The Official Russell Gulley WEBSITE

Russell Gulley in His Own Words I was born in Rome, Ga., Nov.16th, 1947 to blue collar workers. Mom worked in the cotton mills and dad was in the forrestry service till they returned to Fort Payne, Al., mom’s hometown in the early 50’s, so Fort Payne is where I grew up. Most of my life I spent here, till I moved to Muscle Shoals after my Vietnam Experience and stayed there some 13 years working with Jackson Highway, the band produced by Jimmy Johnson and David Hood for Capitol Records in 1980. Early on I loved music. Listened a lot to the radio in my dad’s car late at night when I could pick up WCKY (Cincinnati, Ohio) and WLAC in Nashville. Those stations featured a lot of blues and were my study guide. I couldn’t afford records but that radio and local deejays (such as Jeff Cook of the group, Alabama) were my music instructors, plus the choir at the local Pentecostal Church. The church was where I realized that I had something in common with early rock and rollers, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis, they   were Pentecostals. That fervor and shout was the fire that the early rockabillies had in secular music that attracted me to that style early on, then as I realized the music was really “jumped up blues”, then I began to be a real fan of all the Sun Record artists, and even more so of the founder himself, Sam Phillips