Episode forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Drugstore Rock 'n' Roll", by Janis Martin, an early rockabilly classic by the woman known as "the Female Elvis". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Fever" by Little Willie John



A brief apology before I go any further. There is no Mixcloud this week, and also I've only done one edit pass, rather than my customary two, on the podcast sound file, so there might be some noises and so on that would otherwise not be on there, and the sound quality may not be as good as normal. A close family member has had a severe medical emergency this weekend, and I haven't been able to put in the time I normally would. Normal service should be resumed next week, and I hope this is at least adequate.

Resources

There is very little information out there about Janis Martin. Much of this was stitched together from brief mentions in books on other people, and from ten minutes' worth of interview in an out-of-print documentary called Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly.

The single most important source here was the liner notes for the Bear Family CD collecting all Janis' fifties recordings.

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Transcript

Sometimes a novelty act will have real talent, and sometimes the things that can bring you the most success initially can be the very things that stop you from building a career. In the case of Janis Martin, "the female Elvis Presley", those four words were the reason she became successful, and some say they are also the reason she very quickly dropped into obscurity. There are no books about Janis Martin, who as far as I can tell was the first successful female rockabilly artist. There are no films about her. There are just a handful of articles in obscure fanzines, and pages on unvisited websites, to mark the story of a true pioneer of rockabilly music.

But I don't think that the way Janis Martin's career stalled was down to that label at all. I think it stalled because of misogyny, plain and simple, and I'm going to explain why in this episode. So a warning right now -- this will deal in passing with abortion and underage marriage. If you are likely to find anything dealing with those things traumatising, please check out the transcript on the podcast website at 500songs.com, to make sure it's something you're comfortable hearing. I won't be going into those things in any great detail, but sometimes better safe than sorry.

Janis Martin was born in 1940, and spent her early years as a child country and western act. She started playing the guitar when she was only four, holding it upright because she wasn't big enough yet to play it normally, and by the age of eleven she was a regular on The Old Dominion Barn Dance. This was at a time when the dominant force in country and western music was a series of live variety shows that would be broadcast by different radio stations, and there was a definite hierarchy there. At the very top of the chain was the Grand Ole Opry, whose performers like Roy Acuff would absolutely dominate the whole medium of country music. If you were on the Opry, you were going to be a big star, and you would be heard by everyone. You'd made it.

Slightly lower than the Opry were shows like the Louisiana Hayride. The Hayride was for those who were on their way up or on their way down. Elvis Presley got a residency on the show when he went down too badly on the Opry for them to book him again, and Hank Williams started performing on it when he was dropped by the Opry for drunkenness, but it also booked acts who weren't quite well known enough to secure a spot on the Opry, people who were still building their names up.

And then, a rung below the Hayride, were shows like the Old Dominion Barn Dance. The Barn Dan