EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 4 - Rockabilly
Genre of the Day - Rockabilly
Album of the Day - Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n Roll Trio by Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n Roll Trio (1956)
We find ourselves back in the American 1950s for the first time in a long time on this column. It’s a bit surprising, really: when I think of the most lauded Western music decades, it always seems to be the ‘60s and ‘90s, but the ‘50s was where the real tectonic shifts of popular American music occurred, and rockabilly was a major player at the forefront of those musical revolutions. It’s a commonly enough known history, but in brief, in the first half of the 20th century, a variety of American folk genres existed side by side, but Black musicians married rhythm and blues with elements of blues, gospel, country, and swing music to create a jauntier sum of their parts, rock and roll. We all know what happened there: white singers became the poster boys and synonymous with a Black-spearheaded music genre. Rock and roll quickly grew into an entire industry, though.
Rockabilly, at least to white America, is perhaps the quintessential form of the genre in its nascent days. Elvis’ earlier recordings brought the genre to prominence, but across the south and spreading to the US as a whole (and to some insect-named devotees across the pond) the genre continued its hot streak throughout the 1950s—including a single that supposedly, although unverifiable, sold a staggering 25 million copies—and left a deep imprint on the sound and ethos of rock, continually idolized by subcultures especially in punk rock. Combining deep, rhythmic bass lines, twangy electric guitar, boogie-woogie piano, and impassioned vocals, rockabilly has a sound that is so distinctive that it is unmissable.
Johnny Burnette was a rockabilly pioneer—with a name like that, how could he not be? He came from the mecca of rock and roll, Memphis, and perhaps apocryphally went to high school with Elvis. The essence we often attribute to rock and roll was strong within him: he actually first attempted to become a professional boxer before taking that masculine sense of passion to music. Music clearly ran in his lineage, as despite his death at thirty years old, his musical life was prolonged by his son who also became a rockabilly star was past its heyday in the 1980s.
While the music here is nostalgic and fun to listen to with deeper inspection, for me it was Johnny Burnette’s voice that mainly piqued my interest. He has the perfect voice for rockabilly: commanding but crooning, expressive, capable of leaping and bounding and letting it all loose with a well timed scream (“All By Myself” and “Lonesome Train”). He elevates lyrical material that generally hinge around the same topics: a no-good woman and the ups and downs of love, although some songs are more evocative such as the narrative of a train fling on “The Train Kept A Rollin’” and “Your Baby Blue Eyes.” There’s plenty of rock history tidbits here—in fact, “The Train Kept A Rollin’” is the first use of distorted guitar in rock music, achieved through sheer accident. As much as rockabilly is iconic, it was also innovative and seized upon the energy and power high of the 1950s’ economic prosperity in a way few genres have since achieved so naturally.