The DC area, behind its staid public mask of government, politics, and business, throbs with native musical culture. Its bedrock population of urban rednecks and sophisticated blacks, with rural roots in the Carolinas and Virginias, gives the area a distinctive and urgent beat that can be heard in the survival of living (not revival) rockabilly and bluegrass; in the enduring power of black church music; and in rap, go go, salsa, funk, jazz, and rock. These traditions, rubbing up against each other -and against immigrant traditions from every continent -gave us Duke Ellington, Sonny Stitt, Charlie Rouse, Charlie Byrd, Shirley Horn, Buck Hill, and Ron Holloway, to name a few eminent jazz musicians. In country music, Patsy Cline, Jimmy Dean, Roy Clark, Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and a zillion great bluegrass players paid their dues here. Guitar prophets Link Wray, Roy Buchanan, and Danny Gatton all logged years in area bars. Jelly Roll Morton, the Clovers, Marvin Gaye, Sonny Stitt, Jorma Kaukonen, Roberta Flack, Sweet Honey in the Rock, John Jackson, Nils Lofgren, mid 70s disco king Van McCoy (father of "The Hustle"), Herb Fame (of Peaches and Herb), punk patriarch Henry Rollins, and countless others have called DC home. In short, we have a fine cross-section of the rich musical brew that is America's most original contribution to world culture. It makes my heart swell with patriotic pride just to think about it!
If you distilled this brew, you'd get something like Colonial Beach's Billy Hancock, singer-songwriter and keeper of the rock-and-roll flame. Somewhere over 40, with a face like a rouged motorcycle boot and a pompadour big enough to be wearing him, he is no pretty boy aspirant to teen idoldom. Careening across a local nightclub stage one recent night, snarling and clawing at his guitar, he seemed instead a parody of everything bizarre and aberrant in rock and roll.
But then he sang Dr. Isaiah Ross's volcanic Sun Records rocker "The Boogie Disease" and his unearthly voice and obvious conviction erased any doubts the crowd may have had. With his band cranking behind him, Hancock plunged into the song like a joyride in a stolen hotrod. Flirting with vocal disaster, he bellowed and shrieked ("I got the boog EEEEE...I got the BOO gie disease") until his overcharged voice threatened to skid out of control into embarrassing emotional excess. But, just when you thought he'd crashed through the bathos barrier, he eased back precisely on the throttle, paused, and surged toward danger again, braking at the last moment in a textbook display of rock's classic 3 minute concision. It was funny and brilliant, and it left hearts pounding like a near miss on the highway.
Hardly pausing between songs, Hancock churned the crowd into a fine rock and roll rapture with a set of rockabilly, blues, and unclassifiable originals. His voice nearly too powerful and accurate for rock and roll shifted timbre from song to song, a rockabilly whine giving way to a grainy baritone on Amos Milburn's "Chicken Shack," then to an eerie trumpet tone on Benny Goodman's "All the Cats Join In."
Hancock comes by his skills and authority honestly. An Alexandria native, he played his first professional job at sixteen, then apprenticed in various no account bands around the country (beginning, he says, with a bass-playing job in Tito Mambo's salsa band out of Providence). In the early 70s he settled down as a fixture of DC's burgeoning music scene, working first with Liz Meyer's warmly remembered rock bluegrass fusion outfit, then as singer and bassist of the legendary trio Danny and the Fat Boys (a Liz Meyer spin-off with the amazing Danny Gatton on guitar and Dave Elliott on drums). He played guitar and produced records for local rockabilly artist Tex Rubinowitz in the late 70s and early 80s before fronting his own band, the Tennessee Rockets.
Hancock writes with an odd combination of scholarship (he haunts the Library of Congress) and passion. Unembarrassed by the emotional intensity of rock and roll's pioneers, he writes songs that cut to the heart in the same direct ways. His best work summons up the rebellion and desire, the burning truth, and the excess of early rock and roll and rhythm and blues. His lyrics are classics, about love, death, and dancing, and his tunes add harmonic surprises to the basic three chord rock framework while retaining its mysterious power. ("Frankie," a lovely late-1980s addition to the Hancock songbook, tells the true story of Edmund Perry, who, home to Harlem from his Ivy League college, was shot dead by an undercover cop. Hancock sings it as if Perry were his brother.)
Hancock first recorded in 1975, on Danny and the Fat Boys' album, "American Music," is a varied catalog of popular styles from big-band swing to reggae, for which Hancock wrote 5 of the 10 songs. In twin gestures of devotion, Hancock bought the Alladin label on which his hero Amos Milburn recorded for the album, and hired the fifties doowop vocal group The Clovers (also DC locals) to sing backup. A collector's item for the Gatton and Hancock cults, the record is long out of print; a mint copy might go for $100 today.
Hancock's first LP under his own name was "(Shakin' That) Rockabilly Fever," issued by Solid Smoke in 1981, and reissued several times since. An uncanny evocation of the rockabilly genre, it is full of tunes you'd swear were reissued Memphis classics from the 50s. The 1983 follow-up, "Hey Little Rock 'n' Roller," on the French label Big Beat, also cleaves to the letter and spirit of rockabilly.
"Wanted: True Rock and Roll" is Hancock's latest (1989) EP on the local Ripsaw label. On it, Hancock jumps out of the rockabilly rut with timeless versions of Goodman's "All the Cats Join In" and the old Rolling Stones hit "Time Is on My Side," and an uptempo version of Eddie Fisher's "I Need You Now," as well as a couple of originals.
All these records have great moments on them, but to appreciate Hancock you have to hear him live. After decades of scuffling, he could be forgiven a certain weariness. Yet he still burns with devotion to rock and roll. Perfunctory performances are not his style. Even swaggering through a nightclub crowd between sets, he shrugs off congratulations with a celebrity's disengaged graciousness, every inch the superstar.
He's ignored the last few teen trends. And he ain't pretty. On stage, he triumphs over those debilities, in celebration of the great mystery of American rock and roll. Long may he wave!
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