Notes

The following first appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

Let us sing the praises of the ladies of rockabilly!  Let us salute the party dolls and whistle bait who scandalized while they harmonized.  Let us lift a glass to the rock-bopping babies and the fujiyama mamas who moaned, hiccuped, howled and caterwauled, proving to a pre-feminist world that rock n’ roll was an equal opportunity embroiler. 

Rockabilly music is among the earliest mutations of rock n’ roll’s musical DNA.  Its guitar gallop provided a bridge between the rural cadences of western swing and the urban stomp of rhythm and blues.  Rockabilly stars like Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent are the titans of rock history, and just as in ancient Greece, it was from among their ranks that the first true rock god emerged.  But while history has heaped Elvis Presley and his rockabilly brethren with accolades, the distaff side of the rockabilly pantheon has been unjustly neglected.

Elvis may have been first to record blues composer Jessie Mae Robinson’s “Let’s Have a Party,” but surely it is Wanda Jackson’s scorching 1958 version — which finds Jackson’s rockabilly yelp supported by a knife-sharp lead guitar track by the then-unknown Roy Clark — that echoes in rock n’ roll Valhalla.  Jackson is probably the best-known lady of rockabilly and her “Fujiyama Mama” is a white-hot shot of rockabilly fever as torrid as any of Presley’s Sun Records classics.  Jackson eventually migrated from rockabilly to country and then to gospel, but recently returned to her hepcat roots with 2003’s HEART TROUBLE , which featured the 66-year-old singer backed up by Elvis Costello, the Cramps and Lee Rocker of the Stray Cats.

Another early female rockabilly star who has returned to the stage in recent years is Janis Martin.  Often labeled “the female Elvis” in the early days of her career (until an irate Colonel Tom Parker squashed the sobriquet), Martin’s RCA rockabilly singles like “Bang Bang” and “Drugstore Rock n’ Roll” — recorded between 1956 and 1960 — are revered by fans as some of the best rock records of their era.  Never as well-known to the public as Wanda Jackson, Martin left the music industry and spent years managing a country club in Danville, Virginia, until the rockabilly revival of the 1980s rekindled interest in her catalog, and in the 1990s she returned to performing and recording.