What music comes to mind when you think of rock and roll’s earliest years? For many people, the answer is probably the sort of material that signaled a major break from the overly polished, sanitized pop that previously dominated the charts—manic, upbeat rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Elvis Presley’s “Hound […]
Singer/songwriter Buck Owens, who died in 2006, was the quintessential exponent of country music’s Bakersfield Sound, a rock-infused, back-to-basics style that burgeoned in the 1950s around Bakersfield, California. His music influenced countless artists, ranging from Dwight Yoakam, whose albums include Dwight Sings Buck, to the Beatles, who recorded a version of “Act Naturally,” Owens’s first […]
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That’ll Flat…Git It! Series Unearths More Vintage Rockabilly While the rockabilly genre owed debts to multiple earlier musical styles, it didn’t come to fruition until Sun Records released the first singles from Elvis Presley, whose pioneering work was followed by that of such labelmates as Carl Perkins. As Andrew Hickey notes in an episode of […]
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Ironically, it took a European record company to compile The Memphis Blues Box, one of the most impressive and essential collections of American music you’ll ever find. Still, I can’t think of a label more suited to the task than Germany’s Bear Family, which is world-famous for its gargantuan and definitive anthologies, such as the […]
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