Wills is quoted as saying “Rock and Roll? Why, man, that’s the same kind of music we’ve been playin’ since 1928!…But it’s just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. Recordings of Wills’ from the mid 40s to the early 50s include “two beat jazz” rhythms, “jazz choruses”, and guitar work that preceded early rockabilly recordings. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were the leading proponents of Western Swing, which combined country singing and steel guitar with big band jazz influences and horn sections Wills’ music found massive popularity. Jimmie Rodgers, the “first true country star”, was known as the “Blue Yodeler,” and most of his songs used blues-based chord progressions, although with very different instrumentation and sound than the recordings of his black contemporaries like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bessie Smith.ĭuring the 1930s and 1940s, two new sounds emerged. The first nationwide “country” hit was “Wreck of the Old ’97”, backed with “The Prisoner’s Song”, which also became very popular. There was a close relationship between the blues and country music from the very earliest country recordings in the 1920s. The influence and popularity of the style waned in the 1960s, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s, rockabilly enjoyed a major revival of popularity that has endured to the present, often within a rockabilly subculture. Although there are notable exceptions, its origins lie primarily in the southern United States. Other important influences on rockabilly include western swing, boogie woogie, and rhythm and blues. The term rockabilly is a marriage of rock (from rock ‘n’ roll) and hillbilly, the latter a reference to the country music (often called hillbilly music in the 1940s and 1950s) that contributed strongly to the style’s development. Rockabilly is one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music, and emerged in the early 1950s.

Hillbilly rock n roll