Arts & Culture
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During 1953 and 1954, the Goodwyn Institute Building Auditorium on this site was home to The Saturday Night Jamboree, a live country music show that introduced a group of then-unknown artists who later made music history, including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Johnny and Dorsey Burnett, Barbara Pittman, Eddie Bond, Charlie Feathers, Larry Manuel, Lloyd (Arnold) McCollough, Bud Deckelman, and Harmonica Frank Floyd. Joe Manuel, a popular country music star of that era, founded the show with his business partner M. E. Ellis. As audiences grew, radio station KWEM, with studios in Memphis and West Memphis, Arkansas, broadcast the show. Backstage in the dressing rooms, the musicians experimented with new sounds, mixing fast country, gospel, blues, and boogie-woogie. Their performances on the Jamboree stage of this new type of music, later called rockabilly, may have been the first public renditions of the genre.
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Memphis, Tennessee · United States
