Top 32 Rockabilly Quotes & Sayings

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.

The thing about a music career is that it ain't over until the fat lady sings. Look at all the times people threw in the towel on Dylan - or Neil Young. Remember when Young was doing things in the '80s like 'Trans' and the rockabilly album and being completely lambasted by critics who now think he is wonderful again?

I called it Rockabilly 'cause I was rocking the strums, which you're not supposed to do.

For me, rockabilly is very, very exciting music. It's electric and kind of wild, you know? It's 'make your hairs stand up on the back of your neck' kind of music.

My style icons are Lucille Ball for her bouffant hair and all the updos, James Dean for his rockabilly style - the denim and rolled-up T-shirt thing. And I am also inspired by Dita Von Teese and Gwen Stefani. Their style is retro, but it's still very feminine at the same time.

Music is music; you can't change rock and say well this is punk rock and this is acid rock or rockabilly.

For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.

We weren't afraid to mix some crazy styles into the standard rockabilly look. We also took a lot of different musical influences that were part of that era.

McCartney! Haven't met him and haven't played with him. I would LOVE to. He needs to make a kick-ass rockabilly record.

That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was.

I saw all that [white trash] growing up in Alabama and Georgia. I had a group of country cousins and we'd go visit them when I was a kid. They lived on a red dirt Georgia back road, in a shack, with twelve kids. Farmers. No electricity, they had a well on their back porch, but they had nothing, yet they were the happiest, freest people I'd ever met. I loved to visit them. Great sense of humor, and they kept up with all the latest music, country, rockabilly, that stuff. Great food they grew in the fields and canned. Happy people.

As a genre, rockabilly's post-Elvis profile has seldom been lower in the United States. Many labels that produced fresh bass-slappin' sides during the '90's are now out of business.

Mainly horror movies and exploitation movies and a lot of stuff comes from those press books from those old movies. Lines out of old movies, comic books that we collect, all the old horror comics of the 50s, probably about the only comics that we collect are obscure horror comics, the real sick ones from the 50s. Some stuff comes from there but mainly just old records, old rockabilly records and that stuff, singles mainly, 45s.

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there.

When I first came on the scene, I don't think people knew what to make of the way I dress, my aesthetic and how that ties into my music. It took a lot of explaining. You don't really see females in country music dressed in all black wearing funeral garb with netting on their face. I have a bit of a gothic sense to me in a lot of ways, with a bit of outlaw country, rockabilly and blues. My subject matter is off the cuff a little bit.

I didn't say I wasn't gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain't gonna sing no song that ain't a country song. I won't be known as anything but a country singer.

Everybody told me that if I insisted on doing rockabilly music, I'd never have a chance of selling any records. In fact, I lost count of how many people told me to ditch it all together, in favour, I guess, of sounding like everybody else.

I gleaned different style ideas over the years. In Southern California, there is a big rockabilly sub-culture. So when I would go to car shows, I would see women dressed like this. I had a teacher in high school that always had her Bette Paige bangs.

If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those '60s rockabilly people.

To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.

I'm not God's gift to rockabilly. There's great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they've gotten.

I didn't realize how many true Rockabilly fans there were here in America.

I like the Rockabilly look. My background is half Italian, half French. I wear cowboy boots and jeans.

[Country Music] is the final destination for many punk rockers [...] Rockabilly is the mid-point and then [they] end up at Country [...] There's purity to that music and I think that appeals to a lot of punk rock people - the precision, the purity, and the directness of Country Music.

Ireland and America, music-wise, are very closely related. The Irish came over with their fiddles in hand, and you can hear it in the bluegrass and rockabilly. I love it when music from different countries combine.

I like old rockabilly style. I always wear denim on denim with suspenders and slicked back hair.

If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.

I obviously had my reggae, but I got quite into rockabilly when I was a kid, because I was trying to find something that represented me as a white person.

I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.

The old-timers schooled me good. They brainwashed me to respect music, whether we were playing rockabilly or blues or rock and roll.

I never thought I would be recording on any professional level, so to be doing a rockabilly, Motown, pop soundtrack in a L.A. studio was completely bizarre and amazing.