New box set explores Virginia's role in Rockabilly

By David Maurer
Media General News Service
Published: July 22, 2009

In the early 1950s the pounding, driving wheels of a new kind of music came highballing up out of the South like a past-due locomotive.

Called rock ’n’ roll, it had the transformative power to alter one’s musical sensibilities with a single song. But rock had an older twin with a flipped-up-collar attitude and a good-natured sneer.

This first-born rebel was called rockabilly. Its blistering, slap-back beat set primal nerve endings aquiver that most teenagers hadn’t known they possessed.

No one did more to teach and spread rockabilly throughout the land than the “Hillbilly Cat” himself, Elvis Presley. Other superstars of the genre include Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Virginia’s own Gene Vincent.

Orbiting this galaxy of rock’s founding fathers was a phalanx of talented singers and musicians. These satellite artists provided live music at local sock hops and maybe cut a record or two, but never ascended onto the national stage.

Rambunctious rockabilly never died per se, but by the early 1960s, when the Beatles started taking rock to another sphere, its golden era had passed. Most of the Virginia artists whose early rockabilly recordings epitomized the raw exuberance of the music slipped into obscurity.

As the years went by, some of the best rockabilly music ever cut into wax was coming dangerously close to being lost to the ages. Then a fateful moment occurred thousands of miles from the Old Dominion.

“In 1988, we had been doing some consulting work in Northern Ireland,” said Roddy Moore, director of the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum of Ferrum College, which is the state’s center for folklore and folklife. “Coming back, we were in London, and I was going through albums in a record store.

“All of a sudden here pops up an album titled ‘Rockabilly and Country Music from Patrick and Henry County, Virginia.’ I thought, ‘Well, if these people here recognize this, we need to do some work at home.’

“This was music I knew something about, because it was the music I grew up with. And I had been wondering for years what had happened to all the bands from the ’50s and early ’60s that played at the local dances.

“When I got home I started looking into it, and that’s how this whole thing got started.”

What fate started in the London record store recently culminated in the release of a 2-CD box set titled “Virginia Rocks! The History of Rockabilly in the Commonwealth.” The set includes more than 60 songs that draw their pulsing-with-life energy directly from the pure, unadulterated fountainhead of early rockabilly.

Christopher C. King co-produced the set with Moore and also remastered the songs from the original records, many of which are extremely rare. The records couldn’t have been put in better hands.

In 2003, the remastering engineer and production coordinator for Rebel Records and County Records won a Grammy for his work on the seven-CD box set “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.” He has been nominated for Grammies several more times for his work on other CD sets celebrating musicians such as Ernest Stoneman and Charlie Poole.

King said he initially was reluctant to get involved in the rockabilly project because his expertise is with the music that predates it by decades. He ultimately agreed to take on the work to honor his late father, Les King.

“My dad had recorded and played with a lot of these rockabilly guys, most famously with Buddy Holly for a brief period of time,” said King, who lives with his family in Faber.

“More importantly, my dad was a disc jockey during this time period, playing early rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly out of WKEY Radio in Covington.

“I inherited his 45 records and the songs he was recorded on. When I was asked if they could use some of my dad’s material, I said of course.

“I gave it to Brent Hoiser, who, with Don Harrison, wrote the liner notes for the set. He came back and said the stuff was fabulous, and they ended up including three tracks that my dad played either piano or bass on.

“The best part of all this for me was seeing the look on my mom’s face when I gave her a copy of the set. I told her to turn to a certain page in the booklet, and she saw a big picture of my dad in front of the WKEY microphone.”

The project was funded with support from the Virginia Foundation of the Humanities and includes a large exhibit in the institute’s museum. The exhibit has many rarities, such as Link Wray’s guitar — the one on which he played the instrumental hit “Rumble,” which sold 4 million copies and is included on the CD set.

There’s also the cap, jacket and shirt worn by one of Vincent’s band members, who were call the Blue Caps. Other treasured pieces of rockabilly history in the exhibit are the two turntables and reel-to-reel tape-recording machine from the Fernwood Farms studio in South Norfolk (now Chesapeake) that recorded many of Virginia’s rockabilly artists.

Today, if you asked three people what they think rockabilly is, you might get a dozen different answers. Virginia rockabilly sensation Janis Martin, who was billed in the ’50s as the “female Elvis,” put it this way in 2001.

“What happened was, back in the late ’40s, you only had big-band music — Rosemary Clooney and Patti Page — and then you had hillbilly music on the country side — Hank Snow, Hank Williams,” said Martin, who continued to rock audiences out of their seats nearly up to the time she succumbed to cancer in 2007.

“Then you had the black artists on a label called Atlantic. So really, how rockabilly came about, it was country music singers that discovered the black rhythm and blues music, and they incorporated it into hillbilly music and rocked it up. Rockabilly.”

The CD set includes two of Martin’s hit songs, “Drugstore Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Let’s Elope, Baby.”

It also includes the 1959 tribute song to her by the group Rock-A-Teens, “Janis Will Rock.”

King said a lot of people say what defines rockabilly is the measure of syncopation, while others say it’s the instrumentation of bass, drums and electric guitars. He thinks that leaves out the most important ingredient in the alchemy that brings it to radiant life.

“I think it’s actually the spirit in which the music is performed,” King said. “There’s definitely a huge amount of adolescent angst involved, and that’s what I think differentiates this music from pop music of the ’50s.

“It’s like Patti Page with a horrible attitude. Janis Martin and Gene Vincent are probably the two best examples that show these are basically kids, surrounded by kids.

“Another example is the Collins Kids, who were both under 12 when they recorded, but they were doing hardcore rockabilly. Larry Collins was playing a guitar bigger than he was.”

Legendary Virginia singer Patsy Cline dabbled in rockabilly, as did Roy Clark and Wayne Newton. Songs by them are included in the set, but with these few exceptions, this is a tribute to obscure Virginia artists who could rock it up with the best of them.

“I think the real importance of this project is the recognition and acknowledgement it gives to people from communities throughout Virginia who started out by imitating the music, and then went on to create their own,” Moore said.

“I think the role the local bands played was an important one, because they were playing the music people wanted to hear. There’s a band from the Lynchburg area called the Dazzlers.

“They played at dance parties and made a record. They’re all still alive and still playing together. Back 50 years ago they were pretty athletic on stage, but like one of them recently said, ‘Hell, at 300 pounds it’s hard to get that guitar over my head any more.’ ”

The 2-CD set “Virginia Rocks! The History of Rockabilly in the Commonwealth” costs $22.50 and is available at http://www.countysales.com or by calling (540) 745-2001.

The exhibit at Ferrum College will be up through next spring and then will move to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.