Recommended if you like: Duane Eddy, Sanford Clark, Link Wray, Johnny Cash.

Why you should care: Flashback to hopping your first train, drag racing your nemesis, and rolling a pack of Lucky Strikes in your sleeve.
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Jim Kirchstein's Cuca Records was tucked deep into the wilds of Wisconsin’s Dairyland. After launching in 1959 and reissuing Willie Tremain & The Thunderbirds’ “Midnight Express” in August of that year, the label’s first new product arrived in the first month of the new decade. In 1960 The Fendermen bopped up Jimmy Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 8” and turned it into “Mule Skinner Blues.” Their name homage to their preferred guitar, The Fendermen were Jim Sundquist and Phil Humphrey. “We had a trunk full of Cuca records and nobody would buy them,” Sundquist said. Their big break came when Lindy Shannon at La Crosse’s WKBH caught them playing between screenings at the local movie theater. “He got us on a Cavalcade of Stars-type of show and when we did ‘Mule Skinner Blues’ it brought the house down. He said, ‘Gosh, you guys ought to cut that thing. That’d be a hit!’ I said, ‘We already have—here, have a box.” Within a few months the record was screeching up the Billboard Hot 100 as a result of Cuca upstreaming the record to Amos Heilicher’s Minneapolis-based Soma Records, where it reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but generated no royalties for the band. The band tracked an album’s worth of material, but the release was delayed due to an ongoing lawsuit between Cuca and Soma. By the end of the year the duo were badly frayed. “The last time I saw Phil Humphrey we were flipping a coin to see who was going to buy the turkey dinner as we said goodbye,” recalled Sundquist. “I wished him luck and he wished me luck. We sat down and had a turkey dinner together and a couple of drinks. Then he went his way and I went mine.”