Rockabilly music maintains a level of darkness as a genre. For those of us who love rockabilly and listen to a lot of rockabilly songs, it’s easy to forget that many people don’t even know what rockabilly is. So while one could legitimately argue that rockabilly itself is dark, there is another level of darkness that is even deeper. That darkness, those dark artists and their recordings, has an immense treasure for the rockabilly music lover.
As with any musical genre, rockabilly has its royalty. Of course, there is the King, Elvis, along with Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others who have found varying degrees of fame and fortune. The music these cats made defines rockabilly history and for anyone new to the genre, well, you can’t go wrong with these names. Listening to their music will give you a great education in the rockabilly tradition.
But once you’ve become familiar with these guys and start scratching past the surface, that’s when you really start to discover the untold riches that lie beneath the surface. First you come across names like Wanda Jackson, the Queen of Rockabilly and some of her fantastic rockabilly recordings. That whets your appetite for more feminine rockabilly and you’ll soon discover Janis Martin, the Collins Kids (with Larry and Lorrie Collins), Rose Maddox and Sparkle Moore.
Then when you realize there was a lot more to the rockabilly genre than you thought, you dig even deeper. There you will find names like Jack Scott, Glen Glenn, Sleepy LaBeef, and Billy Lee Riley. Learn about Sun Records and discover without surprise that Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, and Charlie Rich all started in the same place as Elvis and begin to realize the influence that this small Memphis record label not only had on the rock and roll world, but also modern country music.
Now you are really interested. Further investigation uncovers names like Earsel Hickey, Groovy Joe Poovey, Charlie Feathers, Warren Smith, Joe Bennett, and the Sparklethons, and many, many more. It’s not long before you start to realize that what you first knew about rockabilly wasn’t even close to the full puzzle. Perhaps those more famous names form the big pieces of that puzzle. But you realize that just with those big names and their most famous recordings, you have hundreds of little holes in the picture.
It is those names and the recordings that begin to appear in the mist of darkness that really begin to complete the picture. There is no doubt for anyone who loves the rockabilly genre that this music is fun. But like any good puzzle, real fun comes with discovery. Each new piece you discover, each one you put in its proper place, gives you a more vivid understanding of the whole story. And what a rich history this rockabilly story is!
So what new pieces of the puzzle have you discovered lately? If you’ve already discovered all the names I’ve left here, try Paul Louise, Mr. Mack, Sonny Sheater, Coye Wilcox, Norm Sharkey, Hugh Lewis, Bill Thomas, Ebe Sneezer And His Epidemics …