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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Couples jam to rockabilly
The Tennessee Three were among the bands to perform
By TONYA SMITH-KING
[email protected]
Aug6,2006
Bands taking the stage at this weekend's 7th annual Rockabilly Festival performed against the backdrop of oil paintings of giants in that genre of music, a blend of blues and country.
Rock and roll great Elvis Presley's painting hung center stage with rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins at his right. Other musical giants such as Carl Mann, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, W.S. Holland, Charlie Rich and Brenda Lee flanked either side of Presley's and Perkins' portraits.
"When you stand there and sing, you're standing in front of the greatest rock and roll and rockabilly artists that Tennessee has ever produced, and that's just not my opinion, it's universal," said Henry Harrison, the festival's founder and a friend of the late Perkins.
The three-day festival, which started Thursday at Jackson's Carl Perkins Civic Center, is an annual tribute to the artists and their music. Harrison estimated that each night's event had drawn between 600 to 800 people.
"The turnout has been adequate," Harrison said. "We're growing."
This year, 17 groups performed including Cash's band, The Tennessee Three. That group performed Saturday with others including Jason D. Williams and Larry Cole.
Williams wows the crowd by playing his piano with both his hands and his feet and is considered the premier entertainer in rockabilly music on the piano, Harrison said.
The ladies swoon over Cole, a Las Vegas performer Harrison described as "young and good looking."
Jackson artist Linden Noe was commissioned to paint the portraits that hang on stage during the festival. Her painting of Narvel Felts was unveiled Saturday night.
Ed Salamon, a friend and fan of Felts, presented a brief talk about Felts before the unveiling. Salamon met Felts while program director of WHN, a country music station in New York.
In 1981, Salamon formed the United Stations Radio Network with Dick Clark and did interviews with Felts that were broadcast nationally on network radio shows.
"Narvel Felts is ranked as one of the top artists in country music," Salamon told festival fans. "He also has the distinction of hitting the top 100 chart in each of the first five decades of his career."
Felts' painting will hang with the others at the International Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
The performers themselves had an international flair: Hannes Strauss flew in from Germany to perform at the festival and sang Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes," first in German, then in English.
Some of the fans also came from overseas.
Lya and Hans Angevare represented some of those traveling from afar. The couple is from Allemaar in the Netherlands.
For the last three years, they've planned their vacation around the festival. He didn't recall how that started.
"I think that I read something about it in the rock and roll magazines in the Netherlands," Hans Angevare said. "We read all the magazines that deal with rock and roll, America(n) things, '50s style, old cars."
The Angevares like rockabilly's "rough style." Rock and roll is a sweet brand of rockabilly, Hans Angevare said.
"Rockabilly has more rhythm, more hillbilly in it," he added. "It's a natural that it started in this part of the country, I think, white and black music, coming together."
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Musicians gather at Rockabilly Festival
Jackson Sun.com
Aug 6,2006
They traded stories of kids, grandkids, ailments and friends' deaths Friday around W.S. and Joyce Holland's kitchen table, groaning with barbecue, fried chicken and enough pie and cake for two county fairs and three coronaries.
But in the back of their minds, the musicians who gathered once again for the Rockabilly Festival, which continues tonight at the Carl Perkins Civic Center, no doubt had this thought: "We never grew up ... so how'd we grow old?"
Bobby Crawford, who plays drums for Sonny Burgess & the Pacers, said he feels it every morning "when I roll out of bed, when I used to jump.
"But I get on the bandstand, start playing, and I'm 20 again."
Burgess, still rolling at 76, said it's simple. "It's the music ... now we play it for fun like we did when we first started and weren't making any money."
Sleepy LaBeef, who played at Sun Records in the days after Sam Phillips and once opened for Elvis Presley, was able to give up his civil engineer's job in 1965 and has supported himself with music ever since.
"There are guys who are bitter because they could play but couldn't make it big," he said. "But it has to be about the music. That's where the joy is."
Bob Wootton, the lead guitarist with The Tennessee Three (Johnny Cash's longtime backup band) was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame Thursday.
"They may be running out of guys who are still living soon," Wootton said, "but the last six months have been amazing."
The Tennessee Three's album "We Still Miss Someone" got a preliminary nomination for a Grammy Award. They spent a good hunk of the year touring through the Western U.S. and Canada.
"We get kids 10 years old being brought to our concerts and singing every word," Holland said. "Ten years ago, John stopped touring. How does this happen?"
Wootton isn't sure how long the popularity spike that came because of last year's Cash biopic "Walk the Line" will last. "But I want to keep doing this as long as I can."
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
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