[2] As a high schooler, Trammell played country music, and when Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash toured in Trammell's area in the middle of the 1950s, Perkins invited him to sing a song and told him to talk to Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records.
Lefty Frizzell, who was in attendance at the fair, asked him to open for a show at the Jubilee Ballroom, a venue in Baldwin Park, California.
[1] Trammell soon was performing there regularly, and won a reputation for Elvis Presley-like spastic gyrations and wildness on stage that occasionally caused controversy.
[2] Manager/record label owner Fabor Robison signed Trammell to a contract, and he released his first single, containing the self-penned tunes "Shirley Lee" and "I Sure Do Love You, Baby".
He staged a protest on the top of a broadcast tower in Los Angeles, against a radio station's refusal to play his record, but when the structure began to collapse, he had to be rescued by local authorities, and was barred from performing in the state.
However, at the Rockhouse festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, he tried to jump onto his piano but fell, breaking his wrist in the process.