Twisted Tales: Gospel Star David Walker Moonlights as R&B Screamer Bunker Hill

Posted on Jul 31st 2009 5:00PM by James Sullivan
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It's a question they were asking long before Thomas Edison was even born: Why should the devil have all the good music? There's plenty to go around, for Christians and heathens alike.

Case in point: the unsung career of the blistering singer David Walker, who sang for the Lord when he wasn't singing for the guitar devil Link Wray. As a young man, Walker, a Washington D.C. native, was a heavyweight contender who sparred with Archie Moore. In the late 1950s, he joined an L.A. gospel group called the Sensational Wonders, which soon morphed into the Mighty Clouds of Joy. Though the group's leader, Joe Ligon, was noted for his rough, barking vocal style, Walker's voice was something else entirely.

"This guy makes Little Richard sound like Pat Boone," comments one fan on YouTube, and that can't be argued. In the early '60s, Walker met up with another D.C. product, Link Wray, the master of menacing rock 'n' roll instrumentals, whose 1958 hit 'Rumble' was banned in several markets -- despite the fact that it had no lyrics.

Link Wray and his Ray Men, which included the guitarist's brothers Doug and Vernon, brought Walker into Vern's home studio, where they recorded several tracks together. Given the insinuations of the songs they cut -- 'Hide and Go Seek,' 'Red Riding Hood and the Wolf,' 'The Girl Can't Dance' -- the churchgoing Walker was reluctant to put his name on the records. The Wray brothers decided to give him an alter ego, considering the kooky alias Four H Stamp before settling for the slightly more plausible Bunker Hill.

As Bunker Hill, Walker released several singles with Mala Records, which would soon sign Wray. The first, the two-part 'Hide and Go Seek,' actually nudged its way into the Top 40. (Much later, it was covered by Joan Jett, and the song also appeared on the soundtrack to the John Waters film 'Hairspray.')

But it was the utterly unhinged 'The Girl Can't Dance' (recently reissued by retro rock 'n' roll label Norton Records) that truly secured the pseudonymous Hill's place in the dusty corners of rock history. Dave Walker's little taste of the big-time with Link Wray pulled him away from his churchly duties. "We begged him not to go," remembered Ligon, who went on to lead the long-running Mighty Clouds of Joy to mainstream success and the nickname "the Temptations of Gospel." Walker bounced in and out of the gospel group until the late '60s, then dropped out of sight.

"He had one big record, but it just didn't fit his lifestyle," said Ligon. Crate diggers are uncertain what became of the singer known as Bunker Hill after he left the music business. Whether or not his conversion was his downfall, if there's a rock 'n' roll heaven, he's welcome anytime.