Rockabilly a hybrid genre of rock and roll and hillbilly music, performed mostly by southern white artists  was, simply, the combination of "rock and roll" and "hillbilly" musics. The genre was a hybrid of the two popular genres of the 1950s. The performers were almost always white, and most of them hailed from the southern United States. Like Elvis, many of the artists had been brought up in an evangelical religious tradition that encouraged enthusiasm and spontaneity.

Rockabilly music is defined by its equal influences of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, gospel, country music, and hillbilly music. Although the music of Bill Haley and His Comets is generally considered one of the earliest versions of rockabilly, the rockabilly music of artists later in the 1950s had a decidedly different sound than that of Bill Haley. Rockabilly artists typically had fast, tight rhythms. Their ensembles lacked wind instruments, and there was rarely any chorus singing. As we heard in the music of Elvis, many rockabilly artists included vocal hiccupsadditional syllables added to words for expressive effect, such as transforming the word “well” into “ah-well-uh” in their sung lines. Artists would add additional syllables—such as "uh" or "ah"— to words for expressive effects.