Rockabilly Music: The Musical Jam That Started A Revolution
When musicians talk about “jamming” together, it usually means that a bunch of players get together with their instruments and talents and just start playing to see what happens. These musicians may or may not have ever played together before. Bands like The Grateful Dead and Pearl Jam have taken the concept of the musical jam to new heights with long solos that go wherever the players feel like taking them at the moment. But these bands certainly can’t be credited with inventing jam music. Jam music has been around for a long time and even rockabilly music has been highly influenced by the jam phenomenon.
One would have to say that the act of jamming with other musicians has been around since the first musical instrument was invented. If, as a musician, you’ve never played with someone before and you get together to work on music, you pretty much start out by jamming. Somebody starts playing and everyone else figures out the key and jumps in adding their unique character to the music being played. If things really click between a group of musicians, a new band might well be formed and the music eventually morphs from a series of jams into structured, planned-out pieces.
The cool thing about jamming with new people is that everyone in the jam brings new and different ideas and abilities to the session. This sparks invention and takes each player in a direction that he or she may never have followed either on his or her own or by playing with the same people as usual.
So, how does this relate to rockabilly music? Well, in a lot of ways actually. Musicians jamming brought together the influences of blues, country, rhythm and blues, gospel, and more. These are the ingredients that went into the rockabilly stew.
Sure, that’s a pretty vague answer to the question, but there’s a shining and specific example of how jamming influenced rockabilly music. It happened one day in a little studio called the Memphis Recording Service in Memphis, Tennessee early in the summer of 1954.
A good-looking kid with the unlikely name, Elvis, was in the studio to record a few country numbers. This kid had something different that no one–probably not even he himself–knew about. During a break between the planned numbers, Elvis couldn’t contain himself any longer and launched into a crazy hepped-up version of the R&B song, “That’s Alright Mama.”
The two studio musicians who’d been hired to help Elvis record his country songs (Bill Black on stand-up bass and Scotty Moore on electric guitar) did what any musician would probably do: they started jamming along. But this was one of those rare times when everything worked in the jam. It quickly melded into something studio owner, Sam Phillips, recognized as drastically different with hit potential. And he was right.
Phillips recorded the song and released it as “That’s All Right” on his Sun Records label. Elvis became a smash sensation and he, Black, Moore, and later drummer D.J. Fontana turned the style into wildly successful and popular music which came to be called rockabilly.
Of course, Elvis became “The King” and the quartet recorded many, many hits together. And it all started because one kid had an idea and the musicians around him picked up on it and started jamming along. Of course, not every jam results in such amazing success, but this is one instance where an unplanned musical jam ignited a cultural revolution. They called it rockabilly, but it still rages today in the many various forms of rock and roll that rockabilly inspired.
Now, who didn’t think that rockabilly was jam music?