About
When Jason D. Williams sits down at the piano and pounds the keys—with his fingers, andelbows and boots—hollering about hillbillies, holy rollers, and drinking sweet wine, he declares that the 60-year-old tradition of rockabilly is alive and kicking. In the mid-1950s, young musicians from small southern towns combined blues, gospel, and hillbilly music into a mixture called rockabilly, marked by swaggering vocals and aggressive, rocking guitar and piano. With swiveling hips and outrageous stage antics, these groundbreaking artists shocked, rocked, and changed American music forever.
Jason D. Williams was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1959, at the end of rockabilly’s golden era. He started playing piano at age two, and at 16 quit high school to join rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef’s band. From LaBeef he learned hundreds of songs from blues, gospel, country, R&B, and beyond, and how they could be transmuted into revved-up rockabilly.
Williams then got a gig at Mallard’s, a bar in Memphis’s legendary Peabody Hotel named after the ducks that parade through the lobby daily. Memphis, of course, is where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison recorded classic rockabilly records at Sun Studio. And it was in Sun Studio, surrounded by the same perforated white acoustic tiles, that Williams has recorded two albums.
Though clearly influenced by Jerry Lee Lewis, Williams’s inspirations and appreciation for rockabilly’s roots run deeper. “I got some of my energetic moves from Jerry Lee,” he says, “and he’s one of our greatest entertainers. I don’t mind the comparison … because I’d mimic the way people were playing more than what they were playing. I’d watch Hee Haw and see Moon Mullican put his foot up on the piano, so I’d do that. Of course, once you do that, the comparisons to Jerry Lee come right in. But truly, it was Moon Mullican who did that first.” Now it is Williams who keeps the flame of rockabilly’s irrepressible spirit.
Videos:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnQ0b_7Ha_Q
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jndfwIp3m9Y&t=1m3s