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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0501adkinsobit01.html
Hasil Adkins, a rockabilly singer who became a cult figure among record collectors and musicians for his raw, idiosyncratic music and outsize personality, was found dead on Tuesday at his home near Madison, W.Va. He was 68.
The cause was unknown, said Sheriff Rodney Miller of Boone County.
Adkins made a handful of rockabilly records in the 1960s, all released in very small quantities. At the time he was barely known outside his hometown. But for a generation of fans who discovered his music in later decades, he became a symbol of American musical primitivism.
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Wailing in a scratchy Appalachian tenor and bashing with abandon on his one-man-band setup of guitar and drums, Adkins was proudly unpolished as a musician.
Starting in the mid-'50s, Adkins recorded hundreds of songs at home in rural West Virginia, accompanying himself on all the instruments. He played as a one-man band because, he later said, as a child he had heard Hank Williams and others on the radio and had assumed that the one-named musician in the band played all the instruments himself.
His songs often straddled a line between the raucously funny and the disturbingly horrific. She Said, his most famous tune, is a tall tale about the morning after a particularly regrettable one-night stand. We Got a Date, sung in a gravelly sneer, tells a macabre story that features one of Adkins' favorite themes: beheading.
Adkins' few records began to circulate among collectors in the '70s, and his legend grew when the Cramps recorded a version of She Said.
By the early '80s Adkins had been contacted by a few admirers and fanzine writers, and Billy Miller and Miriam Linna, two enthusiastic fans who run Norton Records in New York, collected some of his early recordings on an album, Out to Hunch, in 1986.
That recording and several others released by Norton in the next few years, including The Wild Man and Peanut Butter Rock and Roll, were greeted with amazement by critics and musicians.
After the release of Out to Hunch, Adkins toured widely, often playing in clubs filled with fans who knew all the words to his songs.
In addition, here's a cool portrait of him which also details his life.
http://www.joecoleman.com/gallery/hasil/hasil.html |
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