Jimmy Wages

Born : 1931 (Tupelo, Lee County, MS)
Died : 22.3.1999 (Tupelo, Lee County, MS) (aged 68)

Jimmy "Mad Man" Wages was a Rock 'n Roll/Country musician known for his wild unreleased Sun Records tapes. He also recorded for TomBigBee Records and Cavalcade International Records. There's a rumor, that there's still a bunch of unreleased tapes at Hi Records, where he recorded in 1960 together again with Ray Harris, but nothing has been found yet. Same for Sun, where many tapes remain undiscovered to this day.

In the 1980s, Wages lived with his mother in a small house in Tupelo and still lived from his small and volatile income as a musician. By late 80s and early 90s, Wages successfully started playing shows in Europe. In 1999, Jimmy Wages passed away in his hometown of Tupelo.



Sun Records career:

Wages began appearing in Tupelo with some local musicians and with the Miller Sisters. After the Miller Sisters went to Memphis and recorded some singles on Sam Phillips' label Sun Records, Wages also tried his hand at the record business. In 1956 Wages traveled with his bassist Jesse Carter to Memphis and held at Sun his first session. Overall, he held five sessions, in which about eight to ten songs were recorded, none of which was finally published. Sam Phillips was about to bring out Wages' Mad Man and Miss Pearl, but Jack Clement, who was in charge of Wages, had doubts about the record and convinced Phillips to stay out of it. Since Wages had no own band, he was on most titles accompanied by Sun's studio musicians Jimmy Van Eaton (drums), Ray Harris (guitar), Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich (piano) and Stan Kesler (steel guitar). Although Wages himself played guitar and piano, he only sang on the sessions. Wages' material from Sun was exclusively written by himself, which was probably why his songs were never released. Wages' bizarre, on the one hand by conservative moral ideas, on the other hand by then modern youth views, ambiguous texts were certainly not made for the charts and didn't correspond in any way to the contemporary pop songs. Jimmy Wages is commonly known as "The King of the Unissued" or as a "Mad Man". Wages' known Sun material is from 1956.