.  

     Link Wray, however, would not get a giant share of the royalties or music publishing fees from “Rumble.”  Milt Grant, the DJ, was one co-author of the song, appearing on the Cadence label with “L.Wray.”  But Link’s share, according to one account, appears to have been assigned to his father.  Link would later say that he did receive enough money to buy his mother a house, but that he was generally spared the details of the “paperwork,” which appears to have kept his share lower than it might otherwise have been.  He may have fared better with subsequent songs.

     Meanwhile, back in the late 1950s, Archie Bleyer of Cadence Records – the guy who had first produced “Rumble” since his stepdaughter and her friends liked it – was getting some external criticism for releasing the song.  Bleyer was charged by some critics with “promoting teenage gang warfare.”  Bleyer, nevertheless, thought he could “clean up” Link Wray and his group.  Bleyer’s plan was to have the group record in Nashville, Tennessee under the guidance of the Everly Brothers’ production team.  But the Wrays didn’t like that idea, and decided to part company with Bleyer and Cadence Records.  They soon joined Epic Records, recording a 1959 follow-up to “Rumble” called “Rawhide,” also an instrumental, which rose to No. 23 on the pop charts.  In subsequent years, the group also had other notable songs, including “Jack the Ripper” (1961), “Black Widow” (1963), “Big City After Dark” “Run Chicken Run” (1963), “Ace of Spades” (1965), “Switchblade,” and “Red Hot (1977).  Thereafter, Link Wray would not hit the pop charts in quite the same way again, but would have influence in other ways.

Part Shawnee

     Fred Lincoln Wray was born in Dunn, North Carolina in 1929.  According to some accounts his parents were semi-literate and engaged in street preaching from time to time.  Wray was also reported to be part Shawnee Indian.  He is quoted in one Associated Press story of 2002 saying: “I’m half Shawnee Indian, born to a Shawnee mother.  I had a Shawnee dad, and he was in the First World War…and he was shell-shocked…. I had to go to work when I was 10 years old to help feed the family.  This was Dunn, North Carolina, in a different era, you know, during the Ku Klux Klan days, you know…really bad in the South,” Wray said, explaining he shook with fear at KKK raids.  In Dunn, they lived in a black neighborhood.  “I seen the sheets come,” Wray would recount in another interview, referring to the KKK, “pull out the black people, tie ‘em to a tree, and beat…’em.  We’d hide underneath the bed, hopin’ they wouldn’t come for us.”  For a time, Wray’s family slept on the floors of barns under the protection of Cherokees and ate whatever they could find.  “Elvis, he grew up  — I don’t want to sound racist when I say this – he grew up white-man poor,” said Wray, comparing his experience to that of Elvis Presley.  “I was growing up Shawnee poor.”  An early bout with the German measels had also left Wray with weak eyesight and hearing.

     When Wray was about age 8, a traveling black guitarist and sometime circus performer named Hambone introduced him to the blues, giving him guitar lessons on his front porch, and showing the young boy a few chords and how to play slide guitar.  Wray’s father later worked in the dockyards of Portsmouth, Virginia, and the family moved there from North Carlina, which for young Link was a welcomed development.  “It was like moving from one world to a whole ‘nother,” he would tell one reporter years later.  “I couldn’t believe it — all of the sudden I could turn on a stove and it was gas fire, I could turn on a switch and it was electricity.”  In 1951, Wray was drafted into the U.S. Army, sent to Germany and Korea, where he contracted tuberculosis, which later led to the removal of his left lung.  But when he first returned to the U.S. in 1953 after his Army hitch, he ordered a Gibson Les Paul guitar.  It was then he developed his own style, playing louder than most in part because of his bad hearing.

     By 1955 Wray started playing as a member of Lucky Wray & the Palomino Ranch Hands, a country music band formed in North Carolina with his brothers Vernon and Doug, and later one other member.  The Wray brothers soon moved to just outside of Washington, D.C., and recorded some songs on a local label named Kay and also for Starday Records in Texas.  By 1958, Link Wray’s brother was doing the vocals in the band, while Link focused on the guitar.  Cast a bit in the “Elvis look” of that era, the band dressed in black leather and began playing the local record hops.“…[A]ll of a sudden” in the 1950s, this guy in a black leather jacket “plays this loud chord that practically tears your eyebrows off your face…”
                     – Michael Molenda
                       Guitar Player magazine Wray became inventive in a hunt for his “own sound,” such as poking holes in an amplifier to get the sound he wanted in “Rumble.”  He was also one of the first guitarists to take a major chord and run it up and down the fret board, creating the sound known as the power chord.

     Music historians of the late-1950s-early1960s era would observe some years later that there probably was a bit of “juvenile attitude” in Wray’s “Rumble.”  Dan Del Fiorentino, historian for the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California told the Los Angles Times in a 2005 interview that “Rumble” added “more of a zing, more of a delinquency, if you will, to rock ‘n’ roll.”  Michael Molenda, editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, also noted in the same article: “Fifties rock was pretty clean, and you’ve got this guy — he’s got a leather jacket, he looks scary — and all of a sudden he plays this loud chord that practically tears your eyebrows off your face…It was extremely sexy and aggressive, and it kind of paved the way for the next level of rock and roll.”  Without the power chord that Wray more or less invented with “Rumble,” explains Dan Del Fiorentino, “punk rock and heavy metal would not exist.”  And Wray is revered by a number of the most famous guitar-wielding rockers.  Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, and Jeff Beck all count Link Wray as an influence in their own careers.  Bob Dylan is reported to have called “Rumble” one of the best instrumentals ever.

