Books
“Rockabilly changed my life,” says Jerry Naylor in his book The Rockabilly Legends: They Called It Rockabilly Long Before They Called It Rock and Roll, co-written with Steve Halliday (Hal Leonard, 285 pp., $35). “I was only fifteen years old when an untamed force unlike anything I had ever experienced permanently altered the direction of my professional career.” It was rockabilly, and in 1954 it was a new kind of sound, a mixture of a “fat rhythm guitar; the electrifying magnetism of a gutsy, rhythmic lead guitar; the blistering slap of an upright bass fiddle; plus all of these elements swimming in a man-made lake of ‘tape-delay’ echo.” The book is an enthusiastic (to say the least) telling of a genre, its stars, and its subsequent (and lasting) influence on American music.
Rockabilly Writer Jerry Naylor
Profiles of artists include such well-known performers as Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash but also the less chronicled performers like Gene Vincent, Johnny Horton and Charlie Rich. Exclamation marks are a common sight within the text. Of rockabilly itself, Naylor heaps on the expected high praise: “The explosive musical originality that rocked those years continues to exert a tremendous influence today; just listen to almost every contemporary rock and roll, pop, or country music artist. Within their music, fifties rockabilly still lives!”
Naylor is himself a musician, songwriter and singer who began performing at age 15. Following the death of Buddy Holly in 1959, he became the lead singer of the Crickets. Appearing intermittently alongside the book’s more traditional straight telling of rockabilly is his first-person account of that time. Though the inclusion of his story at times feels intrusive—mostly because it breaks up the narrative and occurs with little contextual explanation—his part in the story is truly historic. The book he’s compiled is a deft mixture of vintage photographs, highlighted text and retro-tinged graphic design, its look as colorful and distinctive as the music it describes. Included is a specially made DVD, and unlike the documentary The Rockabilly Legends: A Tribute to My Friends upon which it’s based, this one is hosted by Kris Kristofferson and features performance footage not shown in the original. Both book and DVD are worth a look.
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