When Rockabilly Drove The Be-Bop 1950s Night- “Rockabilly Boogie”-The Johnny Burnette Trio-A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Johnny Burnette performing Dreamin'.

CD Review

Rockabilly Boogie, The Johnny Burnette Trio, Bear Family Records, 1989


Recently, in reviewing a two-volume CD entitled Rock This House, CDs dedicated to the best of the rockabilly artists that formed one of the important strands of the 1950s rock jail-break for my generation, the generation of ’68, I noted that there were actually very few rockabilly artists who stayed right in the rockabilly genre. They either, like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, inhaled, inhaled big time, the rock wave that swept all before it for a few magnificent years before “they” (that infamous big time record company corporate they, although we didn't know that at the time) made it all soupy, and parent-happy worthy or were left behind. I mentioned the names Warren Smith and Billy Riley as exemplar of the genre. I could also have added Sonny Burgess and the artist highlighted here, Johnny Burnette, at least for a long while.

Of course, seemingly every rockabilly artist, including Elvis and Johnny Cash, started rocking with a three piece band (bass and drums along with lead guitar) and Johnny (along with brother, Dorsey, who had his own career as well) followed that trend. Why Johnny and the trio, which was a staple on that rockabilly circuit did not make it, is detailed in a very informative booklet that accompanied this CD. In general terms it was, as usual, a question of personality, personality differences, and a not unnatural calculation that the road to success was too hard, or too tenuous to make the run. Every genre (for that matter every field of endeavor) has that moment of truth. Here, as well, was the question by Johnny of whether to stick with the “girl who brung you”, rockabilly, at a time when it was heading up against that misty, mushy rock wave just mentioned. However, in the end as a solo he also left those rockabilly roots behind when the music turned vanilla in the late 1950s.

Many of the selections here show very good rockabilly rhythm and workmanlike riffs but a few also point to the limitations, listening limitations of young teenage ears, in the repetition of the same musical theme. Still, the stick-outs really shine: Rockabilly Boogie: Chains Of Love; Please Don’t Leave Me; and, Midnight Train.