Jimmy Van Eaton, Purveyor of the Sun Records Beat, Dies at 86

His drumming lent spontaneity and imagination to the unfettered sound of seminal rock ’n’ roll records by Jerry Lee Lewis and others.

By Bill Friskics-Warren
Feb. 21, 2024

Jimmy Van Eaton, who played drums on epoch-defining hits, including Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and lent spontaneity and imagination to the unfettered sound of the influential Memphis label Sun Records, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Tuscumbia, Ala. He was 86.

His daughter Terri Van Eaton Downing said the cause was complications of kidney disease.

Mr. Van Eaton’s impeccably deployed accents and fills were heard not just on Mr. Lewis’s recordings but also on popular singles by Charlie Rich (“Lonely Weekends”), Johnny Cash (“Guess Things Happen That Way”) and others. He toured with Roy Orbison and Conway Twitty and, as the de facto house drummer at Sun, played on “Raunchy,” the bluesy instrumental by the saxophonist Bill Justis that reached the Top 10 in 1957.

Mr. Van Eaton, who was sometimes billed as J.M., was a full-time musician only briefly, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and performed sporadically after that before settling into a career as a financial adviser. His influence, though, was abiding and deep — especially his momentous work with Mr. Lewis, which had an impact comparable to that of other groundbreaking rock ’n’ roll drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine.

“A lot of people try to copy” the sound of those Jerry Lee Lewis records, Mr. Van Eaton was quoted as saying in “Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll,” by Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins. But, he added, they can’t do it because what he played was “a shuffle with a backbeat” and not a straight 4/4 beat.

“I never could play that straight country shuffle,” Mr. Van Eaton continued. “Maybe for eight or 16 bars, but after that I start falling off the stool. I’ve got to concentrate, and when you concentrate, you lose the feeling.”

Feeling was paramount to Mr. Van Eaton’s drumming. His galloping accompaniment of Mr. Lewis was so unbridled at times that the tempo almost seemed to outrun the two men mid-session.

On “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Mr. Van Eaton accelerated the cadence between the first two stanzas, laying down a flurry of beats that created the impression of a locomotive picking up steam as it pulls out of the station. Likewise, his headlong rhythms on “Great Balls of Fire” — and especially on the aptly titled “Breathless” — threatened to overtake Mr. Lewis and his piano.

(Some sources have said that Mr. Van Eaton did not play on “Great Balls of Fire,” but experts like Mr. Escott and Hank Davis, an authority on the drummers at Sun, have insisted that he did.)

“The looseness and unpredictability of his drumming may sound out of place in the modern era when most drum tracks are derived from a computer sample repeated with mathematical precision,” Mr. Escott and Mr. Hawkins wrote of Mr. Van Eaton’s intuitive musicianship. “But the sound of surprise that he captured in his playing was the pulse of Sun Records.”

James Mack Van Eaton was born on Dec. 23, 1937, in Memphis, one of six children of Hobart and Annie Lou (Watson) Van Eaton. His father worked in a lumberyard; his mother ran the household.

Young Jimmy was captivated by big-band music and the Black gospel rhythms he heard at a church in Memphis growing up. He formed his first band, the Echoes, while in high school. The group recorded a demo that caught the ear of Jack Clement, a producer and engineer at Sun who was recruiting musicians for the band of the rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley.

Still in his teens, Mr. Van Eaton played on Mr. Riley’s best-known — and most incendiary — recordings for Sun, “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Red Hot,” both from 1957.

In 1960, Mr. Van Eaton left Sun to join Mr. Riley and the guitarist Roland Janes, both of whom were disenchanted with how Mr. Riley was being promoted, as the staff drummer at the newly formed Rita Records. Their biggest success came with the singer Harold Dorman’s 1960 Top 40 hit, “Mountain of Love.”

Mr. Van Eaton also released a single under his own name for Rita, an atmospheric, surf-style recording called “Beat-Nik,” also from 1960. By the middle of the decade, however, he had all but retired from the music business. He worked for his father-in-law’s vending machine company before establishing himself as an asset manager in the 1980s.

Mr. Van Eaton performed only occasionally over the ensuing decades, appearing at rockabilly reunion concerts and playing on the soundtrack of the 1989 movie “Great Balls of Fire!,” which starred Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis. (The singer Mojo Nixon, who died this month, played Mr. Van Eaton onscreen.) He also did periodic session work into the 2020s at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama. In 1998, he released “The Beat Goes On,” an album featuring his drumming, vocals and songwriting.

A longtime member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, he was also inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2022.

Besides his daughter Terri, Mr. Van Eaton is survived by his brother, Richard; another daughter, Anna Blumberg; two sons, Mack and Tim; a stepson, Alex Lebrija; 13 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

“There are a lot of influential people that nobody ever gets to hear about, like guitarist Roland Janes and also Jimmy Van Eaton, who was drummer on a lot of stuff,” Mr. Clement was quoted as saying in “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”

“The sound that became magic to a lot of people,” he added, “was partly due to him; it was so funky, but at the same time it captured the fun.”