Rockabilly is the earliest form of rock and roll as a distinct
style of music. It is a fusion of blues, hillbilly boogie, bluegrass music
and country music, and its origins lie in the American South. As Peter
Guralnick writes, "Its rhythm was nervously uptempo, accented on the
offbeat, and propelled by a distinctively slapping bass....The sound was
further bolstered by generous use of echo, a homemade technique refined
independently by Sam Phillips and Leonard Chess in Chicago with sewer pipes
and bathroom acoustics." While recording artists such as Bill Haley
were playing music that fused rhythm and blues, western swing and country
music in the early 1950s, and Tennessee Ernie Ford performed in a somewhat
similar style on songs such as "Smokey Mountain Boogie," they were
not playing rockabilly. As Nick Tosches writes, "By the early 1950s, it
was not uncommon to encounter simultaneous country and rhythm-and-blues
recordings of the same song." And he points out that the Delmore
Brothers and Hank Williams were performing, in the late 1940s, music that
could be called rock and roll. But rockabilly was a stripped-down version of
its various sources, and thus a specific stylistic moment in the evolution
of music that before had existed in many forms.
Bill Flagg was the first to name the music when he recorded for Tetra
Records in 1955 - 1956. His song "Go Cat Go" went into the
National Billboard charts in 1956. He is a member of the Rockabilly Hall Of
Fame.
Elvis Presley's 1954 Memphis sessions for Sam Phillips's Sun Records
produced arguably the first rockabilly recordings. "That's All
Right," first performed by Arthur Crudup, was a reworking of a blues
tune, done with overtones of country music. "Blue Moon of
Kentucky," by Bill Monroe, was a bluegrass standard, done with
overtones of blues.
During roughly the same period of time, a young singer/songwriter down in
Lubbock, Texas named Buddy Holly was busy taking elements of various musical
styles (blues, country, gospel, south of the border, etc...) and melding
them into what later became the "Tex-Mex" sound. Holly's
pioneering efforts are legendary, and the rockabilly sound was a strong
element in much of his work.
Carl Perkins, who also recorded for Sun, is another performer whose
recordings helped to define the genre. "Blue Suede Shoes", written
by Carl, is considered a classic of the style. The early recordings of Jerry
Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Dale Hawkins, Charlie Feathers, Hasil Adkins, Gene
Vincent, Billy Lee Riley and Roy Orbison are also considered essential,
although Cash, Vincent, Lewis and Orbison each went on to perform in other
styles. Eddie Cochran and Ricky Nelson also are considered rockabilly
performers; they were not, however, from the South, although Nelson's
guitarist, James Burton, grew up in Shreveport.
Although the influence of rockabilly, both as a musical style and as a
set of attitudes and gestures, has never waned, Holly's death in a plane
crash in 1959 tended to mark the end of the classic rockabilly era. In the
1980s, The Stray Cats led a brief revival of interest in rockabilly, while
another revival followed in the 1990s with bands like High Noon, Big Sandy
and the Fly-Rite Boys, the Dave and Deke Combo, The Racketeers, and many
others. And bands like The Cramps, Tav Falco's Panther Burns, Reverend
Horton Heat, Southern Culture on the Skids, and more recently The Meteors
merged the music with Punk rock/Horror, forming a distinct sub-genre
referred to as psychobilly. Dire Straits did a rockabilly track, The Bug, on
their 1991 album On Every Street.
Guralnick writes, "Rockabilly is the purest of all rock 'n' roll
genres. That is because it never went anywhere. It is preserved in perfect
isolation within an indistinct time period....".
In 1997, the Rockabilly Hall of Fame was founded by Bob Timmers to
present early rock and roll history and information relative to the artists
and personalities involved in this pioneering American music genre.
