I listen to a lot of radio, and I don't ever hear "liner cards." To be honest, it's rare that I hear a DJ today or at any time classify music on the air.
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"Rock N' Roll"
- Thread starter radiolover78
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I listen to a lot of radio, and I don't ever hear "liner cards." To be honest, it's rare that I hear a DJ today or at any time classify music on the air.
The DJ wasn't classifying the music. He was classifying Buddy Holly and the Crickets. I can't remember exactly but think it was shortly following the plane crash that killed Holly, J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) and Richie Valens.
I would not have classified all of Holly's music as Rockabilly either and I am not sure that was the DJ's intention. It was 1959.....a very long time ago.
Same thing. Even Alan Freed didn't get into breaking down the various sub-genres of music in his show. To him, it was all rock & roll.
Also the use of the term "rockabilly" was considered an insult to some. So I'd ask geographically where was this DJ who you remember using the word on the air?
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I have no way of knowing what Freed said or did as he wasn't available in my market. In fact, I never heard of him until I joined the Navy in the early 60's.
Tucson, AZ and it wasn't considered an insulting term to us.
Not knowing who the DJ was or anything more, I have no way of knowing if he used the term. I also have no reason of knowing WHY he used the term, because it technically wasn't accurate for Holly. My sense is he didn't know what he was talking about. That wasn't uncommon for DJs at the time.
Rockabilly is a combination of rock and hillbilly. Southerners don't like being called hillbillies. The term rockabilly is still pretty negative today.
There were a lot of DJ's making comments about "the day the music died" about that time and I have never been able to remember exactly who made that comment. It was made on KTKT though, that I do remember (possibly because that was the only station I listed to at that time). However, I disagree that the comment wasn't accurate (acknowledging I can't remember the entire comment). Much of Holly's work was not rockabilly but some of the most popular hits were. It was someone's opinion and accepted as that.
I have always heard the term "hillbilly" being applied to rural mountain dwellers and not simply Southerners (most of whom live in cities as do the rest of us). I have never heard anyone (until you) criticize the term rockabilly as being negative. To me it is similar to the term bluegrass which also describes a more or less hillbilly culture. If it was negative then "Hee Haw" and The Beverly Hillbillies sure got a ton of viewers out of it.
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True.
Broad, sweeping generality. Mostly wrong. And, irrelevant. While Southerners who live in the hills of Appalachia or the Ozarks might object to being referred to personally as hillbillies, the rest of us who live outside the hill regions simply regard being called "hillbillies" as an indication of damnyankee stupidity. Besides, even people who don't like to be called hillbillies seldom object to having certain types of music called "hillbilly".
Hogwash. Total poppycock. And clearly the opinion of someone who might know radio, but who is clueless about music. Most bands that specialize in playing rockabilly use the term happily. About the only people who think rockabilly has a negative connotation are the people who don't like rockabilly music, or clueless people who like to find offensiveness when there is none.
Do you know who Marty Stuart is? Marty Stuart knows rockabilly. Some of his music IS rockabilly. He considers it a negative term.
I have no idea who he is but one person's opinion does not necessarily describe an industry.
Same could be said about the DJ who you cite.
This would be true of most artists who are classified in a specific genre.
I have combed through my memory to see if I could remember the time frame when I first heard the term "rockabilly" and some of the other terms discussed in this thread. My memory, unfortunately isn't that precise.
What I do remember is how localized the acceptance, tolerance and rejection of these terms were. My roots are in Southern Texas and then the Ozarks. It was the land of Bob Wills, it was the land of The Big D Jamboree and the Louisiana Hayride and The Cimmaron Ballroom. Each of those was different, but they had more in commong with each other than they did with The National Barn Dance, The Grand Ole Opry, and the Wheeling Jamboree.
In my part of the country every respectable regional station had a country musician in residents who did a morning show including in-studio live music and promoted the high school fund-raiser concerts they did in the area. I am so old I remember when it was called "Country and Western" and the transition period when calling it "hillbilly" went from being a slur and insult to becoming a badge of honor. And that was not TTBOMK a unified national movement and change. It was market by market. It was dependent on the attitude of the station owner.
I completely missed a part of the evolution. Where I live now The Allman Brothers are candidates for sainthood while they were not even on my radar living in the Midwest at the time they achieved their prominence.
I sold advertising for a country music station in Indianapolis, I sold advertising for a country music station in Louisville. It was like two different worlds. (Opposite of what you might assume. Post WWII Indianapolis took on the flavor of a Southern market, Louisville being an old, old city along the Ohio River had a culture more in commong with Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis and other older Northern markets.
Today with television and the Internet, our nation tends toward being more homogenized, while the era when hillbilly and rockabilly came into vogue was a world that was much more compartmentalized and had a more regional orientation.
I look forward to the possibility that David Eduardo might do a quick tour of his collection of trade journals and maybe enlighten us on when some of these terms popped up and were considered by some to be of questionable birth, and when they became accepted nationally more or less.
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Wow! One whole person. Well, I guess finding one whole person who had a string of country hits in the 1990's who considers it a negative term proves that the dozens and dozens of other artists who proudly put the label "Rockabilly" on their music are wrong.
Well, "Duh!". In all my time posting in here I've consistently beaten the drum about genres describing songs, not necessarily artists. In post after post I've pointed out that attempting to define any genre (or radio format) by the artists instead of the songs is usually wrong. The only exception are one-dimensional artists like George Thorogood and the Destroyers, who managed to have multiple hits with the same terrible song slightly reworked.
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How many do you want? You said that I know radio better than music. So I give you a musician, and now that's not good enough.
Stay on subject.
Your guy was describing an industry. Mine was describing one group.
In my youth it was 580 KCNA and the artist was a lady named Nita Lynn. I still have the autographed photo she sent me on my 8th birthday.
I'm staying on subject. We're talking about a word, not an industry.
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You do know radio better than music. You mentioned a single, obscure musician. You claim that the one obscure musician you mentioned "considers it a negative term", with nothing to back up the claim beside your claim. You're damn right it's not good enough. It's not good, period. You could have simply picked the name of any obscure country artist from yesteryear whose had a handful of top ten hits a few decades ago and claimed that he "considers it a negative term".
Wow...so you're now insulting a musician, one who is a living practitioner of rockabilly. Of course he hasn't had hits lately. Name a rockabilly artist who has.
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