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Rockabilly

Boone County, West Virginia

Hasil Adkins

Hasil Adkins was born in 1937 in Boone County, West Virginia, the youngest of ten children of a coal miner, and he lived there all his life. He played as a one-man band, guitar in his hands and drums under his feet, and from the mid-1950s he recorded at home near Madison on whatever gear he had. Asked about the rough sound, he said he just had bad microphones. Chickens come up a lot in his lyrics. He mailed his records to the White House, and Nixon wrote back in 1970. The Cramps were fans, and Norton Records, a label started partly because of him, put out a run of albums from 1986. He died at home in April 2005, eleven days after a teenager on an ATV ran him over in his yard.

Detroit, Wang Head, 1987

Elvis Hitler

Elvis Hitler was a Detroit band led by singer Jim Leedy, who went by the band's name himself, a crude mash of Presley and the dictator. They played rockabilly at punk speed with lowbrow jokes and called it metalbilly. Old horror films on TV fed a lot of the material. The debut came out on the local Wang Head label in 1987, with early copies in handmade corrugated cardboard sleeves, and Restless reissued it the next year. College radio took to them, and the Detroit Free Press called them the Ramones of rockabilly. Two more albums followed on Restless, in 1989 and 1992. Bassist Warren Defever later led His Name Is Alive. Objections to the name led them to record as Splatter in the mid-1990s.

Holly Springs to Memphis

Charlie Feathers

Charlie Feathers was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1932. He started out as a session player at Sun Studio in Memphis and recorded for Sam Phillips's small Flip label and then for Sun itself, though Phillips never rated him much. His wildest records came after he moved to Meteor and then King, sung with a hiccuping, theatrical style that Lux Interior of the Cramps later took on. The hits never came, and he blamed a conspiracy. He studied with the bluesman Junior Kimbrough. In the mid-1980s he shared bills at Memphis clubs with Tav Falco's Panther Burns, and his son Bubba played guitar on his later New Rose albums. He died in Memphis in 1998.

Oklahoma City to Capitol, 1956

Wanda Jackson

Wanda Jackson was born in Maud, Oklahoma, in 1937 and had her own country radio spot in Oklahoma City as a teenager when Hank Thompson heard her. He got her onto Decca in 1954, after Capitol's Ken Nelson had turned her down with the line that girls don't sell records. At the Grand Ole Opry in 1955, Ernest Tubb made her cover her dress with a fringe jacket, and she decided the Opry wasn't for her. That year she toured with Elvis Presley, with her father driving and chaperoning. Presley played her R&B records and talked her into rock and roll. He also gave her a ring. When Capitol signed her in 1956, Nelson let her record rockers next to the country sides, some of them her own. Her mother made the stage dresses.

New York, ZE, 1980

Alan Vega

Alan Vega was born Alan Bermowitz in New York in 1938. He was a painter and light sculptor before he formed Suicide with Martin Rev around 1970. His first solo album, out on ZE in 1980, traded Suicide's electronic drone for stripped-down rockabilly, driven by his love of Elvis Presley. He produced it himself at Skyline Studio in New York, building the drum parts one at a time, and brought in a young Texan guitarist, Phil Hawk, whom he called a blonde Elvis. NME put it in its albums of the year for 1981. Collision Drive, made in the same studio, swapped the drum machines for a live drummer and a harder band. By 1990 he was back to minimal electronics. He died in his sleep in New York in July 2016.

Sacramento to Memphis

The Cramps

Lux Interior and Poison Ivy met in Sacramento in 1972 and bonded over collecting records. After a spell in Lux's hometown of Akron, Ohio, they moved to New York and started the Cramps in 1976. Forgotten rockabilly by people like Jerry Lott and Hasil Adkins shaped the sound, with Link Wray close behind. Early flyers said psychobilly, which they later called carnival-barker talk, and they kept clear of the scene that took the word. In 1979 they recorded their first album in Memphis at Sam Phillips's studio, with Alex Chilton producing. Ivy called rockabilly blues music and the Cramps a blues band. Fans later traded a long-running series called Lux and Ivy's Favorites, built from records the pair named in interviews.

Shady Grove to Palm Springs

Jody Reynolds

Jody Reynolds was born in Denver in 1932 and grew up in Shady Grove, Oklahoma, where western swing on the radio got him playing guitar at fourteen. By the mid-1950s he was playing rockabilly in Texas, with Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins as models. In San Diego the publisher Herb Montei signed him to Demon Records. His band, the Storms, put out instrumentals under their own name. Colonel Tom Parker took him on as a writer for his publishing company, but Presley never recorded any of his songs. By the mid-1960s Reynolds had settled in Palm Springs. He sold real estate and ran a music store there, still recording at home. He got a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in 1999 and died in Palm Desert in 2008.

The Collection