So much rockabilly to discover!

I’ve been reading Max Décharné’s book A Rocket in my Pocket: The Hipster’s Guide to Rockabilly Music and he points out that hundreds and maybe thousands of rockabilly songs were recorded following the breakthrough recordings that Elvis made for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in 1954. Most of those recordings were one offs cut in the craziest assortment of home studios and garages by people who very few of us have ever heard of–kids who wanted in on the excitement of rock and roll. Even so much of the material recorded at the legendary Memphis Recording Service studio (home of Sun Records) remained unreleased until it started showing up on reissues and compilaton records in the 1970s, around 20 years after it was recorded.

And when the “bigs” started realizing that there was a lot of money to be made with this new music, the major labels started having many of their established country stars cut rockabilly songs of their own. And a lot of that music is really very good rockabilly. It all adds up to an astounding amount of authentic rockabilly music to be discovered.

Really, it’s an amazing amount of songs which are built around a simple structure that mostly uses no more than three chords. With just 12 notes and three chords to work with, how could that many songs be written without running out of new ideas? Well, I’m sure someone can flesh out the math for me and show that there is an infintite number of combinations of those 12 notes, but still I marvel at it.