Rockabilly music originated in Tennessee in the early 1950s, a raw, electrified merging of country music, blues and early rock’n’roll. It impacted dramatically on the mainstream American consciousness in 1954, when Sam Phillips, a record producer and owner of the legendary Sun Studio in Memphis, discovered what he had long sought – “a white boy who could sing like a black man”. In his style and his attitude, the young Elvis Presley was rockabilly incarnate, the chosen one whose ascendancy left even the music he loved in its wake.
If the visceral sound of the white, working class, rural American south faded all too soon from the mainstream, it has continued to fascinate teenagers, becoming like mod and northern soul – a musical cult defined by a dedication to the original music and sartorial flair of its pioneers. If Britain remains the fulcrum for this kind of youth cultural revivalism, France, as Gil Rigoulet reveals in this fascinating book, has had its moments: after all, it gave us the unashamedly faux rock’n’roll of Johnny Hallyday – dubbed for a time, without too much irony, “the French Elvis”. One senses the young men in Rockabilly 82 would have preferred the original.
In Normandy in 1982, Rigoulet trailed a group of local rockabilly musicians and their friends as they hung out, danced, played gigs, partied and posed. Reminiscent of Chris Steele-Perkins’s photobook Teds, first published in 1979 and now a classic of British documentary photography (and republished next month by Dewi Lewis), Rockabilly 82 is a visual record of a style that refused to die. In black and white, Rigoulet shoots in an intimately observational way, with fly-on-the-wall images punctuated by the occasional posed portrait.
Here, the look is all, from the quiffs to the imported American threads – inscribed bowling shirts, brothel creepers, neckerchiefs, woollen high school baseball jackets, 50s-era herringbone tweed coats. Compared with Steele-Perkins’s English teds, Rigoulet’s French rockabillies seem younger, cooler, less set in their sartorial ways. Images of Elvis and James Dean proliferate on bedroom walls and, in one instance, a poster for British rockabilly revival group Crazy Cavan ‘n’ the Rhythm Rockers. This is this glimpse of a very masculine world, though the rockabilly girls, when they do appear, are chic in polka-dot tops, matching stockings and 50s flared skirts.
In September 1965, the cover of Paris Match declared “France threatened by rock’n’roll”; two decades later, as Rigoulet shows, the anti-authoritarian rebellion the music inspired had been turned into pure style and a nostalgia for a defining youth cultural moment that seems both so innocent and yet so threatening to the mainstream as to be almost unbelievable.
Rockabilly 82 is published by André Frère Editions (£29)
