Stick around the Orange Beach waterfront long enough and you might hear an impossible sentence delivered with a completely straight face: “I was in the ORIGINAL Rolling Stones.”
The man saying it is William “Cuz” Covington, and he isn’t joking. Four years before the English Rolling Stones played their first gig, Covington was the bassist for an American band of the same name — five Mississippi State students who became a genuine regional rock ‘n’ roll sensation in the late 1950s, cut a record at the famous studios of Memphis and Nashville, and once drew a parade down Jackson’s Capitol Street to celebrate a single’s release.
He and his wife Debbi have made their home base in Orange Beach for the last four years, and Cuz is happy to relive the era for anyone with the time — with photos, recordings and newspaper clippings to back up every word.
A band name born of a bank robbery
The English Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song. Cuz’s band had a more colorful origin story.
“Our guitar player, ‘Little Joe’ Tubb, came up with that,” he says. “Some guys he knew had robbed a bank in Canton, Miss., and afterward they said, ‘We’re nothing but a bunch of Rolling Stones.’ They were students at Hinds Junior College and probably got drunk one night and decided to go rob a bank. They did go to prison for it.”
The name stuck. It was 1957, and the name — like the bank robbers — had a dangerous, rolling energy that fit the new music perfectly.
From a Mississippi State dorm room to the Legion Hut
Cuz grew up in Meridian, Mississippi, playing at informal get-togethers hosted by a songwriter who happened to be a cousin of country legend Jimmie Rodgers. At Mississippi State, he fell in with four other young musicians: Tubb on guitar, “Andy” Anderson on vocals, Roy Estes on piano and Bobby Lyons on drums.
“We all met at Mississippi State and started jamming together in a room at the Old Main dormitory,” he says. “It wasn’t just rock ‘n’ roll. We also played some country and some crooning music. Our first gig was a street dance on the campus of Mississippi State College for Women, in Columbus, Miss.”
The band’s act was built around Covington’s big, custom-painted upright bass. He would stand on its side, give it a spin, and play it behind his head — showmanship borrowed from none other than Elvis’s bassist Bill Black, with whom Cuz would soon share stages. Audiences across the Southeast had never seen anything like it.
Memphis, Nashville and half a million records
The band made the pilgrimage every Southern rock act made in the 1950s: Sun Studio in Memphis, the same room where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis were making history. Their breakthrough recording came later, at Owen Bradley’s celebrated studio in Nashville — a song called “Johnny Valentine.”
The single was recorded with harmonies by The Jordanaires, the vocal quartet that sang on many of Elvis’s biggest records. Released in January 1958, it sold an estimated half-million copies, most of them — remarkably — in England.
Back home, the band were heroes. “Our record came out in January of ’58,” Cuz remembers. “They had a parade down Capitol Street and the whole town turned out for it. I don’t think Elvis would have drawn a bigger crowd at that time. It was a big thing — it was the world premiere of our record.”
Sharing bills with the birth of rock ‘n’ roll
The touring years that followed put the original Stones in rooms with the architects of the music. They opened for Elvis’s band when it performed as The Scotty Moore Trio — Cuz even lent his bass and amp to Elvis’s bassist, Bill Black, for one show. He shared bills with Carl Perkins, Brenda Lee, Johnny Horton and Ferlin Husky.
“We started playing all around Mississippi at first, and then we started playing all around everywhere,” he says. “We played a lot in Jackson at the Legion Hut, and we played at the University of Alabama probably twice a month. We played some in Biloxi, too, but not a lot, and when the record came out we toured up north, doing shows in places like Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and Minnesota.”
He never met Presley, though their paths overlapped in age and geography. The band’s heyday lasted about five years — an era when a regional act could sell half a million records without a manager, a tour bus or a record label’s marketing department.
When the Englishmen took the name
By 1962, a young blues-obsessed band in London had adopted the same name, drawn from the same Muddy Waters catalog the Mississippi boys loved. The English version, of course, took it to a scale the original could never have imagined.
“We just kind of rolled with it,” Cuz says. “We were happy for them.”
There is no bitterness in the telling — just the matter-of-fact pride of a man who knows exactly where he was when the music was being invented. The original Stones’ story is preserved now in the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame, which inducted the band twelve years ago. All five members reunited to perform that night. Cuz calls it a crowning moment.
A life that kept rolling
After the band wound down, Covington built careers in several fields across Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, playing music on the side the whole way — right up until about 2020, when he and Debbi moved from Mobile to the Romar Beach area of Orange Beach and settled into a high-rise condominium with gulf views.
These days the stories come out over coffee and on neighborhood strolls: the bank robbers who named a band, the parade in Jackson, the borrowed bass, the Jordanaires harmonies, the half-million records that mostly went to England. “I’ve always been real pleased with what we accomplished, starting with nothing and not having too many big promoters pushing us,” he says. “We did it on our own. I’m happy with how far it went, especially with us having hardly any musical background when we first got together.”
On the Alabama coast, where every bar has a band and every band has a dream, it’s worth remembering that one of the true originals of rock ‘n’ roll lives quietly in Orange Beach — bass in hand, memories intact, and a claim that sounds like a punchline until you see the clippings.