Overview
Elvis Presley’s early recordings for Sun Records were in a musical style that was called rockabilly, which was a mixture of rhythm and blues, country and western, honky tonk, boogie woogie, and gospel music. When Elvis made the move to RCA, other recording artists continued making records in this rockabilly style. Artists such as Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Eddie Cochran all made names for themselves as rockabilly artists.
Objectives
- Examine the defining musical characteristics of rockabilly and consider how artists combined different genres of music to create a new style
- Examine the shift in rock and roll that occurred at the end of the 1950s, often marked by “The Day the Music Died”
- Identify various rockabilly music artists and defining characteristics of their musical styles
Conclusion
As we have seen in the last few lessons, many genres of music came together in the 1950s to create the new, exciting genre of rock and roll. Combining country and western, rhythm and blues, gospel, boogie-woogie, and other styles of both black and white musics, artists such as Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly made names for themselves in rock and roll history as well as in the hearts and spending habits of their teenage listeners. The landscape of American popular music was changing again, though, and the 1960s would bring with it new music, artists, and stories to be told.
