Elvis Presley takes Richmond’s “folk music addicts” by storm in 1956.
Don here. If there’s one thing we haven’t indulged in at Save Richmond, it is a lot of shameless self-promotion. So you haven’t heard a great deal on these pages about my travails as a paid writer and journalist, working on subjects ranging from the 1907 Jamestown Exposition to the state of America’s coastlines to a history of Virginia’s drive-ins to a profile of R&B legend Swamp Dogg (to name a few). It would be a tough shoehorn to fit any of those topics — save Swamp Dogg. More on him later — onto the pages of Save Richmond. Agreed?
Plus: In my paid work, I normally work in something called print. You youngsters don’t know anything about that. But it’s tough to link to a print magazine lying in a doctor’s office. (OK, OK, I did have to bite my lip when my Virginia Living interview with Dr. Ralph Stanley hit the stands. Ralph has played Richmond many times, after all — surely he is relevant to discussions about downtown redevelopment)
But this time I have to make a big exception. I have to point at myself and whoop it up and do a paradiddle. I’ve got to get real gone for a change.
It seems word is spreading about the Virginia Rocks! 2-CD set and museum exhibit that I helped to research and put together along with the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum at Ferrum College. The project took nearly two years and was partially funded by a grant from the Virginia Foundation For the Humanities. I, along with my fellow rockabilliologist Brent Hosier, wrote the 72-page essay of liner notes enclosed with the CD box set, and Grammy-winning sound specialist Chris King mastered the discs.
The box set was released on July 14th. And the museum exhibit is up and hooting now at the Blue Ridge Institute in Ferrum, which is near Roanoke. Get directions here.
Writing about the project, David Maurer at the Charlottesville Daily Progress flat gits it in a recent feature article”:
In the early 1950s the pounding, driving wheels of a new kind of music came highballing up out of the South like a past-due locomotive.
Called rock ’n’ roll, it had the transformative power to alter one’s musical sensibilities with a single song. But rock had an older twin with a flipped-up-collar attitude and a good-natured sneer.
This first-born rebel was called rockabilly. Its blistering, slap-back beat set primal nerve endings aquiver that most teenagers hadn’t known they possessed.
No one did more to teach and spread rockabilly throughout the land than the “Hillbilly Cat” himself, Elvis Presley. Other superstars of the genre include Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Virginia’s own Gene Vincent.
Orbiting this galaxy of rock’s founding fathers was a phalanx of talented singers and musicians. These satellite artists provided live music at local sock hops and maybe cut a record or two, but never ascended onto the national stage.
Rambunctious rockabilly never died per se, but by the early 1960s, when the Beatles started taking rock to another sphere, its golden era had passed. Most of the Virginia artists whose early rockabilly recordings epitomized the raw exuberance of the music slipped into obscurity.
Brent Baldwin picks it up from there in today’s Style Weekly:
Everybody’s heard that absurdly catchy “Woo-Hoo” song from Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” later made more popular through a national TV campaign for Vonage broadband. But did you know the original 1959 song came from an Oregon Hill-based group, the Rock-A-Teens, featuring longtime local ad man Jess Duboy?
If you did, another “woo hoo” for you.
Thanks to a double CD set, released just last week, “Virginia Rocks! The History of Rockabilly in the Commonwealth” (on British label, JSP Records) — unsung local rockabilly acts such as the Rock-A-Teens are finally getting their due. The collection, part of a larger exhibit from the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum at Ferrum College in Southwest Virginia, features the likes of “female Elvis” Janis Martin, Roy Clark, Patsy Cline, Link Wray, Wayne Newton and Norfolk legend Gene Vincent — hero to future rock gods John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison.
There have been other swell feature writeups here and here, and some nice early reviews here and here. If you can’t find it locally (always support your local record store FIRST), you can order the box set here on Amazon.
The idea to document Virginia’s early rock ‘n’ roll had been in the works for a long time, and this whole project was really the brainchild of Roddy Moore, the Blue Ridge Institute’s tireless director. He can well remember the local teen dances and sock hop shows of the late ’50’s — he was there.
Seven years ago, Moore convened a “Rockabilly Roundtable” to meet at Ferrum and discuss the possibility of getting something like an “Early Rock in Virginia” project off the ground. [Now that should be something that Richmond can really appreciate: a Rockabilly Board of Directors.] Convened were record collectors, writers, folklorists, geneologists and archivists — exactly the kind of people you’d want to advise on a project like this.
After its initial run at Ferrum College, the Virginia rockabilly exhibit will travel across the state to various museums and cultural institutions over the next few years. A warning to readers— I’ll be updating the progress of the project, and the box set, from time to time on these pages. Because, sometimes, a little shameless self-promotion (like loud rockabilly) is good for the soul.
To see photos of the Virginia Rocks exhibit, log onto the Blue Ridge Institute’s Facebook Page. And here’s the official press release.
Gene Vincent’s biographer Sue Van Hecke served on the “Rockabilly Roundtable.” You can check out her excellent blog here and find out more about the book she just co-wrote with Norfolk rocker Dean Kohler.
For more on Brent Hosier and his excellent Arcania International label — unearthing lost R&B, soul and rock from Virginia’s complicated past — click here.
For more on Elvis in Richmond, check out the great photos and period newspaper ads featured on the Scotty Moore website. And if you are one of those old-timers who still knows what print is, click here to buy the back issue of a magazine that features a piece about Elvis Presley’s Virginia connections, written by yours truly.
And for a taste of what you’ll get if you check out Virginia Rocks!, get an earful of the original version of “Woo Hoo” by the Richmond-based Rock-A-Teens via this inspired fan video: