He just felt that Jerry Lee was gonna be the next superstar, and he quit promoting me and Johnny Cash and Orbison. Riley recalled that he had been booked on Freed’s upcoming rock and roll tour when “Sam got me kicked off the tour and sabotaged my record and called the distributors and canceled all the orders because he only wanted to go with Jerry Lee. My record ‘Red Hot’ was happening, and Alan Freed was playing the heck out of it and told me personally I had a hit record.” “A singing piano player was something very different, and he thought it could be another Elvis Presley. “After Jerry Lee got on the label, Sam got hung up on him,” Riley told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2000. Riley blamed Phillips for promoting Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” at the expense of “Red Hot.” His follow-up single, the hard-driving “Red Hot,” came some months later, and Riley, who was known for his raucous stage performances, figured he had a national hit.Īlthough Riley recorded what have been called seminal rockabilly tunes, stardom eluded him.

Riley’s single “Flyin’ Saucers Rock and Roll” was released in early 1957 and made Riley and his band, the newly dubbed Little Green Men, a regional name. I was doing what Elvis was doing before Elvis did it: mixing blues and hillbilly, putting a laid-back, funky beat to hillbilly music.” “We’ve never gotten credit for that, but it’s a fact. “My band was the Sun sound,” Riley told the Associated Press in 1984. His band, which for a time included a then-unknown Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, is said to have played a key role in shaping the Sun Records’ sound, providing backup on recordings by Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Lewis and others. The Arkansas-born son of a sharecropper who began playing harmonica and guitar as a child, Riley landed at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in 1956. Riley died Sunday of colon cancer that had spread to the bone at a hospital in Jonesboro, Ark., said his wife, Joyce. Billy Lee Riley, a rockabilly pioneer and songwriter who recorded for the legendary Sun Records label and is best remembered for his 1957 singles “Flyin’ Saucers Rock and Roll” and “Red Hot,” has died.

Rock squirrel