Rockabilly, jump blues, hillbilly, classic rock'n'roll and scene culture.
In January 1957 Bill Haley headlined Lee Gordon's BIG SHOW in Australia, a company of twenty-two American performers. Eleven days after the last Sydney date he opened in London, in a Britain that had only recently begun letting American bands back in.
In January 1960 Duane Eddy toured Australia in Lee Gordon's All-American Rock Spectacular, billed below Crash Craddock. Eight weeks later he was second to Bobby Darin in British theatres, on a circuit whose halls Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were working the same season.
The Rock and Roll Trio's Coral records never reached the British chart. Six years later Johnny Burnette worked twenty-three consecutive nights across Britain, with four UK chart entries behind him and a fifth arriving ten days after the tour closed.
Irving Feld's Super Attractions moved a rock'n'roll company across the continent on an eighty-day schedule. Eddie Cochran joined it on 15 October 1957, during its sixth week on the road, and the trade press had printed his name weeks before he stepped on.
Two and a half years of stardom, three continents and one car on the A4. Eddie Cochran's touring life read through the paper that survives it: programmes, newspaper advertisements and the running order of the show he was playing when it ended.
A band from Anaheim that has treated pre-rock American music as a trade to be practised rather than a period to be revived, from a 1988 trio to a working catalogue thirty-eight years long.
Teenagers from Newport who started a band to play rock'n'roll while the dance halls belonged to the beat groups. Their own label, their own songbook, and fifty years on the road.
Discogs states that its Marketplace grades are the Goldmine Standard, and publishes the scale it uses. EX is not one of the grades on it.
Seventeen examples from Billboard and Cash Box between 1947 and 1956, ordered by publication date and limited to what those pages actually document.
What three bass players did, when it can be dated, and what the musicians who played beside them said it was for — including what cannot be dated, and the technique one of them named but did not describe.
Sam Phillips got his echo from tape. RCA got a different one from a tiled hallway, for Heartbreak Hotel, with the same guitarist in the room. Cosimo Matassa in New Orleans was solving other problems entirely.
On 20 June 1953 Billboard put a talent search on its front page: two records by women had sold, and the A&R men went looking for more. The continuation page names about twenty of them, label by label.
Billboard kept pop, R&B and country as separate charts through 1956. Its own pages show records, songs and performers appearing across more than one of them — and in November 1955 RCA Victor announced it would work Elvis Presley in all three fields at once.
In 1948 a Billboard chart headed Folk Records defined its contents as hillbilly records. On 25 June 1949 the rubric changed to country and Western while folk stayed in the heading — and stayed in the paper's columns and in record advertising for years after.
The records now grouped as jump blues were filed by Billboard as race records, and from 25 June 1949 as rhythm and blues. Ten editions of the trade press between 1946 and 1954 show the categories, the vocabulary and one connection that can be followed from one record to another.
In August 1954 Billboard reviewed Elvis Presley's first Sun single in its country section and described it as good for the country and the r&b markets. By June 1956 the same paper was calling records like it rockabilly. The trade press of those two years documents the change.
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