Rockabilly in Print: From Country and R&B to a New Label, 1954-1956

Rockabilly in Print: From Country and R&B to a New Label, 1954-1956

The records came before the word. In 1954 and again at the start of 1956, the American trade press described the records now filed under rockabilly using the categories it already had: country on one side, rhythm and blues on the other. By the summer of 1956 the same papers had a new word for them.

What follows is that change, read in the papers that made it.

August 1954: a record between two markets

On 7 August 1954, Billboard ran a short review in its Country & Western Records section:

ELVIS PRESLEY — That's All Right (Wabash, BMI) / Blue Moon of Kentucky (Peer, BMI) — Sun 209. `Presley is a potent new chanter who can sock over a tune for either the country or the r. & b. markets. On this new disk he comes thru with a solid performance on an r. & b.-type tune and then on the flip side does another fine job with a country ditty. A strong new talent.`

Four sentences, and the whole problem is in them. The reviewer heard the two sides pulling in different directions, said so precisely, and filed the record under country. What the review does not contain is the word `rockabilly`.

Two pages later in the same issue, a trade note: `Sun Records has signed singer Elvis Presley and is going on an all out drive on his recording of "That's All Right."` That records the label pushing the record that week. It does not date its release.

Late 1955: still in the country listings

By December 1955, the classification was still visible. In Billboard of the 3rd, sixteen months after the first review, Elvis Presley is still in the country and western listings: `MYSTERY TRAIN (BMI) — Sun 223`.

That December listing gives another snapshot of the vocabulary still in use before the 1956 examples below.

January 1956: the same treatment, a different artist

21 January 1956, Billboard, Country & Western again:

CARL PERKINS — Blue Suede Shoes — Sun 234. `Perkins contributes a lively reading on a gay rhythm ditty with strong r. & b. styled backing. Fine for the jukes.` Of the flip side, Honey, Don't: `Same comment.`

Same construction as 1954, a year and a half later: a country release described by pointing at rhythm and blues. Still no new word.

June 1956: the same record, another name

Five months after that review, in the issue of 23 June 1956, Billboard ran a column on the rhythm and blues best-seller listing:

`The phenomenom of the charts, of course, is the presence of three rockabilly platters on the r. & b. list — two by Elvis Presley and one by Carl Perkins. Prior to "Blue Suede Shoes," no country artist ever showed here. And prior to Presley, Victor was a stranger to the r. & b. charts for a long, long time.`

The three records are on the page: Heartbreak Hotel at seven, Blue Suede Shoes at ten, and Presley's My Baby Left Me on Victor 20-6540.

So the same paper, five months apart: in January `a gay rhythm ditty with strong r. & b. styled backing`, in June `rockabilly`. Nothing about the record had changed. What changed in Billboard's language was the label it used for the same Perkins record.

The word appears elsewhere in that same issue, in a record review, with no gloss and no quotation marks: a `rockabilly warbler with good beat`.

July 1956: a word that needed no introduction

Cash Box printed its Fourteenth Annual Year Book on 28 July 1956. Its editorial looked back over the year and, in passing, marked the term as already settled:

`This is the year that the r & b artist, and the country artist with what has become known as rock-a-billy music, moved out from the status of launching platform from which a pop star could cover and ascend the charts with a national pop hit, and took the play away from the pop artist.`

The phrase itself marks `rock-a-billy` as a name already in circulation.

In the same issue the word has stopped describing only records and started describing people. A New York column notes a new release: `Also just released is "Go Cat Go" by rock-a-billy Bill Flagg.` And a review of a Presley single calls him, without further explanation, `the best selling rock-a-billy`.

Billboard used it the same way a month later, on 25 August 1956, reporting the same label's signings: `Talent signed … for Tetra includes a rock and roll group, the Neons, and a rockabilly singer, Bill Flagg.`

Autumn 1956: critical shorthand

By October the word is doing routine work in the review columns. Billboard of 20 October 1956, on two Sun releases:

• Roy Orbison, Sun 251 — `Orbison displays vocal sock showmanship on "You're My Baby," a fast country blues with a strong rockabilly beat. Flip, another good rockabilly rhythm side.`
• Ray Harris, Sun 254 — of one side, `Typical rockabilly backing`; of the other, Come On Little Mama, `Solid country blues, rockabilly style. Harris' vocal is backed by typical Sun back shack instrumental arrangement.`

Four months after the earliest use located in this archive, the word describes a beat, a backing and a style, and a reviewer can pair it with `country blues` in the same sentence without contradiction.

By 1 December 1956 it was part of an act's name. A Billboard item on television plugs lists `"Guitar Rock," by Bill Flagg and his Rock-abillies` — the word inside the name of the act. The record carries the same credit: Tetra 4448 is issued by Bill Flagg And His Rockabillies.

By December, the surviving examples document the word across records, rhythm, performers and an act name.

Who coined it is not settled here

Bill Flagg is often named as the person who invented the word. The attribution is worth stating carefully, because of where it comes from.

The source it usually rests on is a Boston Globe feature of 12 August 2015 — fifty-nine years after the fact — and that article words it as a recollection rather than a finding: it reports that in Flagg's mind he was the first to use the term, and states plainly that there is no consensus on the word's origin. It offers no document from the period.

What the papers of 1956 do show is that the word was applied to Flagg early, and that his act carried it in its name by the end of the year. That is evidence of adoption, not of authorship.

There is also a claim pointing earlier than anything here. Craig Morrison's Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and its Makers (University of Illinois Press, 1996) is cited as placing the first written use in a Gene Vincent press release of May 1956, a month before the Billboard column above. That book has not been consulted directly for this article, and the claim is reported here as it stands.

The honest position is the narrow one. The trade press documents the word in repeated use by mid-1956, on specific records and performers, and shows how quickly its uses multiplied. It does not show who used it first.

A note on sources

• All contemporary quotations come from Billboard and Cash Box facsimiles in the World Radio History archive, `https://worldradiohistory.com/`. Page numbers refer to the page of the facsimile, not to the printed folio, which the archive's text layer does not render reliably: Billboard 7 August 1954, pp. 39 and 41; 3 December 1955, p. 58; 21 January 1956, p. 45; 23 June 1956, pp. 56-57; 25 August 1956, p. 10; 20 October 1956, p. 46; 1 December 1956, p. 12. Cash Box 28 July 1956, pp. 76 and 82.
• Quotations are transcribed from the archive's scanned text and corrected for obvious scanning errors: the scan renders Rockhouse as `Roclthouse`, which is corrected here. The 20 October issue itself heads the Sun 251 review `RAY ORBISON`; that is a printed error, not a scanning one, and the artist is Roy Orbison. `phenomenom` in the June column is left as it stands.
• June 1956 is the earliest use of the term located in that archive through the single-term searches `rockabilly` and `rock-a-billy`. Multi-word searches in the archive behave as AND queries rather than exact-phrase searches, and are not used to establish that boundary. The archive is a large but partial run of the trade press, and it is searched through optical character recognition on ageing paper, so that date is a boundary of this archive search, not a claim about the first use of the word anywhere.
• The attribution to Bill Flagg is from James Sullivan, "Love, not accolades, sustained rockabilly pioneer Bill Flagg", The Boston Globe, 12 August 2015. The reference to Craig Morrison's book reaches this article through the Music Museum of New England's page on Flagg, `https://www.mmone.org/bill-flagg/`, and is reported as a second-hand citation.
• Sources differ on when Go Cat Go was recorded — January 1956 in one account, the summer of 1956 in another — and none of them is an archival document. No session date is given in this article.