Rockabilly Radio

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There was time when you could turn on your radio and without ever changing stations you would hear:

Rock and Roll

Little Richard: "Good Golly Miss Molly"      Bill Haley: "Rock Around The Clock"      Chuck Berry: "Maybelline"

Country Rock

Marty Robbins: "A White Sport Coat"      Sanford Clark: "The Fool"      Jody Reynolds: "Endless Sleep"

Waltzes

Les Paul and Mary Ford: "Vaya Con Dios"      Patti Page: "Tennessee Waltz"      Snooky Lanson: "It's Almost Tomorrow"
And it was all Top Forty.

Rockabilly Charts

And here is what was cool (though we weren't using that word yet):

This was such a mix of music that our parents would be listening to something like "Suddenly There's A Valley, where peace and love begins", and the next drop of the needle on vinyl would be "Whao! you sure like to ball", and we didn't know what that meant, either!

We didn't like to ball, we had a ball, as in have fun.

Other things we did not know was "a one-eyed cat peeking in a seafood store" and what "Rock and Roll" really meant.

We were not hip. There was no such word.

There were hep cats, and you can still hear that used on some of the early rockabilly records - like Carl Perkins - but they were a left-over from the jazz age and the beatniks.

It was a new world and a new era and the radio took us and showed us.

Home E-mail: Mike smith