Rockabilly

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.

External links

• Enviken Records, a Swedish Rockabilly label
• Rockabilly Hall Of Fame
• The Rockabilly Guitar Page - How to get a good rockabilly guitar sound, by The Jime's Vince Gordon (also links to his instructional ebook)
• RockAbilly.US showband
• http://www.geocities.com/alvieself/index.html (ALVIE SELF)
• The Heavy Rebel Weekender
• Boz Boorer

Rockabilly Doghouse bass page. Shows bass players from many different current rockabilly bands

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• Rockabilly Bass page