Film & TV Music

     By the early 1970s, a few of Link Wray’s songs were finding their way into other venues.  Wray’s “The Swag” was used in the 1972 film, Pink Flamingos.  “Jack the Ripper,” another of his instrumentals, was used as the music behind a high-speed car chase in the 1983 film, Breathless, with Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky.  In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film, Pulp Fiction, both “Rumble” and “Ace of Spades” were used.  In the 1995 film, Desperado with Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas, “Jack The Ripper” was used.  In 1996, Independence Day, the highest grossing film that year, Wray’s “Rumble” made another appearance.  “Rumble” was also used in the January 1999 pilot episode of HBO’s The Sopranos.  A first use of Wray’s music in TV advertising also came in 1999 with excerpts of “Jack the Ripper” used in a Taco Bell commercial.  In 2001, “Rumble” was used in the film Blow, starring Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz.  “Rumble” was also used in 2009′s It Might Get Loud, a documentary on the history of the electric guitar by film-maker Davis Guggenheim.  These film uses of Wray’s music brought the Link Wray sound to a new audience, gave it another shot in the market and renewed appreciation by fans and other artists.

     Over the years, there have also been various cover versions of Wray’s songs in new music, such as the song “Killer in the Home” (based on “Rumble”) by New Wave group, Adam and the Ants, included on their Kings of the Wild Frontier album of 1980.  The guitarist for this group, Marco Pirroni, has cited Link Wray as a major influence.

     Wray’s legacy is found not only in the U.S., but also in Great Britain, where his music has been cited as an influence on The Kinks and The Who, among others.  Pete Townshend has reportedly stated that “if it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,’ I would have never picked up a guitar.”  Townshend also said of his first impression on hearing the song: “…Link Wray never toned the music down. He was always ready to Rumble…”
                         – Richard Harrington
                           Washington Post “I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard it, and yet excited by the savage guitar sounds.” Ray Davies of The Kinks also cites Wray as an influence. In 2003, Rolling Stone’s entry for Wray in their “100 Most Important Guitarists in History,” called him the man behind “the most important D chord in history.” Wray was ranked at No. 67 on that list. The Rolling Stone entry also credits Wray with creating “the overdriven rock-guitar sound taken up by Townshend, Hendrix, and others.”

     In 1980, Wray married his fourth wife, Olive, a Danish student who had been studying Native American culture.  He then moved to Denmark and began some recording for the foreign market.  By the 1990s, Wray’s older music had caught the attention of grunge musicians, as some of this work was also reissued under various labels.  Wray himself continued to perform and record, turning out two albums – Shadowman in 1997 and Barbed Wire in 2000.  Link Wray continued performing his music into his 70s.  “He just loved playing,” said Michael Molenda, editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, who had seen Wray perform in 2005 in San Francisco.  “He wasn’t like a guy who was 76 years old,” Molenda told the Los Angeles Times.  “He was like a 19-year-old in a 76-year-old body.”  Wray lived his last years with his wife Olive on a Danish island.  He died of heart failure in Copenhagen in early November 2005.

     “Link Wray never toned the music down,” wrote Richard Harrington of the Washington Post at Wray’s death.  “He was always ready to Rumble.”

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Date Posted:  10 May 2010
Last Update:  16 May 2010
Comments to:  jdoyle@pophistorydig.com

Article Citation:
Jack Doyle, “Rumble Riles Censors, 1958-59,”
PopHistoryDig.com, May 10, 2010.

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Sources, Links & Additional Information

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In the 1970s, frustrated with the music business, Wray turned a family chicken coop into a crude, three-track studio, where he & friends experimented with sounds & styles. This 2005 two disc album by Acadia Records captures some of that.

1973 Link Wray album, “Be What You Want To,” Polydor.

Spencer Leigh, “Link Wray Obit,” Rockabilly Hall.com.

Cain Burdeau, Associated Press, “The Original Man in Black: Link Wray Still Rumbles,” August, 2002, Rockabilly Hall.com.

Lawrence Laurent, “10- Count ‘Em- 10 Top- notchers Has Milt,” The Washington Post-Times Herald, April 10, 1958, p. C-14.

“Milt Grant Plugs A Hit – His Own,” The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), June 1, 1958.

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Angie Carlson, “How a One-Lunged Shawnee Indian Invented Punk: Link Wray, ‘Rumble’ and the Meanest D Chord Ever,” Gibson.com, December 14, 2007.

Richard Harrington, “Prophet of the Rock Guitar: With Pick and Pencil, Link Wray Pointed the Way,” Washington Post, Tuesday, November 22, 2005.

Dennis McLellan, Obituaries, “Link Wray, 76; Rebel Guitarist’s Power Chord in ‘Rumble’ Started Rock Music on Its Journey to Punk and Heavy Metal,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2005, p. B-8.

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Source for West Side Story “Rumble” photo, 1957 stage production.

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Museum of Making Music, Carlsbad, California.