Shelby Singleton, 77; launched music careers, revived Sun label
LOS ANGELES - Shelby Singleton, a maverick country music mogul and talent scout who launched the careers of Roger Miller and Ray Stevens before resuscitating the fabled Sun Records label, died Wednesday in Nashville, following a battle with brain cancer. He was 77.
Mr. Singleton, whose work for Sun gave new life to recordings by the label’s 1950s discoveries, including Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, had been admitted to St. Thomas Hospital last week after suffering a seizure, longtime friend and associate Jerry Kennedy said Thursday.
Mr. Singleton experienced overnight success in 1968 when he put singer Jeanne Carolyn Stephenson into a recording studio with a Tom T. Hall song about small-town backbiting. “Harper Valley P.T.A.’’ gave Jeannie C. Riley, Stephenson’s stage name, a number one hit not only on country radio but on the pop singles chart as well.
“We did that at a 6 p.m. session on a Thursday night, I think,’’ said Kennedy, who played the dobro prominently featured on the track. “I was going to Gatlinburg in Eastern Tennessee for a long weekend, and when I was driving back, I started hearing it on the radio. Shelby had cut acetates and got them to radio stations all over the place. He took one to Ralph Emery on WSN . . . and he played it immediately, just a few hours after we had recorded it.’’
With the profits from that million-seller, Mr. Singleton bought rights to the Sun Records name and thousands of master recordings made by the label’s visionary founder, Sam Phillips, who had discovered Cash, Lewis, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and dozens of other rockabilly, blues, and R&B acts.
Phillips had famously sold Presley’s contract and master recordings in 1955 to RCA Records for $35,000, but Mr. Singleton ended up owning what is considered one of the seminal catalogs of early rock. In the 1970s, he reissued many of those recordings, helping spur interest among new generations of listeners in the pivotal records of some of rock’s greatest figures.
He also launched the careers of some of country music’s most colorful artists of the 1960s, including Miller, Stevens, and Jerry Reed, after quickly rising at Mercury Records to head of artists and repertoire, the talent scouting and development side of the record business.
Shelby Sumpter Singleton Jr. was born in Waskom, Texas. He grew up in Shreveport, La., and joined the US Marine Corps after high school. Upon being discharged, he worked as an engineer for Remington Rand, maker of the early UNIVAC computer.
Long before he acquired the prestigious Sun catalog, Mr. Singleton snagged one of its cornerstone artists, Jerry Lee Lewis, whom he signed in 1963 when Lewis’s career was at an ebb. Within a few years, with Kennedy producing, Lewis became one of the most consistent country hit-makers of the late 1960s and ’70s.