Lew Williams (US)

1934 – 2019 In memoriam

American rockabilly singer and songwriter, born in Chillicothe, Texas in 1934 and raised in Dallas, and one of the odder stylists of the first rockabilly wave: the writer Bill Millar called him 'the Cab Calloway of rockabilly' for the jazz phrasing and the jivey, crooked lyrics he brought to it. He was a regular on WFAA's Saturday Night Shindig, broadcast live each week from the Texas State Fairgrounds in Dallas, appeared on the Big 'D' Jamboree and toured with Sonny James. A 1953 single for Flair went nowhere. Imperial's Lew Chudd took 'Cat Talk' for publishing, then signed him as an artist in 1955, and across 1956 and 1957 issued 'Cat Talk', 'Bop Bop Ba Doo Bop', 'Something I Said', 'Abracadabra' and 'Centipede'. None of them sold. A last single came out under the pseudonym Vik Wayne, and he gave up trying to make a living from records in 1959 and left music altogether by the mid-1960s, working in publishing, marketing and events. Bear Family's reissues in the 1990s made his name in Europe and Japan and brought him back: he headlined the third Viva Las Vegas weekend in April 2000, aged 66, and worked the weekender circuit on both sides of the Atlantic for most of the next two decades. He died in Winnsboro, Texas on 1 September 2019, aged 85.