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One response by the Nashville music industry was to dress up country in younger clothes. Some songs marketed in the revival as 1950's rockabilly and more appropriately thought of as teen-oriented country or hillbilly music suitable for jive dancing. As the decade ended, it became apparent that the most succesful new clothes for country music were not the rocking kind but the uptown variety. Besided the television version of the West (gunfighter ballads), a new Nashville Sound was developed by producers, especially Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, for records by Patsy Cline and others. The sound was soft and inoffencive, characterized by twangless singing with orchestra and smooth vocal groups. This development was paralleled in pop with the fabricated teen idols.
Before these sounds took over, however, Owen Bradley's Quonset Hut studio was just one of the spots in Nashville where first-rate rockabilly was recorded. Vocalists often used a house band known as A Team: a group of highly skilled and flexible session players that included drummer Murrey "Buddy" Harman; pianist Floyd Cramer; guitarists Grady Martin, Chet Atkins, and Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland; and the Jordanaires or Anita Kerr Singers. They made some of the most musical rockabilly ensemble work ever recorded, although perhaps lacking the fire of stable performing bands. Rockabilly sessions gave the studio players a new vocabulary - Garland, for example, listened to black R&B stations to get ideas, used lighter-gauge guitar strings, and dialed more treble on his amplifiers - so it is no surprise that, under Atkins's production, Don Gibson's finely crafted pop country songs contain many rockabilly elements.

Most of these players were the band for Don Woody, then a dee-jay in Springfield, Missouri (home of the Ozark Jamboree), at his Nashville session in December 1956. Four songs resulted, although two remained unissued until 1976; all were cowritten by Woody. The songs are musically strong, but they demonstrate a surface involment with rockabilly and how quickly it became studied and formalized.


The information was taken from "Go cat go! : rockabilly music and its makers" Morrison, Craig (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1996).

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