There's another group[ Brian Setzer has fronted, called the Nashvillians. I have one of their (live) CD's, and they're pretty good.

My absolute all time favorite rockabilly song is the Sun Records issue of Boppin' the Blues by Carl Perkins. I saw him live around 25 years ago and he blew my mind.



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Another classic is Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues. I love the guys who hand clap along with his songs. I wonder if hand clappers had a lot of groupies back in the good old days.



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File under sexually repressed teenagers. Check out this wild & wooly rendition of The Train Kept-A-Rollin' by Johnny Burnette. This film segment was condemned by the Legion of Decency in the 1950s for "suggestive costumes" and "lust inducing dancing."

I guess this could be considered Rockabilly:

A great song that I've sung hundreds of times over the past 35+ years.

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This is great because it's live and real. Those Town Hall Party films are such a treasure.

Gene Vincent also had a couple of Blue Caps whose role seemed to be mostly to clap along and hoot and holler. One of them, Tommy Facenda, had a hit later with "High School U.S.A." (actually, 28 hits, since he cut custom versions for high schools in cities across the country).



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This, on the other hand, is a fake job. The song the Rock and Roll Trio is actually performing here (from a movie) is "Lonesome Train on a Lonesome Track." Someone has edited in a whole lot of dance footage from another source and then just played the studio recording of "The Train Kept a-Rollin'" over it. (You notice that the Trio is shown primarily when no singing is going on, and Paul Burlison's guitar playing doesn't match what is heard — all the more poignant in that Burlison isn't playing on the record either, Grady Martin is!)

Fun to watch, but not exactly an accurate historical document.

I heard Imelda May's music for the first time this month and enjoy three of her songs very much. I like her rich, warm voice, her sometimes quirky and humorous lyrics, and the upbeat rockabilly sound with admirable performances by the musicians:

Imelda May - "It's Good To Be Alive"
Cute video!


Imelda May - "Inside Out"
Seductive yet amusing. I don't know what loving someone "like a hobo" entails, and it doesn't sound altogether desirable to me, but it is odd, so the line sticks in my mind.


Imelda May - "Mayhem"
A solid song with great energy. This song makes me want to learn how to play the trumpet.

What, no love for Wanda Jackson?

I'm more a psychobilly / punkobilly / hellbilly fan myself but do tend enjoy a bit of rockabilly as well.

Glad I found this thread! Rockabilly doesn get nearly enough attention as a genre. I stumbled across these Finnish guys on accident when I was listening to the Collins Kids...

Another fun one from a different Scandinavian group:

^ Those are both great songs by Whistle Bait and the Go Getters. I especially liked "Junkyard Dog" by the Go Getters. I didn't realize rockabilly was popular in Scandinavia.

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My current favorite rockabilly musician is Lance Lipinsky, a great pianist and singer (and guitarist) who plays and sings with incredible ease, charisma, and humor. He's a phenomenal performer.

We saw Lance Lipinsky performing as Jerry Lee Lewis earlier this month in the musical "Million Dollar Quartet" in Chicago, where he has played the role for 5 1/2 years with his final performance in just a few days. I'm glad we saw him while we could!

His own band is called "Lance Lipinsky and the Lovers," with which he plays oldies and his own songs.

Lance Lipinsky - Live in Canada
Here he is playing mostly Jerry Lee Lewis songs in a great performance. He looks like he really loves what he does and his enthusiasm is contagious!



Lance's website offers a thorough and fascinating biography with darling footage from his childhood musical endeavors: lovers

While growing up, Lance didn't know about the rockabilly subculture that has been alive and well, apparently, all these years since the 1950s and '60s, so once he discovered it, he must have been elated to have found his musical home.

Quoting from his bio: "What made this new discovery of the Rockabilly sub culture even more exciting was that the community was made up of predominantly younger people. This wasn't the same audience of old timers in a smokey casino that Lance was use to. This was a real, critical music scene full of younger people, an almost secret society of new fans of an art form thought to be extinct."

Here are some more good quotes from the bio: