re: Endless Sleep - The Obituary Thread

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Rockabilly great, 'Mona Lisa' hitmaker Carl Mann dead at 78

Carl Mann was the “Last Son of Sun,” one of the final artists that Sam Phillips introduced to the world. A child prodigy from West Tennessee, Mann arrived in Phillips’ orbit at the end of the Sun Records founder’s golden run in the 1950s. The teenaged Mann would hit the charts with his galloping rockabilly redux of "Mona Lisa" in 1959. Mann died Wednesday at Jackson-Madison County General Hospital in Jackson, Tennessee. He was 78.

A lanky dark-haired figure with a mellifluous voice, Mann sometimes mused that he was born a little too late to have been part of Phillips’ all-star roster of acts earlier in the era, which included Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.

“If I'd have been a little older, I probably would've been more in the heyday of it," Mann recalled in a 2011 interview with The Commercial Appeal. "I came right on the tail end of the Sun era. And everybody, most of the guys — Elvis, Cash — had left except for Charlie Rich." [Actually Jerry Lee was still there too - K]

But Mann would ultimately achieve his own global renown, becoming an icon of the 1970s rockabilly revival in Europe and be enshrined in the International Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

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