Carl Mann

Rockabilly one-hit wonder Carl Mann was born August 22, 1942 in Huntingdon, Tennessee. He became proficient on both guitar and piano while still a boy, and enjoyed his first brush with celebrity playing on a local radio station. After releasing his first single, 1957’s “Gonna Rock and Roll Tonight”, he was signed to the legendary Sun Records. One of his first recordings for Sun was a rockabilly rave-up of the Nat King Cole standard “Mona Lisa”. Country singer Conway Twitty heard the recording, and promptly recorded and released his own version of Mann’s arrangement, which prompted Sun head Sam Phillips to rush Mann’s version into stores. They both cracked the top 30, but Mann’s hit highs of number 24 on the R&B chart and number 25 on the pop chart all before the singer was 16-years-old. Follow-up singles failed to take hold, and his 1960 debut LP, Like Mann, flopped. Mann entered the army and retired for a while from the music business before attempting a comeback in 1974 as a country singer. He released a smattering of inconsequential singles through the end of the decade, returning to his family’s logging business in the early 80s. He would perform intermittently, and his influence was made clear by his induction into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 2006. Mann passed away on December 16, 2020.

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