For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.
Quotes about rockabilly (16 Quotes)
I didn't like the '50s, you know. I appreciate Elvis, but I'm not a big fan. I'm not a rockabilly fan. And the '60s and early '70s were, to me, the greatest times to live.
We weren't afraid to mix some crazy styles into the standard rockabilly look. We also took a lot of different musical influences that were part of that era.
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
That was a fluke. I'd recorded a lot of stuff for this record. I worked on it over a year. Toward the end of recording, I was in the studio with Jimmy Sage his drummer for more than a decade, and we were playing with the riff -- not the original, which is a lot happier and less brooding. He was trying some different drumbeats. It was just one of those things that popped into my head in a minor key. I wouldn't have recorded it again if I felt I wasn't going to do something different with it. The album is not a rockabilly revival or '50s music. ... My music is not a museum piece in that you've got to do this way or that way.
I never really did rockabilly exactly like they did it in the '50s, ... We always kind of updated it. But I didn't need to go blasting crazy, wild guitar solos around this stuff. I tried to keep it authentic.
Kristofferson, who actually knew a great deal of the legends examined in the documentary, was thrilled to be a part of the project. Jerry sent me a copy of the documentary while I was on tour in Australia and New Zealand, ... I settled in and watched the entire thing, and I was captivated. It brought back a lot of good memories of a lot of good friends like Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Cowboy Jack Clement, Carl Perkins and Charlie Rich. I also learned a few things along the way. The Rockabilly Legends influenced so many of the artists in rock and roll and country who followed, and rockabilly music is a key part of our American musical heritage. I'm happy Jerry Naylor invited me to help preserve the rich rockabilly legacy.
Rockabilly is really part of our background, ... It's a cousin to the blues and country. And it's that important.
The big thing that I wanted to do was touch on the very start of rock and roll, I loved this moment in rockabilly music. I loved the idea of people making music because they loved music and not because they saw the video or how to market themselves. A very big point for me in this movie is that John didn't arrive at Sun as the man in black. He didn't already know his marketing angle. He didn't have it worked out. He was just trying to be heard and however that would work or not work was fine, but he just needed to be heard. What was magic to me about that moment in time was that it was a moment before the term 'rock and roll star' existed.
I'm not God's gift to rockabilly. There's great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they've gotten.
I called it Rockabilly 'cause I was rocking the strums, which you're not supposed to do.
I didn't say I wasn't gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain't gonna sing no song that ain't a country song. I won't be known as anything but a country singer.
I wanted to keep it authentic, ... I even went as far as copying the original drum parts. I felt that was an overlooked part of those recordings. Now when people play rockabilly they ignore the little fills and tricks they used.
Those drum parts were so integral to that original rockabilly. People don't play that anymore. A lot of those original drum fills were kept.
I didn't realize how many true Rockabilly fans there were here in America.
That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was.