Go Cat Go! Rockabilly Music and Its Makers
1999; Arkansas Historical Association; Volume: 58; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-1213
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoGo Cat Go! Music and Its Makers. By Craig Morrison. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 326. Preface, conclusion, notes, bibliography, selected discography, song title index, index. $29.95, cloth; $17.95, paper.) Go Cat Go! is a very valuable work almost in spite of itself. It must contain nearly everything that a fan or student of rockabilly music might conceivably want to know, but at the same time it is nearly impossible to read in a straightforward fashion. It seems clear that Craig Morrison never really decided whether he was writing a reference work or a narrative history (and his editors were no help to him either), and as a result his book is flawed by any number of organizational and stylistic shortcomings. But Go Cat Go!, approached by way of its index as a sort of rockabilly encyclopedia, at last justifies the claims of its subtitle. It is indeed the story of Rockabilly Music and Its Makers, and it is the most thoroughgoing treatment of the subject to date. Morrison begins with an exercise in definitions which goes on much too long and includes the views of many self-appointed authorities best left uncited, especially since his own second paragraph offers a more than adequate definition: is up-tempo rock and roll, a mix of white (country) and black (r&b) traditions, first sung by southern white male soloists and small ensembles (guitar, stand-up bass) in celebration of young love, fast cars, and raising hell. Succeeding chapters discuss rockabilly's origins, its brief moment in the limelight in the 1950s, the defining figure of Elvis Presley, its primary cultural home base in Memphis, and subsidiary foci in Louisiana, Texas, and California. There are also chapters on rockabilly women, the complex relationships between rockabilly and mainstream country music, and various rockabilly revivals. The narrative in virtually all chapters is constructed around more or less free-standing thumbnail biographies, which are often entertainingly written even when bizarrely placed. Fans will be much surprised to find the primary entry on Charlie Feathers, for example, nearer to the book's end than its beginning-he's in chapter thirteen, Veterans. Sleepy LaBeef is in the same chapter. Even Eddie Cochran, a megastar in the rockabilly firmament, is treated in chapter eleven, along with Ricky Nelson, Rose Maddox, and the Collins Kids, as a Californian. Strange linkages these, but Feathers and LaBeef, in particular, are warmly appreciated in Morrison's account, so that for the most part the volume's organizational vagaries are forgotten in appreciation of its informational wealth. (My favorite veteran, however, has to be one Hasil Adkins, nicknamed the Haze, who is credited with a dance called the Hunch and described in performance as resembling someone's drunk dad singing at a party [p. 221]. In such as Hasil, the spirit of rockabilly lives. …
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